ART'LOFT — OVERLAPPED SENSIBILITY

04 : ABOUT THE ARTIST
To overlap refers to the act of folding one thing onto itself. This process, in its reflexivity and repetition, is one key to understanding the work of Sunghong Min. The artist practice develops through the rigorous application of a set of formal and material operations. These operations – for example, molding, melting, shattering, and reconstructing – derive largely from the vocabulary of sculpture, arguably the central medium for a practice that also includes a wide variety of installation and site-specific work.

Min uses birds as surrogates for humans, modeling social systems with the birds that, through the logic of allegory, correspond to human interactions. (His work, in this respect, can be compared to Allan McCollum’s 1982 Plaster Surrogates). In Overlapped Sensibility: Imbued, Min cast a birdhouse out of a human residential space, based on a survey of towns on Daebudo Island conducted by the artist himself. Out of these materials, he created a cross-shaped roof composed of two gables, erecting a spire at the intersection and placing a bird, like a weathervane, on the apex. Echoing the structure of European churches after the Middle Ages, as well as the birdhouses of artists like Mike Kelley or Wim Delvoye, a flock of birds huddles inside this shelter, like a flock of believers gathered to hear their pastor’s sermon.

The work of Sunghong Min is a meditation on the visible and the invisible, the placement and displacement of images. By investigating the material status of the image, he resists a contemporary tendency toward its dematerialization. Through uncanny combinations of materials, which often intermingle construction and deconstruction, Min addresses these questions in media that range from ceramics to casts to photography.

Presented with their cracks still visible, Min’s recent ceramic bird heads, first shattered and glued back together, construct an image of destruction: desire, for Min, can only take this contradictory form. By placing these bird heads under a roof from a human home, the artist literally combines the homely and the unhomely. The encounter with such images, whose magnetic appeal derives precisely from their uncanny contradiction, propels the audience to a place that the artist has already reached. This place is also a non-place, an empty place, a void where the obstinacy of the topos vanishes into ruins. It is the place of ex nihilo, the place of truth, according to Lacan. There, we come to realize that the most beautiful site, like the vessels that proliferate through Min’s work, is empty. Summoning the invisible into the visible, Min transports the forgotten and the ruined from his world into ours.