PROJECTS
WAP Architecture 2013-2017
WAP Art Space occupies the first and basement levels of the WAP Foundation building, designed by the Swiss architect Davide Macullo. It has 6 exhibition rooms of diverse size and a sunken patio over 700 square meters.
"A slice of life to share, a piece of the city as a gift to culture. WAP art space is an urban tree, its fruits the works on show. Mineral branches at a human scale punctuate the voids of the neighbourhood, precise frameless satellites, suspended in the city. The path is already the journey, from outside to inside, from inside to out. The mind stitches together the living spaces in a mnemonic tapestry that draws the first tree of an imaginary forest, of the ideal city. The cubes, calm and nomadic capture the life giving light. Architecture is the DNA of a place and its future. The
DNA of a tree in infinitely richer than that of man because it finds its sense of being without the need to move, in one precise place. From afar architecture is a sign, close up, a collection of many things, from within, a world. The urban scale is a condensed organism that connects itself to man and makes him the protagonist of his newly constructed existence, a new world. Nature teaches us to live sparingly, working on our unconscious, to restore with genuine unfiltered gestures, the strength of our roots. A work is meant to be experienced as a three dimensional constellation of stars, each one's luminosity determining the priorities in the choices of life. The presence of WAP Artspace completes an urban piece but it would be just as happy there alone, just as it is. Like a magic tree, it performs the ultimate goal of architecture, creating a comforting space for man."
- David Macullo
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Inaugural Exhibition: Photographic Visions
Photographic Visions – Victor BurginᆞLewis BaltzᆞGeorges RousseᆞBoomoon
- Date: 28 April - 30 June 2017
- Curated by Kim Art Lab
WAP Art Space is pleased to launch its galleries with 'Photographic Visions'. The exhibition will be held on the first and basement levels of the brand-new WAP Foundation building, designed by the Swiss architect Davide Macullo.
In line with the simultaneous construction of the building and the constitution of the art collection, the exhibition focusses on the concept of space. Photographic Visions thus shows major works by four artists whose practices foster a “sense of place”, and form the core of the WAP Foundation art collection: Victor Burgin (b.1940), Lewis Baltz (1945-2014), Georges Rousse (b.1947) and Boomoon (b.1955). The works on display will act as “windows” and “mirrors” within the newly built gallery space, evoking “there” while also establishing “here”.
These four artists are extraordinary figures in the field of contemporary photography. Although each one of them has been acknowledged as a distinguished contributor to the very much discussed topic of “photography as contemporary art”, common grounds between them are not so obvious. They all lived in Paris for a certain period of time, and they worked sometimes with the same galleries, yet they have never been exhibited together. More significantly, they share similar life attitudes, as they all chose to live away from their home ground.
British artist Victor Burgin studied in the US, and currently lives in a remote countryside of France. Lewis Baltz, born in California, was critical towards American capitalism and decided to live in Paris as he believed Europe had a higher sense of public interest. Parisian Georges Rousse continuously travels to set up his ‘mobile studio’ in the places he explores, while Korean photographer Boomoon left Seoul and moved to Mountain Seorak’s vicinity where he has been honing his own world.
Although the notion of distance is essential to any photographic practice, the artists in this exhibition consider it specifically as a method for acknowledging the world in front of them. Their photographs are far from the aesthetics of the decisive moment and of chance; they are rather based on a reflection on the photographic medium, on the analysis and understanding of objects, and they result their work from elaborate working processes. This exhibition therefore aims at bringing to the fore these photographic visions that deliver the presence of the photographic image. Simultaneously, these attitudes and visions will be cornerstones for the WAP Art Space.
Eighty-one pieces in this exhibition include significant works of contemporary art history: 'Office at Night' (1986) by Victor Burgin and '89-91 Sites of Technology' (1989-1991) by Lewis Baltz. These critically acclaimed works are brought together with new pieces by Georges Rousse, commissioned by the WAP Art Space ('Cheongdam Project', 2013-2016), and with Boomoon’s 10 meter-long monumental landscape. All of these works are presented in Korea for the first time.
The exhibition catalogue will be published with essays by Victor Burgin, Georges Rousse, Alistair Hicks, Christophe Schaden and Kim Airyung.
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Cheongdam Project 2016
The second Cheongdam Project by Georges Rousse was produced in the gallery space of the WAP Art Space during the construction of the building. It ran for nineteen days from April 15 to May 3, 2016, and resulted in five works. The artist created paintings, drawings and a collage on the frame of the building, which is now covered with wooden panels, plaster and bricks. The artist again demonstrated his ability as an artist and a photographer who can use his personal sense of space in order to morph it with color and light. As the first ‘resident’ of the place, he created works that reveal the properties of the space, magnified by his own fantasy.
Seoul 4, which exists in three different versions, represents a “sphere” floating in a deep and narrow passage. Being Rousse’s favorite shape, the circle is a metaphor of the camera lens, which plays a crucial role in the whole working process. It also was a challenge for the artist to draw a perfect circle in a three dimensional space. In the first stage, a circle was painted in black, graphically marking the space (Seoul 4a). The black circle was then covered with prepared newspapers from various countries. All the images in the newspapers were obliterated in an iconoclastic manner so that black rectangles and squares rhythmed the monumental collage. The work reflects the communication networks in our Babel-like world (Seoul 4b). Finally, the circle was painted in blue, creating a meditative space flooded with blue light. (Seoul 4c).
Seoul 5 was an installation in a semi-cylindrical staircase connecting two floors of the gallery. In this narrow vertical space in concrete, two circles were drawn in the shape of an eclipse creating a dramatic anamorphosis.
Seoul 6 was made in the underground patio. Rousse created a 7.5 meter high by 9.8 meter wide mural, integrating scaffoldings that hindered his sight as a component of his installation. The geometric composition echoes the floorplan, and the architectural aesthetic of the WAP Art Space. It is also the artist’s personal homage to Mondrian. The print was produced in a large format (300 x 405 cm).
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Cheongdam Project 2013
In 2013 while planning its new construction project, the WAP Art Space commissioned a site-specific work to Georges Rousse. Rousse was the ideal artist in this regard as his practice is based on a combination between the memory of places and his own imagination.
In December 2013, he visited the abandoned house which preexisted on the site of the future construction. It was a two-story house that used to be popular in Korea in the 1970s. The artist chose to work in the living room and the kitchen which had seen a center place of family life. Cheongdam Project was set up for ten days from December 2 to 11, 2013.
Rousse drew a gigantic star across the walls, ceiling and floor covered with veneer. He said that he “imagined creating the geometric shape of a pentagon in this space, yet poetically turning it into a five-pointed star. By evoking the marker that sailors use for nighttime orientation, the star introduces the idea of dreams into an abandoned place.”
The project unfolded in three stages and three works were created accordingly. First, the star was painted in white. The correspondence between the white tube lamp on the ceiling and the white switches on the wall, alongside the light coming in through the white curtains created a perfect harmony (Seoul 1). The lights and switches were then removed and the star was painted in yellow (Seoul 2). The yellow star illuminated the interior with its warm glow for the last time. Finally, all interior materials were taken off except for the yellow star and in doing so, the concrete structure of the house was revealed (Seoul 3). The wooden interior was left inside the yellow star only; and the exposed structure took the viewer back in time, reviving the memory of the original architecture. The construction-destruction-reconstruction cycle is now symbolically recorded in the photographs.
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