Black Swan: Unpredictable Future

 4th Open Media Art Festival 

Oil Tank Cultural Park

Seoul, Korea  

 

 12-15 November 2020

 

Partner with “Open Media Art Festival”, Comma Space is pleased to present artists Kray Chen, Sai, Urich Lau and Yang Jie in the 4th edition of Open Media Art Festival, “Black Swan: Unpredictable Future” at the Oil Tank Cultural Park in Seoul, Korea. 12 – 15 November 2020
The festival, Black Swan: Unpredictable Future, has focused on the extreme impact of a rare and unpredictable event and the human tendency to find explanations for these events. It also stresses the possibility of overturning all the values we protect and believe today because of the emergence of situations that we believed were impossible or nonexistent. Through the artists’ works of our time, the Open Media Art Festival in Seoul began with a few questions that imagine the “unpredictable future” and ask what it means or how it will affect our lives. From these questions, we ask how artists explore and examine the future, such as Black Swan in our time, and Black Swan will be introduced and presented in the near future, which will deliver various perceptions and attitudes of the artists toward the future.
/Organization/
Open Media Art Festival
/Partners/
Jordan National Gallery of the Arts, The Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Jordan, and Comma Space 逗号空间, Singapore
/Directors, Curators/
Seungah Lee & Janice Kim (Korea)
/Guest Curators/
Wang Ruobing (Singapore), Dana Kaoukji (Jordan), Jay Kim (Korea), Daechan Heo (Korea)
/Participating Artists/
Byunjoon Kwon, Kira Kim, Shinil Kim, Jinah Roh, Hojun Song, Youngjun Choi, Jinhyun Park, Team Triad, Joon Moon, Hyunjoo Kim (ex-media), Anna Kim, Youngrim Lee, Units United (Korea) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Daniel Irequi (Quebec, Canada), Kray Chen, Chen Sai Hua Kuan, Yang Jie, Urich Lau (Singapore), Ahmad Salameh, Studio 8, Asia Alsheshani, Tawfiq Dawi, Walid al Wawi (Jordan), Lin Tzu Huan (Taiwan), Marc Lee (Switzerland), Yuge Zhou (China), Akihiko Taniguchi (Japan)
/Sponsors/
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Arts Council Korea, The Québec Government Office in Seoul, National Arts Council Singapore

Sai/Chitter-Chatter (No.2)/2020/Kinetic Sculpture
Chitter-Chatter is a sound kinetic installation comprising used dental casts (accurate, three-dimensional replicas of patients’ teeth), Each dental cast is attached to a motor and set at different speeds animating different manners of speaking. Chitter-Chatter orchestrates informal and inconsequential conversation that enquires the ongoing social struggle of speaking, creating the tension of hearing as well as of being heard.

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Urich Lau/The End of Art Report/2013/Video

The End of Art Report is Urich Lau’s contribution to the Singapore Biennale 2013, consisting of three short videos appearing as news stories. The videos feature a local Singaporean television personality delivering fictitious news reports. These reports, announced in the television broadcast style that everyone is familiar with, claim that three major cultural institutions in Singapore will close. The artist has created this video in order to test the reactions Singaporeans may have to this fictional news. Urich Lau used actual reports from around the world as the basis for The End of Art Report. He had gathered stories covering specific instances in which museums and cultural institutions in other countries were forced to close due to political, social and economic reasons, and he compiled these various stories together, contextualising his work to the place of his birth.

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Kray Chen/5 Rehearsals of a Wedding/2018/Film
5 Rehearsals of a Wedding is about a failed romance that ends up as an wedding exercise, an imagining of what could have been. The artists, fresh out of a long term relationship, casts four other friends to role play as groom and groomsmen in this seemingly dysfunctional and wedding rehearsal. Through the miming of rituals, ceremonies and habits of a conventional Singaporean Chinese wedding. This absurdist film mixes art, theatre and film to put a spectacularly futile performance that reenacts our search for purpose, reflections, happiness and a sense of belonging.

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Sai/Space Drawing No 7/2010/Video

‘Space Drawing No.7’ was created at an abandoned warehouse in the city centre of Limerick, Ireland. Like many other forsaken urban spaces in the city, this is a place where emptiness and decay are slowly taking place within a manufactured and civilized urban landscape. ‘Space Drawing No.7’ captures the social life of the warehouse through the energy released from a black bungee rope. The rope bounces from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, from inside to outside mapping the space in an energetic and dynamic way and disclosing the unspeakable emptiness of the site.

‘Space Drawing’ is a series of experimental and multi-disciplinary installation, life-performance and film work, which explores the idea of the simplest but the most fundamental function of a line – to divide, subtract and define a space..

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Yang Jie/Time Table/2020/Interactive Installation
Time Table imagines a world where automation is allowed to reproduce all aspects of work-life: where the human cog only needs to punch buttons to start a mechanistic chain of activities which simulate the experience of the office. An immersive kinetic and light installation, the artwork is an office-like space which performs as a “clock”, where audience interact with various knobs, dials, buttons, and stationary objects which “accelerates/decelerate” the passing of time marked by the clock.

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