Everyone has probably experienced being inspired by art at least once in their life. Every genre of the arts, such as art, music, movies, and literature, is inextricably bound up with life and death and has a diverse effect on them.
On:Off is a project in which a visual artist, musicians, and a curator depart from their established roles of simply influencing one another and producing ancillary works. Each genre is newly incarnated as a work, remaining unseparated. What makes me live or die? Turning on (life) and turning off (death) is one of the themes artists have to constantly interpret and explore. The artists participating in this program executed organic works in which they brought a focus on the features of art and music as creators of our time, discovering their similarities and differences in each field.
Artist Junyoung Yoon, who has represented the feelings of loss, frustration, and emptiness contemporary people often feel, visualizes messages sent to herself while in the middle of life and death. Nothing, Anything features a process of life in which one keeps his or her balance between life and death. Hypnotic images are incarnated through an overlap of drawings featuring faces, constellations, waves, different moons, and birds in harmony with a video using each object that conveys meaning.
Indie band Frog in the Well ushers in a feeling of delightful comfort with an acoustic sound, embodying our stories of life and death in songs. The exhibition title songs “Never”, “There Was Nothing in the First Place”, and “My Last Carnival” convey stories pertaining to love, youth, music, and passion. These pieces insinuate that every meaning found in life can emit light at the end of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche said that there has been only one thing that makes our realities enriched: art when religion became powerless by science. Artists produce artworks through their talent and efforts using a variety of media and people make their lives artistic in their own manner. Life and death may be things that are placed at the beginning and end of our lives, or things that are parallel to one another. Viewers are expected to seek out the meaning of life and death while looking into messages concerning the two as interpreted by artists of our time. (Written by_Yooyoung Park)