"Reisen 여행" -정지된움직임 ● It's got two wheels. Neatly leveled with a hitch. Safety markings, chrome fenders. Road worthy... except for its load - a bunch of suitcases and TVs. It's a video vehicle. Seon Yeong titles her cart "Reisen" ("Travel.") It's stationary, parked in the gallery. On board, her video monitors represent the only movement, her own movement as a subject, a body, between identities and into memory. This artist's "Travel" becomes 'travail' (French, meaning 'work.')

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Borrowing in the feminist art tradition from male art 'heroes' here, Nam June Paik, Seon Yeong supports Sherry Levine and Sarah Lucas' bet on unmasking art memories buried within modern works, and exposing that for all to see. The memories however for Seon yeong are less authoritative and historical, and more allegorical, autobiographical. The video monitors packed this way and that in the round on her wagon show facets of time, most effectively existence time, while the artist moves over Europe, through Germany, and the past few years... not unlike her postmodern topos - Nam June Paik - who, a feminist reading of "Travel" might conjure and disclose.

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Travel is art. Both are uneconomical, sensual and cerebral experience. A destination reached, like a completed art work is not somewhere out there or on a wall but exists somewhere in the observer's own mind's eye, hopefully somewhere new, undiscovered. Seon Yeong's wagon is at rest, even if her numerous time-images travel by. The moving and standing image paradox created by Seon Yeong calls to mind Bob Dylan's lyric "I may look like I'm moving but I'm really standing still" or for younger ears Jamiroquia's release "Traveling without Moving." The optimism of traveling, the unknown road ahead, is set against the weight of recorded memory, of imposed identity, and a chronic loss of time.

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Seon Yeoung's image seems to wish to wriggle out of each screen, out of bounds, and find channels more invisible, more direct to audience minds and memories. And yet, each frame of each video is contained, time passing through space, bound to small screens within her parked object in the exhibition. Video allegory and art history aggregate in "Travel" with a bit of help from the artist's sense of balance and straps. The artist packs her time (and ours watching) and in doing so, historical time quickly passes into allegorical time. The big question raised here is 'when does linear chronological or historical time become mythic or allegorical time, especially in the age of reproductive and appropriative media?' ● Seon Yeong's video loops are the flux or glue that hold each screen together, in aggregate with material, analogue sculpture, raising a postmodern feminist video and media question: 'one person in many bodies, many persons in one body?' ■ philip pocock

Vol.20100910b | 이선영展 / ISEONYEONG / 李善永 / installation