YOUNG & EMERGING

PART-TIME SUITE

In 2009, three graduate students rented a musty, water-damaged basement in Seoul and invited guests to the space. As visitors descended the steps in galoshes provided by the trio, they first saw that the room was entirely flooded. Appearing like a black, inky sheet of silk, the water perpetuated an overwhelming sense of abandonment emanating from the hidden space, which was marked with brown stains due to leakages from the restaurant upstairs.

Ominous and foreboding, this first project by Part-time Suite (which began as a three-person collective, and now consists of Miyeon Lee and Jaeyoung Park) was an ode to the disused spaces in Seoul’s cityscape as well as a resistance against conventional interactions with galleries and institutions, which can often involve long periods of stasis and social exclusion. (2017), for example, they attempt to reconcile with the falsities of the image-reality relationship, warped by the digitization of culture, through revisiting the Minjung art movement of the 1980s. Utilizing a series of archival images from demonstrations and pro-Korean-reunification events and smartphone-shot home videos, the work revisits the image itself as a political tool.