HEAL THE WORLD

Joseph Beuys said “Everyone is an artist.” It does not mean that every human being is a painter, sculptor or musician, but it does every human being works on the sculptor, ‘society’ as well as produces art works by using each one’s creative life style. The phrase shows Beuys artistic creed, his trying to reform the society through the arts entire his life. In effect, he tried heal the ill world by participating in the politics and dedicating to preserve the environment, expanding the realm of the arts to all the aspects of the life. This Beuys’ anthropological approach to the humanity opened up the infinite possibility of the arts. Though abiding by enigmatic question and contradiction, the various areas of the arts and possibility that he trailblazed have affected many artists till today. The three young artists who participate in the Wooson’s exhibition Heal the World are in collusion with that they relentlessly agonize over the possibility of ‘healing’ and ‘recovering’, which is latent in Beuys’s concept of the arts, to communicate with language that fits each one’s environments and times. It is the spirit of art that Joseph Beuys tried to make obligation and reality the arts has in our society to be more conscious and explicit via his art, which is the biggest benefit, ‘freedom’ that todays’ young artists are inherited. It is not ever the intention or analysis of feminism that constitutes the theme ‘healing’ and ‘recovering’, but it is interesting that all the three artists of this exhibition are female in same generation. That is because their warm and exquisite form of expression of their works is related with ‘protective instinct’. All the three artists have also common that they left their geological hometown, Asia, went to Germany, France and the United States, and they are proactive and practical to experience new culture. The reason why these three artists are together for this exhibition is the artistic approach that they seriously try to recognize the vulnerability or the ultimate value of human existence in the society by relativizing themselves to things that never change or to how their surroundings change them. What Oh You kyeong pursuits is to find ways to articulate the invisible elements existing in our society as latent energy that is prevailed. However, the way she tries to show the invisibility is not simply finding and transforming an image or object to her art works, instead, she explores the elements to make it possible to reveal the invisible, or make it more visible when it comes to less visible matters. Her drawing and installation reflect the continuous permutation of evanescent, imperceptible objects into perpetual, invigorate figures whose attribution is interlinking poetic unity and harmony transiently. Oh You kyeong seeks to shape evocative constellations reinterpreted from the adrift fragmentation of our everyday materials, which activate our emotional capacities towards the experience of empathy. Her works reminds us of a quote of Joseph Beuys "Every sphere of human activity even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done". To manifest this sort of ‘consciousness’ is the very core of Oh You kyeong’s work. Kei Takemura restores destroyed things, broken objects, wounded situations based on her memory. Her large-scale installations are comprised of different overlapped layers of embroidered translucent silk onto her own drawings or on printed photographs. Through the slow process of sewing(embroidery), Kei Takemura wants to carefully retain not only fragmentation of memories of the artist but also experiences through memory of others. For Kei Takemura the act of restoring (sewing) the broken things (the act of reflecting the irreversibility of history) manifests her willingness to encounter others through her experiences and memories, which creates new metaphors of time and space in the preserved awareness. Wrapping and sewing on silk would never give back the original function of the broken things, however, Kei Takemura tries to heal wounds with the limited but beautiful engagement of human effort. Lost time is never turned back and might leave wounds. ‘Wounds’ exist because we have become aware of it, ‘unhealable wounds’ exist because we have turned away from it instead of responding it. Bea Camacho works on installation, video, sculpture as well as performance to explore ideas of distance, absence, memory, often in relation to family and home, privacy and intimacy. The video ‘Enclose‘ of Bea Camacho presented at the exhibition is a recording of an entire performance in real-time for eleven hours. In the video, she continuously crochets herself into a cocoon, using red yarn without any breaks until it covers her entire body, and she finally hides herself completely. Bea develops her own ideologies around notions of isolation and security with her performance and architecture where she recreates a space or home as her private utopia. Another video ‘Efface’ of her, she also crochets herself into yarn that is the same color as her surrounding, which means she is not just creating an isolated space, but also speaking about disappearing into her surroundings.