Joo, Song yeol

Odd Stories in Bags

It has been almost 8 years since Song-Yeol Ju had a private sculpture exhibition. Differently from his first and second private exhibitions, the main theme of the current exhibition is a "bag" sculpted from mixtures of metal, bronze, natural stones and iron materials, which might be a relatively easy subject for everybody to understand. The sculptor’s iron bags reflect his liberal and sincere point of view on life, which one might discover while sitting next to him at the bar or bumping into him on the street.

What is the sculptor's intention of displaying bags made out of natural stones and industrial materials such as steel and bronze? Although life-sized, they are obviously too heavy to carry. The bags we carry with us everywhere we go, full of our things, are like mirrors reflecting our lives. Perhaps by making such weighty bags, the sculptor tries to capture the invisible heaviness we all carry around in our lives.

The bags on display can be classified into 3 types: bags carried by men at school and work; bags carried by women when they are going out; and bags representing the meaning of travel away from everyday life.

While his first exhibition played out a certain figurative sense of beauty through the interaction between steel and cement, manifesting the incorporation of traditional and modern, this exhibition reflects everyday life with a single material, such as iron or bronze, for each piece. This time, the intermixture of iron and natural stones merely takes the assisting role unlike the previous exhibition.

The bags of the first category include , , , , , , , and others. Most of the works vividly illustrate images of the artist's school days through the qualities and textures of the materials and figurative characters. , , , and remind us of the hardships, vigorous emotions, or delicate and complex mental images of the times when we were carrying them around, as if we are flipping through old albums full of memories.

Among them, the one evoking the most curiosity and well representing the artist’s figurative sensibility is . It is a kind of bag one would find in the scenes of the movies or TV shows with lonely characters wandering around far from their hometown. Distinctive from other works, such as which depicts social irrationality with bronze and black color at the bottom, or in which the minds of social members living in the competitive world is a bit awkwardly expressed, reveals a figurative sense of beauty just like the childhood experiences the artist must have gone through.

The second category of sculpture is the women’s bags. The swift lines and elegant textures of the materials seem to suggest stylish ladies walking by or glamorous middle-aged women with luxury goods, seemingly indifferent to social atmosphere. These works, however, could be criticized in that the sculptor seems to interpret the female psychology from a male-centered point of view. Considering that the male-dominated social structure is still prevalent, women under these social circumstances may be suffering more hardships and pains than men, far more graciously and humbly than the male eye might perceive.

The third category of works, disclosing the overall intention of the sculptor, seems to resolve the criticisms of the previous two types, and relieve the tensions built up in every piece of work by the dualistic confrontation of natural stones and iron, through the organic fusion of natural and artificial. The industrial materials, such as iron and bronze, symbolize the labor in daily life; natural stones implicate the innate character of human beings endowed by Mother Nature. Though connecting the first and the second groups of bags, the sculptor implies that strenuously competitive life throughout childhood and into adult social life only lead one to disharmony within society, studded with all kinds of absurdities and overconsumption. In order to relieve such tension, the artist utilizes the correlation between the iron materials and natural stones as you can discover in and . The proportionally harmonized textual qualities and figurative forms in those two works reveal the hidden design of the artist to observe and interpret the life as the unity of opposites, such as labor and rest or artifice and nature.

Likening the men's bag to the social absurdity and the women's to the overconsumption is still likely to be condemned by both sides of the gender. Nevertheless, the figurative textures of the materials and the organic structures among the works seem to reflect the natural and humble life style of the artist much better than his previous exhibitions.

by Gwan-Yong Jo(Art Critic)

Artist Profile

Joo, Song-Yeol (朱 松 洌)

* 1991 Graduated from Hongik University College of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture

* 2001 Graduated from Hongik University Graduate School of Fine Arts majoring in Sculpture

* 1995 1st private exhibition (Samjoeng Art Space, Seoul)

* 1997 2nd private exhibition (Gwanhun Gallery, Seoul)

* 2005 3rd private exhibition (Art Factory, Paju / Cube Space, Seoul)

* 2006 4th private exhibition (Dam Gallery,/ Gwanhun Gallery, Seoul)

* 2011 5th private exhibition ( Baum art Gallery, Seoul)

* 2003 Korea-Spain Sculpture Symposium(Gonjiam , Gyeonggi-do)

* 1991 ~ 2011 Exhibited in about 100 Group Exhibitions.

* Member of Korean Fine Arts Association