Afterpiece
An exhibition cannot be fully realized without securing a site in which the presence of the artist, curator, work, space and viewer is ensured. Because it is only open for a short while and in a specific space before closing, an exhibition depends on and exists through people’s memories and records. Even the most faithful pilgrims of art cannot visit all exhibitions at once; as such, the story of art is constructed after the fact through a discourse grounded in memories and records. However, these memories and records are often imperfect or shallow. Memories become subjective with time, and records can only incompletely represent the sensory experience of an actual place through certain methods; dependent on memory, they are constantly re-analyzed. And what about the works of art, after the exhibition ends? The work of art produces meaning through a reciprocal relationship with the space and time of the exhibition. When the work leaves that space, it is like a strange stone found on a mountainside or a souvenir from a trip crushed at the bottom of a bag: it no longer produces the same feeling as before. 
Afterpiece focuses on the imperfection that an attempt to record or remember a one-time event must inevitably confront. It explores the stories that do not appear in an exhibition in its completed state, and in particular considers the meaning of works of art after the event ends. It does not, however, intend to reveal these hidden aspects only to insist that everything about our attempts diverges from the truth. Afterpiece intends to continue the processes of remembering and recording, despite their inadequacies and shortcomings, while investigating the relationship between the two as they develop with reference to one another. Again acknowledging that all memories and records are selective and nontransparent, we investigate how individuals have created exhibitions in the space for imagination and interpretation that emerges from this dislocation.
Jeongja Lee unearths and presents the traces of artistic activities that are repeatedly covered up in physical locations. The walls and other temporary fixtures ordinarily installed for exhibitions hide, as much as they can, the fact that they are constructed in order to divide and partition the space and present it as if it were always in that form. The artist keenly cuts away at false portions of walls and rearranges the byproducts of this process at her discretion. She discloses the back-end structures that are hidden for the duration of a location’s role as an exhibition space, during which a number of its actual components are distorted. Upon our adjusting to its unfamiliar present state, the artist without warning presents the exhibition space in its “originally constructed” form, creating a metaphor for its impermanence. Uncovering and scraping away at the layers of paint covering the walls, the artist uncovers the traces of coating and nails that have accumulated over a long time and actively engages with them as elements of her work. 
ps jinjoo kim imagines what comes after the records and memories of an exhibition. The point of departure for her work is a concern over what to do after contemplating an exhibition through these two means. This kind of questioning does not imply a “succession” of the kind seen in historical lessons. It is instead closer to the creative potential found in the act of conveying to another the inspiration one has acquired through ruminating on records and memories. As if personally resolving to pursue this intention or encouraging another to do so, the artist speculates on what the exhibitions of Insa Art Space have left behind, expressing this as “the right to memory.” The sculpture installed on the roof of the building is a symbol of and medium for this “legacy”: making rubbings of objects found by chance without knowing why they would be in an art museum, the artist transforms them into a legacy. These things are connected through a kind of lease in which they receive and yield to the institution’s “legacy.”
We diligently record exhibitions through photographs, film, and text, perhaps through a reluctance to let go of things that are disappearing or for the purpose of reconstructing meaning after the fact. The following generation then encounters the exhibitions of the past through textual and photographic records and, through them, produces discourse. But is it even possible to fully summon past events through records and memories? Lyotard refers to the postmodern impossibility of representation as a “state of differend and tort.” What degree of differend and tort is to be found in testimonies based on imperfect memories and records that cannot represent all occurrences, and the criticism and discourse that emerges from them?
Part-time Suite brings this state of tort and the imperfection of records to the forefront. Diligently investigating the archives of Insa Art Space from 2000 to 2008, the artists bring together the language and images of its catalogues, sourcebooks, and administrative materials in a fragmentary manner. Selectively expanding on these constant traces of the past to the extent that it is difficult to deduce the original, they irregularly interpose these fragments with footage of an undisclosed performances carried out by the members of Afterpiece in the exhibition space. The reconstructed film lightly hints at the originals and the situations surrounding them only to dismantle their foundation. This astutely edited film shows the ineffectuality of experiments in pursuing the original while questioning the present state and role of artistic practice. The title One Opening comes from a mistranslated record from a presenter’s text at a 2002 symposium. 
Meanwhile, works from one-off exhibitions inevitably receive another form of life after the exhibition ends. Sculptures and objects feel this fate particularly strongly, as they resonate with the physical space in which they are located. If placed in another exhibition they would acquire new meaning through their relationship to its space, time, and politics; however, without a suitable place for storage, they could just disappear. Because of a certain lack that exists between the recorded past and the present, works that only leave behind a few photographs or texts also need to be “recoded” into new, different contexts.
The work is as it is, but it is subject to change. 
As Soosung Lee’s objects are of a monumental scale, they often cannot be stored after an exhibition ends. The artist has stored these works by dismantling them and detaching them from their foundations. Having once created an exhibition based on the materials of his sculptures that had been scattered across many other shows (Bachelor’s Party, 2014), for this exhibition Lee places parts of his works (which become monuments themselves by being deprived of their monumentality) around the exhibition space, ensuring their safe preservation. 
Minae Kim creates installation works that actively relate to the spaces of exhibitions for their duration. The more a work relates to aspects of its space’s architecture, the greater the gap between its existence in that space and its state after the exhibition ends. Such works “become foolish” after the fact, to use the artist’s expression. For this exhibition, the artist looks back on her first exhibition, Anonymous Scenes (2008), considering the meaning the works and scenes held at the time through her own records and memories. Her thoughts on the works’ present state are expressed through texts that spread across the veil of imperfect memory. The texts in Manuscript-paper Drawing—which began through an attitude of ruminating over her works’ references—visualize the temporary existence and volatility of memory through erasing and cutting out portions of the text.
The title “Afterpiece” is a term describing amusing performances that were shown after plays in the 18th and 19th centuries. Because of its similar linguistic structure, the word evokes ‘Masterpiece’ and also resembles a proper noun to describe pieces of art whose context changes before and after an exhibition. Under this title, these artists have revealed the personal narratives of works of art that are hidden in the discourse surrounding exhibitions and have brought records from the past into the here and now with a meaningful, critical mindset. Following a mixture of records and memories and excavating traces of the past from the spaces of these artistic activities like archeologists, these artists have shown an idealistic passion in pursuing the original forms of works even while acknowledging the transience of the originals. 
Can these works of art emerged from arbitrary decisions and memories obtain the presence beyond the particular space and time of temporary exhibitions? The stories following the closing of an exhibition gradually lose cohesiveness as the footnotes on their subjective narratives multiply, and sometimes they cannot find a proper home in the constrained form of an exhibition. After imagining the recollections of those in the future, what is left behind varies depending on each individual’s situation and politics. This project may ultimately come from a place of anxiety, of not knowing if something important from the past has been omitted or if one can know the past in its entirety. Afterpiece, created with reference to a variety of perspectives on the past, will also come to a close; into what kind of dormant past will it be recorded and remembered?