Extra Contrast: Porsche and Dump Truck

Foreword

Extra Contrast: Porsche and Dump Truck is a story about “collision.” Yeonsu is a place where Songdo International City (called a “tool”), the first-generation new towns (called “complexes”), and the old downtown (called a “village”) each assert their own placeness and “collide.” Yet within the vast signifier of Yeonsu, the collisions among heterogeneous places, people, and cultures lose their sound. This is because the signifier of “region” advances the political rhetoric of integration, harmony, and unity rather than collision, attempting to conceal the collisions of heterogeneous things as something that “exists yet does not exist.”

The 2023 Art Plug Yeonsu curated exhibition Extra Contrast: Porsche and Dump Truck seeks to reveal the aesthetic potential of collision. Art has always spoken, in its own language, about the currents and changes of an era, thereby offering a perspective through which we can understand and look into individual lives and the culture of a community. The point of collision is a vantage point where the shape of an era is revealed. New aesthetic possibilities tend to sprout not from the stillness of harmony but from the noise of collision. To drag out the collisions of heterogeneous things that the rhetoric of integration seeks to erase, to make them collide with our gaze, thereby making them collide with our rigidified conventional notions, and through this to draw forth new perceptions—this is precisely the reason for art’s existence that history has so far proven.

Extra Contrast: Porsche and Dump Truck consists of 22 works from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Art Bank collection and works by six Yeonsu-based and invited artists. The exhibition is divided into two themes that explore the diverse aesthetic possibilities of collision: “IN BETWEEN,” and “EXTRA CONTRAST,” which traverses the local and gazes upon the residual traces of collision inherent in the locality of Yeonsu. Through this exhibition, we hope to connect the diverse forms of aesthetic and social collision with individual experience, and thereby create a space for exploring new aesthetic and performative practices that arise at the boundaries of difference, dissonance, and impact.

IN BETWEEN: Memory, Aesthetics, and Reconstruction of Collision
“Flowers bloom on every boundary,” says the poet Ham Min-bok. “IN BETWEEN” is a garden of the flowers that bloom on the boundaries of heterogeneous things. The boundary—that is, the “in-between space”—is a place where heterogeneous things creak and split, where dissonance addresses the viewer, and where a tense contest of force unfolds between the living and the non-living, the figurative and the abstract, the real and the virtual. For this reason, the point of collision is a site where aesthetic experimentation blossoms. IN BETWEEN is presented in three parts: “Memory of Collision,” “Aesthetics of Collision,” and “Reconstruction of Collision.”

#Memory
On one side stands the public history of development, progress, integration, and harmony; on the other side sit private memories that cannot be reconciled with it. We examine the artistic expressions born from the splits, conflicts, and collisions that rise in the “in-between space” between public history and private memory, as well as attempts to revive, through the force of one’s own memory and record, the groups of figures that public history has taxidermied into abstract concepts.

#Aesthetics
The aesthetics of collision is not a smooth plane. Heterogeneous things twist typicality and collide with the familiarity of cliché. Thus the aesthetics of collision is closer to a combination of crooked and irregular things. It introduces works that, by experimenting with diverse materials, media, and forms, pursue the unfamiliar rather than the familiar, ambiguity rather than linear interpretation, and probe new aesthetic possibilities.

#Reconstruction
Contradiction is not an answer but a question. The contradictory nature of collision—absence and presence, a virtual that exists, a performance composed of rests, death that completes life—is itself a question. If this question belongs to the artist (or the work), then the reconstruction of thought must belong to the viewer who confronts that question. In this way the viewer becomes the subject of reconstruction. May we confront the question of contradiction without the protective shell of institutions and conventions as hard as a carapace.