KimChangPractice!!

Book, 120 x 200 mm, 149 pp. Poster, 1000 x 600 mm; 120 x 200 mm 30pp when unfolded.
Artists: KimChangPractice!!, Matteo Orsini, Leyla Stevens, Daniel Wang ; Collaborated with Kit-toast (Exhibition), Press Kit Press (Publish;Design)

The Practice Making of Guidebook is co-produced by KimChang Practice, Leyla Stevens, Matteo Orsini, Daniel Wang, kit-toast to produce a guidebook for local sites based on personal memory and experience. Based on the data developed throughout courses of interchanging between artists from April to December in 2010, the project involves an exhibition(2010.12.9-12.15, Space Bim / 2010.12.27-12.30, platform slowrush / exhibition designed by kit-toast) and a publication(production SR, 2010.12 / co -concept designed by press kit press).

Artists and non-artists living in different environments offer the information (text, image, sound and object) of their own local site to the artists and non-artists who’re living in different places. By using the information offered by each other, every member imagines the indicated sites and creates their own guidebooks of certain sites. The guidebook what is completed by such process does not necessarily need to contain general characteristics of sites. The participants rather interpreted those personally selected and given information to create guidebooks without direct experiences. In order to produce a guidebook, the information about certain cites would be partly selected, possibly misunderstood and inevitably misinterpreted by takers’ own preferences.

The information offered by people from different areas contains multi-layered perspectives based on individual experiences, rather than objective information and description what generally reflect a sole perspective and is usually offered for and by travelers. For instance, two different sites where are located in a long distance, of course, have a visual difference which has came with different cultural-political-social backgrounds. If the information of the two different sites, on the other hand, is selected by personal experiences or memories, then it may rather reveal some kinds of similarities which come by personality or individuality. Throughout such process, the boundaries of internationality and locality possibly overlap as well as being apart from the individual boundaries of memory and life.

The publication, ‘The Practice of Making a Guidebook’ takes two parts; the ‘data’ interchanged between participants and the ‘guidebook’ developed based on the data. To help advanced level of each site described by the guidebooks, some characteristics of the sites are specially selected as tags and separately listed. Corresponding each tag listed below, you can easily find their page numbers in index page.

KimChangPractice!!, Leyla Stevens, farm, family photograph, childhood, hometown, china town, identity, ethnicity, Incheon, Matteo Orsini, Pittsburgh, Sondo, Intenational, urbanism, future, neighborhood, Cheongju, move, fieldtrip, nothing, Daniel Wang, Shanghai, taxi, fight, stranger, resting area, souvenir, empty room, email/chat, gesture

This project, as a part of local study, is inter-occurred in every direction. Every participant takes their dual-roles as both a giver and a taker (of the information of their sites). The process of understanding each other in the course of inter-relating ‘your experience’ with ‘my experience’, becomes a kind of ‘learning’ about locality. However, this is unlike the ordinary learning, an acquisition of knowledge. Instead, this new kind of ‘learning’ practically demands a prior step of researching or studying of certain sites before actually taking the personalized information. This means, therefore that the ‘guidebook’ becomes an appropriate way to speculate the process of learning or obtaining and interpreting information. The taker (of information) in the future can be the most important giver (of information), too. This inter-relationship or inter-change minimizes the physical distance between givers and takers as well as networking them each other. This must be an aspect of pro-active community for inter-changing information.

The results of this project ‘The Practice of Making a Guidebook’ are an exhibition and a publication which consequently become the network itself of the whole project. This network has formed by the participant artists and the co-creative artists as they get entangled each other. A map visualizes the inter-relationship, names of data and image information. Especially the confusing lines connecting each point indicate what this project is about after all.

138 x 120 mm, 12pp; 544 x 360 mm when unfolded; Promotional material for cro:the invisible : slowrush.

As a collaborative project with the publishing section of “the invisible”, Tourmap : SONGDOis built upon a field study of construction sites in New Songdo City to investigate the basis of ‘new city’ formation, the historical context of old and new downtowns and the flux of urban culture.

Tourmap : SONGDO focused on the similarities between the development-oriented and purpose-driven mottos of New Songdo City and the modern power that returns to vanishing point. In New Songdo City, on top of an immense magnitude of administrative control, there are aspirations of the petit bourgeois overwhelmed by economic logic. Concepts such as desire, power and capital were either understood symbolically, or in relation to complex ideologies. And yet, in New Songdo City all these abstract words seem to materialize in real life as a gigantic civil engineering project. Things that did not and could not reveal themselves formed a gigantic urban landscape.

Tourmap : SONGDO is a tour map that guides visitors around the construction sites in New Songdo City, regarding them as one of the characteristic features that vigorously reveal the ‘here and now’ of the city. The landscape, which is full of iron structures of buildings and huge cranes, construction screens, and geotechnical construction, creates a skyline distinctively different from that of a metropolitan city, or anywhere else in the suburbs of new cities in Korea. The skyline changes according to the position of the observer, a virtual line that derives from the difference in perspectives. Likewise, the diversity of skylines corresponds to the diverse positions of the observer. Tourmap : SONGDO leads the way to ‘the place’ where the New Songdo City skyline can be identified.

This ‘place,’ however, is a ‘spot’ where the observer is forced to stand, much like the vanishing point mentioned earlier. Indeed, to see New Songdo City in just the same way as in the promotional New Songdo City blueprint, the viewer has to be at the exact spot where the photographer took the picture for the blueprint. To verify all 12 skylines presented in Tourmap : SONGDO, visitors to New Songdo City need to look all over the construction sites. As a guide map of this itinerary, Tourmap : SONGDO is a sort of a game, road signs that suggest one possible way to experience the city.

Objects that we brought from In-cheon china town
Incheon Woman Biennale, 2009

..Historically, Incheon, the host city of the 2009 International Women Artists' Biennale, has been the major international port for trading with China due to its geo-political location. In the modern times, it was the gateway into Korea for the foreign powers and the first city which Japan conquered to spread its powers to East Asia. The China Town succeeds a very unique cultural geography for the minorities in Korea.

Kim and Chang focuses on the cultural originality and isolation of the China Town near Incheon Port, the geographical center of three major countries in East Asia. The installation named consists of objects they have collected from the China Town and two slide projectors. The artists made themselves aliens among the alien residents in the China Town and revealed that their communication had to be segmented. In order to share their communication problems and experiences in the China Town, where kitsch culture is produced and consumed, they adopted the Netherlands' object paintings, which metaphorically used mundane objects to represent life. The objects are used as metaphorical symbols and the images revealed in order by the projectors. Considering that the newly renovated venue of Incheon Art Platform reflect the history of Japanese imperial rule over Korea, the artists' texts imply a more complicated meaning in a mutual communication with the past, the present, and the future.