Boma Pak, Fay Shin and Go-eun Choi met at the 2015 Arko Workshop. Although the workshop changes its title and curriculum slightly every year, this program has discovered promising new artists and curators for 10 years since 2005. A total of 22 artists (and 8 curators) participated at the workshop last year which was held from September 8th to December 24th, 2015. The three artists, each in a different team, met on October 5th and talked about having a group show together. They received help from curators Seo-young Jung and So-yeon Ahn in their planning stage, and their exhibition at Insa Art Space was accepted through the final screening on December 22nd. They met once a week at the Artisee in Samcheong-dong, as they liked the high ceiling and the comparatively affordable baked goods. They had 15 meetings and also met to drink 4times under the excuse of research, and after their meetings, they had cake as if it was a ritual, or a reasonable way to maintain their sugar level. Once they met at Duomo and drank wine to their heart’s content, and once they went shopping for clothes and shoes at Wonseo-dong.
On February 4th, I received an email from Boma Pak to take part in the organization of the exhibition. I met her for the first time, and she showed me, with laughter, a few images of her work Vagina-Donutswhich she produced for the exhibition. While the three artists seemed to have formed a tight and intimate connection with each other, they didn’t seem all that interested in close reading of each others’ art. Their relationship seemed to rely on emotional connection like children, and I often had a hard time differentiating or distinguishing them. Or, just as the monkey’s ass is as red as apple, which is as delicious as banana, perhaps the art of metonymy is reflected in an artist fully and completely respecting the world of another artist. At any rate, they called each other comrades of solidarity, which wasn’t completely incomprehensible.
 

Boma Pak
 
All artists are strange in their own ways, but Boma Pak is especially odd. For example, in her work blackwaters, I still vividly remember Boma dressed in something bizarre and making a ‘blackish drink’ which I highly doubted was potable. Boma claims that she motivated herself as an artist because she was mesmerized by the momentary impression of the sky and wished to preserve it.  There is probably no other such concise and perfect expression that can explain Boma than that. In addition, Boma becomes a dancer (qhak) or an advertising company of light (fldjf studio), or even believes that she is a ‘reflector’. As if to realize the discontinuous time of continuous film, this brilliant form suspends, through a quasi-cinematic way, the visible ordeals which cannot be captured in one frame. In a story, treasure hunters in a jungle seek help from male bowerbirds, which like to collect sparkly things, in order to find the king’s riches. Boma Pak is probably like the birds in a parallel universe somewhere. Boma is an artist with the sensibility of the sky, which is a quality she pursues, and also is the ambience of this exhibition. She thinks that she is similar to Fay Shin in the way that Shin collects and preserves facades of things that are temporary.
 

Fay Shin

Shin got on the boat like a veteran skipper and smelled the wind with her highly sensitive olfactory sense. It was her duty to furl and unfurl the sail. There is no coincidence that the title of her last solo exhibition was Points, Lines, Planes and Weather(2015). Art critic Hyun Jung read Shin’s work as “an expression of unpredictable time and space which captures the ‘flow of consciousness’…which occurs between the self and external environment(「Dissonance for Balance」, Hyun Jung.)” The ‘seemingly romantic conversation with environment’ is ‘powerful and cannot arrive at agreement’, and ‘endlessly bounce between excess and lack, affirming dissonance(「Dissonance for Balance」, Hyun Jung.)’ Because I don’t believe in the jinx of a sailor, I behaved like a sensitive Spanish missionary on the boat of the tolerant Moors. In short, reefs and rocks in the sea scared me more than the majestic astrology which Shin believes; despite so, I can’t deny that the primal impulse for the sea is the biggest impetus for this voyage. In terms of the significance of the canvas for Shin, she believes that her painting and Go-eun Choi’s sculpture stand on a similar stance.
 
 

Go-eun Choi
 
 Go-eun Choi was the only planner in this exhibition. On top of being a participating artist, she would sometimes turn into a competent architect and fine tune the structure of the exhibition. It was Choi who found a commonality among the three and put them together. Choi’s work involves bringing together large household electronics or furniture, disassembling them and putting them in different use.  Going in and out of her studio in the basement in Imun-dong, I felt like I was going in and out of a large butcher shop. Her sense of humor, as exemplified in the work where she cut a large refrigerator in half and affectionately name it ‘Fridgie’, suggests that her purpose doesn’t just lie on emancipating an object from its familiarity. For example, she confronts objects through the body of the artist, and finally finds a tiny gap through which she can dissect it. She digs up into the shell of the object, and what is discovered in the wound of the ruptured shell is the cross-section of the description imbued onto the body. The wardrobe, like a mammoth taken off of its thick leather and fur and now a possession of the hunter, is placed in the white cube and functions as a decent painting. What fascinates Choi in such action and reaction is not largely different from what enchants Boma Pak.
 
I suggested a few guidelines at the onset of the exhibition, such as the following: Expand the form of work into that of the exhibition (even if it seems more or less thoughtless); Approach commonality through difference, and; Meet different partners if possible in each different floor. While some suggestions were accepted without trouble, some were taken as a new provisory clause after a struggle. What is more powerful are unwritten laws formed naturally among them, such as “hiding behind each others’ work (based on special fellowship)”, “not evading or hesitating emotional criticism”, and “willingly responding to the comparing of uncertainty as a consequence.” In the mean time, I decided to become a quiet subjective recorder, closely observing and keeping watch on them, and collecting and laying out on the table the trivial evidences they have left out behind the stage. Insa Art Space will contribute to jumbling up to confusion the artists’senses of different depths. The exhibition is refreshingly delightful in that it signifies the ways in which the self-identity in young-female-artists is introduced and operates in the art form. Silky Navy Skin is an adjective, noun and adverb. Although the term lies within the range of the senses, it’s something that’s oneiric which cannot easily be assembled. Now, a clue has been given.  ■ Juli Yoon