Images
of Exhibition
Digital Utopia
Friday, February 6 - Saturday, March 20,
2004
Gallery Korea is pleased to present "Digital
Utopia," a multimedia duo show of Airan Kang
and Julio Soto, curated by Eunhee Yang. This exhibition
will mount the two international artists' recent
video and photographic works, which explore narratives
in the real and virtual worlds. For both of the
artists, digital technology is essential to creating
the narratives and making them accessible to the
viewer.
Airan Kang, widely exhibited in France,
Japan, and Korea, channels her vision of the
digital world through books. Since 1999, Kang
has pursued her vision of the future of books.
Her resin-cast, electric-lit books (or, more
precisely, book containers without any content
in them) began to appear in her installation
pieces, for which she used paper books on bookshelves
or photographic images of bookstore bookshelves.
Those illuminated books, which were often unreadable
except for the cover, and which made the adjacent
conventional books look obsolete and dead, signified
the coming of new books that would go beyond
paper-relying mass-produced book technology.
For this exhibition, Kang shows digital books,
which might be called her second phase of the
book project. The new books now project information
onto a vertical screen or a horizontal plate
via sensors that detect the approach or presence
of viewers. These more viewer-friendly books
aspire to intrigue human beings, luring them
beyond the printed book era into the digital
world.
Julio Soto has made visual narratives
of fallen or successful utopias, using highly
digitally processed images in his recent video
works. Featured in numerous international exhibitions
and festivals, including Kassel Documenta Film
and Video Festival (2003), NAP Video Biennial
in Pasadena (2003), and ArtExpo 2003 in India
(2003), Soto exhibits "The Possibility
of Utopia" (2003), one of his recent digital
projects, for this show. This eighteen-minute
audiovisual work dynamically combines found
images of once-ideal cities such as Akademgorodok,
an artificial city designed by Soviet scientists
in the 1950s and Pitesti, an urban center known
for auto industries in Romania. Soto questions
the ideal cities of the later half of the twentieth
century and at the same time envisions the future
of New Jersey by examining the desire-driven
cities of the past. The fantastical quality
of his work is derived not only from his archeological
research of history but also from his recreation
of the discovered images through computer technology.
An opening reception will be held on Friday,
February 6, from 6 - 8 pm, with both artists
present. For further information, please contact
Gallery Korea at (212) 759-9550. The gallery
is open from 10 am to 7 pm Monday to Friday,
and from 10 am to 4 pm on Saturday. Closed on
February 16 and March 1.
