A ‘TALKING TO’ FOR THE SELF-CONTRADICTING INDIVIDUAL AND THEIR SOCIETY: ‘HOMO NATURA’
The solo exhibition ‘Homo Natura’ by Song Sanghee, which was on show at Seoul Museum of Art, came to an end on the 27th of February. As the winner of the of The Hermès Foundation Missulsang 2008 and the Korea Artist Prize 2017 at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Song is not a newcomer to the contemporary art scene as a media artist. Song focuses on presenting the silent voices of people across known sites of natural disasters, acts of terror, war, and genocide that had either been forgotten or ignored, and this solo exhibition – the first time she has exhibited her work alone in a national museum in Korea – marks the end of a 20-year hiatus in her practice, returning with a more refined and elaborate outlook.
This omnidirectional project, which crosses the boundaries of certain media and collates various spatiotemporalities and histories under the theme ‘Homo Natura’, now takes a bold step forward. I had the opportunity to ask her about the message contained in this 75-day exhibition, by covering her artworks one-by-one.
Bang Yukyung (Bang): This exhibition is your first solo exhibition since the Korea Artist Prize 2017. Did something change in your work or in your thinking following that exhibition?
Song Sanghee (Song): The exhibition at MMCA was described as one that ‘embodies the voices of people who cannot partake in public discourse and are forced to disappear by the existing power structure’, and I felt ashamed of this claim. In reality, I find it difficult in Friedrich Nietzsche’s . I realised that the doubts and questions that began with the sense of ‘me’ as an individual coincided with the contradictions that define this world, and that a human being cannot simply be explained by the easy binaries of good and evil, true and false. I wanted to invite viewers to confront their ‘terrible basic text’ and expose the contradiction and irrationality threaded throughout the individual and their society. This is how I came to decide on the title ‘Homo Natura’—I began noting down the exhibition plan in 2019.
