SEOUL.- The paradox intertwined with the Theseus’ Ship[1] in Greek mythology is generally read as a thought experiment around the issue of sameness: which ship is the ‘original’. Here, ripping off old planks and layering strong new wood to fix the ship is for elongating the original function of the ship, that is the prospect of sailing. Sailing has long been the metaphor to contemplate the subject of modernity, and the passion for transgression to willingly reach your hands into the rough waves was always followed by empirical power and desire. And in today’s capitalist society, whether they’re humans or objects, replacing the old into the strong and new is omnipresent.

Let’s put aside the discussion about ‘which one is the original’, and focus on the act of the person who repairs the ship, for example, a carpenter. After a long sailing journey, when it comes to the point for the surfaces of the ship being so damaged and weary that it needs repair, deciding how big of a wood, thick of a wood, and how to patch them together, is entirely up to the carpenter. But if the wood they chose was not strong enough, or if it was something else mistaken as wood, and if the journey can’t go on because of that, can we still call this ship a ship?

The exhibition tries to connect this act of carpenter— ripping off the surface of the ship and adding another grounds, gradually going away from the mythology of the Original—to the working process of the two artists. Jiyeon Lee accumulates the raw outbreaks in the process of recollect the original experience made up of memory, and the original is related to the room that her own body has experienced. Kyungeun Son replaces the performer of the sculpture production under the condition she made, or carries out the incomplete replication using molds that are the frames of casting process. What lies in front of the two artists in each of their process moves constantly to the direction further from the Original.





Jiyeon has painted the room over and over again. Here, ‘room’ is not a detached object that the artist perceives through her eyes, but it is something that is closely weaved into her own body. The artist recollects the ‘original’ she experienced through her body through painting. If the room she experienced herself is the original, relying on her memory, she clothes and breaks the comprehensive elements that compose it(texture of the carpet, temperature of the wallpaper, the angle of the small window, etc.) in the canvas. The memory is arbitrary, and therefore it seems incomplete in the representative aspect. But the overlapping dislocation of brushstrokes and colors through painting, in fact, is the closest to the state of the memory. And this vivid place that can’t be the other anymore turns into a different body(canvas) and put in front of our eyes.

In this exhibition, the artist tries to paint a ship that she’s never been on board. Since the experience of the ship, i.e. the original memory itself is absent from the artist, via the brushstrokes, the form that was about to be a ship becomes something that doesn’t have to be a ship anytime now. (2026), the painting that occupies a big wall portion of the space, began with an exterior of a ship, but it becomes the surface of apartment renovation site in front of her house as well as a tunnel we might have went through one evening. Actually it becomes nothing, and comes back into the room after going round and around many, many spaces. The attempt to chase the form of a ship resorted to a room, and the form began from the experience of a room became a ship again. To willingly drift in this room, in such a close and intimate room, feels like it would come with a lag. But the attempt to capture the artist’s experience and memory in this quiet lag evokes the ever-dynamic act of painting.

(2026) that cuts across the center of the exhibition space is installed patch of remainders of canvas pieces and light fabrics from her studio. This work is a membrane that restricts the viewer’s gaze, preventing them from taking in the entire space at once. This restriction is intimately engaged with the way of viewing the painting placed at the

[1] The thirty-oared galley ship that returned with Theseus and the youths was preserved by the Atheneans until the era of Demetrius of Phalerum. Atheneans took off the old planks as time went by and replaced them into the newer and stronger planks: by some philosophers, the ship became the symbolic case on the discussion about change and sameness. Some argued that the ship is the same ship from the beginning, and the others argued that it became another ship. - Plutarch, Life of Theseus, 23.1

inner part of the exhibition space, and a slight wind blows along the viewers as they pass by. The movement of the viewer securing the perspective behind the membrane in order to see the entirety of the painting resembles the transgression in sailing accompanied by the wind[1].

Kyungeun Son has been working back and forth between sculpture and performance. She has made sculptures that functions as props[2] of performances, and has made sculptures first before temporary performances where her body is involved in the sculptures. Hence, the artist imagines, also in the work that is solely a sculpture, the trace of her body’s movement in the process as a score.

In this exhiibition, The artist named her buddy artists Dongheon Shin and Minjin Song as the makers of the sculptures Shepherd(2026) and Headholerock(2026), instead of her own body that is absent in Seoul: the work departs from locating her body and the buddies’ bodies on two clauses, Frankfurt and Seoul. In the process of delivering the instruction for making the sculptures to the buddies, and of the works being done, the gesture of the each maker, and the difference in the standards of materials produced in each country creates minor discrepancy between the two works. The works made through the instructions create discrepancy from the work of the artist, which is considered as the original. Viewer is not the only one who can’t place their body in Germany and in Korea at the same time: so does the artist. She herself can’t witness the difference. This accompanies the suspicion on the original itself, and the authority of the original is shaken in this process. The artist takes this vulnerability as a condition, imagines the gestures of the bodies stemmed from the process of the sculpting and the sculptures as scores, and continues them again to performance[3].

On the other hand, the sculptures laying low on the floor play with the mold, an object touching the replicating potential of sculpture, in different ways. is a tomb-looking stack made up of hundreds of sticks, the plaster of trashed bike tires, molded with latex and casted with plaster. Yet the sticks fail to be the complete replicas when they are crumpled and tangled in the making process. Every stick becomes a heterogeneous entity to continue back to back to become the form of a huge tail. Within the bike tires crossing the body of the sculpture, plaster filled up to the brims. This form allows them to look like the molds of the plaster sticks, but the actual molds that are of latex becomes the material for (2026), emerging in a completely different way.

The painting (2026) and the sculpture takes a round circular form that reminds us of hole, head, and yard. To look at two circular form side by side, the movement of a round spool that is held and gone again in a child’s hand in the play of Fort-da[4]— an origin of the repetition compulsion in childhood— can be imagined. For the kid, he spool operates as a substitute of the mother, delaying the absence when it’s grasped and causing anxiety when it goes away. However, as it inevitably goes away again, to repeat this act of suffering from distancing resembles the two artists’ enduring of the original’s absence in the repetition process. When the spool, the alternative of the original, comes back into grasps, it seems to look different than before.

Leaving the memory about a space in the canvas through the repeated brushstrokes, or grasping the gesture of sculpture making that is replicated through the hands of the alternates

[1] The passion for transgression is likened to a wind indispensable for navigation; it enables the ship to cross the sea of life, but at the same time drives it onto perilous shoals.-Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator

[2] any movable, physical object used or interacted with by an actor used on a theater stage or screen set

[3] As a performance related to will be done in Trianon, Frankfurt and Gallery Chosun, Seoul. Kyungeun Son and the artist Dongheon Shin make the end part of the sculpture, in each of their spaces, and the movement of each is simultaneously aired in each other’s space. 12th July 2026, 11:00 in Germany/18:00 in Korea.

[4] …hence the failure disappeared within it and at the same time he made that impressive sound. Afterwards, he pulled the string again to drag the spool out of the bed again, and happily exclaimed “Da(there)” when it appeared again. Then that was a perfect play of disappearance and coming back.

- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

to renovate an old thing in order to use it as a ship that can still sail. It is to set aside the magnificent and reckless mobility sailing across the ocean, and to endlessly extend the time of the acts of going into the ship, ripping, and repairing the body. In the time of this extension, the body of the ship is thoroughly broken and holed as if it doesn’t have to be a ship anymore, and willingly transforms to take the other body. Though the body doesn’t float on the water ever since, we can vaguely remember that it was a ship.