Le Paradis Accidentel — Dohyang Lee Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 19 → July 11, 2015

Accidental Paradise

A solo show by Hayoun Kwon

Hayoun Kwon is an artist who uses several media (photography, video, models, sound…) and she experiments with cutting-edge techniques such as virtual reality headsets.

Based on the recurring theme of the border that separates the two Koreas, she develops a personal, sensitive and memory-based reflection that clearly distinguishes itself from the geopolitical domain.

There are currently 2.4 mines per square meter in the zone called the D.M.Z. The time that it would take to demine the no man’s land that separates the two Koreas also serves as the starting point for the main piece in the exhibition: 489 years

Through this title, we enter into a universe of unreality in which the imaginary is immediately summoned. It’s this specific mental space that Hayoun Kwon works on, stages and reconstructs. In this zone that is the product of human insanity, a world of fiction emerges: it will remain an uninhabitable space in which nature has taken over. Today, almost sixty years later, the mines are covered with vegetation and wild animals have invaded the area. The soldiers that maneuver in that area are thus exposed to both military and natural risks. In the soldier’s story recorded by the artist, he makes reference to an anecdote that combines both dread and poetry. Hayoun Kwon materializes this story, as it faces 489 years, through sculptures, a recorded story and digital images. Sensorial, perceptible and subjective memory are what interest her most. The entire exhibition is a poetic quest for a feeling of humanity within this dehumanized space.

In the testimony Le train fantôme (The Ghost Train) played on the lower level, we discover the anecdote of a French journalist who went to Korea in the 1950s. He explains that he was able to find a ticket at the Seoul train station that still allowed him to go from the South Korean capital to Paris, passing through Anatolia and the Soviet Union. This trip that seems totally fantastical in today’s world, nostalgically evokes a world without borders.

Having graduated from the Fine Arts School of Nantes (École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes) and from the Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Art, Hayoun Kwon has found a way to testify to the intimate dimension of this separation between the Koreas through the use of new technologies and cinema. She speaks of the intimacy of those who deal with this separation on a daily basis and whose voice is drowned out by ideological and political discourses. There’s also the question of the intimacy of the artist who, by being at a distance, felt the importance of this story throughout her self-construction process. The detour through artistic creation is thus a means to develop fictions and imaginary worlds that mirror the deadly means that presided over the separation of the two Koreas and that prevails in the DMZ space today. Accidental Paradise is not simply an irony, but is also the poetic description of a fiction that combines the murderous insanity of mankind with a wilderness that ends up taking back its rights in order to recreate an almost original abundance.