ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS OF KWON MINHO: A FLAME THAT DOES NOT EXTINGUISH
Architecture is the protagonist of the artist’s landscape painting of modern and contemporary Korea. According to Walter Benjamin, the architectonics can never be stopped since human demand for housing does not disappear, although the Greek and Roman epic and medieval panel paintings have disappeared as the mode of production changed from slavery to feudalism, and to capitalism. Unlike other artistic styles, architecture is also a prototype of an artwork that is accommodated in a collective manner. Long-standing architectural structures have habitual familiarity. In the process of inadvertently paying attention to them, people perceive art not in a visual manner but through tactile senses. This is the capitalist mode of perceiving art, where immersive art no longer functions.
In other words, through buildings, it is possible to perceive things in a tactile manner, which could not be seen through the visual sense of contemplation. For example, in A Far Distant Place, we do not merely see the ordinary old commercial buildings in a local city or the signs juxtaposed by the artist. We also have a tactile sense of a day in the life of a female worker in the Masan Free Trade Zone, which is invisible in a visual sense. And in the cluster of distractingly juxtaposed images that appearing in Clouded Breath, we sense the sweaty workers in the tobacco factory through our bodies. This is possible since Kwon Minho’s work takes the form of an architectural drawing of the building. Since it is in the form of an architectural drawing, it is possible to expand the subject of consideration into a building and then into a place. And through this expansion, it becomes possible to tactilely perceive the history of the building and its surrounding areas.
Extract from ‘ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS OF KWON MINHO: A FLAME THAT DOES NOT EXTINGUISH’ Lee Aeseon (Hongik University)