Conversations With Yi Sang was a project aspiring to question established modes of engaging with legacy, memory, and the ideas of monument or memorial through the development of an events program in a building that was once a residence of the modernist Korean poet Yi Sang and is to be redeveloped into an Yi Sang memorial house.
This intervention in this specific location and time attempted to establish a multivocal dialogue between Yi Sang’s literary breakthroughs and experimentation, the historical social and political context of his time, and current contexts carried out in the present tense.
As part of this project, that transformed the space of Yi Sang’s former residence into a functional dabang (Korean coffee-house), an installation of the archive of destruction was set in place under the denomination Department of Stuffed Geniuses. The
documents selected to be there available, attempted at placing Yi
Sang’s work and social political context into a wider and more global frame, taking him out of the geographic confines that his work met
during his life, and drawing lines from his time to present days, the
initial intention being to gradually add new documents to the collection that, pertaining to Korea’s cultural and historical context, would intensify the intended dialogue between the archive's documents and Yi Sang.
In this sense, an array of selected audio and video recordings from the archive’s collection were there available to be freely consulted, along with a thorough collection of European and American avant-garde magazines, published during the period of Yi Sang’s life, ranging from Futurists to Dadaists or De Stijl, whose radical attitudes regarding art and literature were to find an echo in Yi Sang’s practice.
Yi Sang’s accomplishments as a writer, through the rejection of the dominant values of his time, challenging moral and social codes, and persistent work on the destruction of the then established literary canons, earned him in fact the potential of avoiding the fate of the genius as described in the opening sentence of his short story The Wings (Nalgae), and from which this installation of the archive of destruction takes its name.
Along with the installation, some events were developed that took the archive as a departure point, and formed part of the overall programming for the space.
film screening program:
a selection of films from the archive of destruction
workshop:
unlearning structures
In this sense, an array of selected audio and video recordings from the archive’s collection were there available to be freely consulted, along with a thorough collection of European and American avant-garde magazines, published during the period of Yi Sang’s life, ranging from Futurists to Dadaists or De Stijl, whose radical attitudes regarding art and literature were to find an echo in Yi Sang’s practice.
Yi Sang’s accomplishments as a writer, through the rejection of the dominant values of his time, challenging moral and social codes, and persistent work on the destruction of the then established literary canons, earned him in fact the potential of avoiding the fate of the genius as described in the opening sentence of his short story The Wings (Nalgae), and from which this installation of the archive of destruction takes its name.
Along with the installation, some events were developed that took the archive as a departure point, and formed part of the overall programming for the space.
film screening program:
a selection of films from the archive of destruction
workshop:
unlearning structures
