[SEOUL] Future Elegy For a New Life: Gijeong Goo, Hyunjin Park, Soeun Bae

Let’s, once again, return to loss⥄ In the process of losing, the aftermath, and the empty stretch of earth now open and new to something else. Something different. What does it mean to return to oblivion, to return to life? Some new formulation of material, model, data, possibility, framework; And perhaps even,,, some new formulation for grief, care, life, death ? the molecules re-arranging themselves over and over into new bodies. These bodies are synthetic, android, humanoid, human, nature, and infrastructure. Wires > wax > silicone > bones > soil >> and sunlight. And they transgress and transform form, and our ideas about what makes a body, what makes a life, and how we cope with what comes after.

In an intermedia and multi-modal perceptual experience that places us within “the network,” we become plants, bodies, image, and effigy. Who are Park Hyunjin’s apparitions, Bae Soeun’s biomorphic archival fragments, and Goo Gijeong’s flora? They are us and we are them. Instead, you could be a digital remnant, and I could be a rose

-        sam blumenfeld

CHOI&CHOI Gallery presents Future Elegy For a New Life, a three-person exhibition featuring Hyunjin Park, Soeun Bae, and Gijeong Goo, artists whose practices build post-biological futures in an effort to resolve the questions of mortality along post- and trans-humanist frameworks. Through building alternative bodies, the artists' works engage and activate each other through form and materiality. In doing so, they expand upon a notion of what it means to exist in multiple realities, as well as care aesthetics that both outlast and transgress what is human.

Gijeong Goo’s process involves the intermedia translation of bodies, nature, and technology, problematizing their linguistics as their existence transcends the boundary between the digital and physical. In ‘The Transparent Rendering Apparatus, 2025’, Goo places man-made steel objects alongside real plants that continue to grow and wilt, requiring constant observation and care throughout the exhibition. Nature, ever-more iterative through the digital, becomes entwined with virtuality through augmented reality. As a result, his work hints at a vision of the Biocene, a speculative era in which governance of the Earth is restored from human intervention to nature. The work initiates a dialogue around the shifting boundaries between life and non-life that reverberates throughout the exhibition, serving as a death knell that signals the birth of a new life.

Hyunjin Park combines tradition, history, folk tales, and myths to create scenes that float between life and death, human and non-human, care and mourning. Dogs appear as a recurring motif in her work, as icons of the threshold between this existence and what comes next. The three dogs in the exhibition stem from the myth of Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of the underworld. Cerberus’ three heads are reimagined as skulls dyed with touch-me-not flowers, each fitted with a skeletal torso combining canine, floral, and human female forms. Park imbues the traditionally beastly figure of the dog with a sense of humanity by imparting each head with its own autonomy. The addition of touch-me-nots evokes the Korean tradition of women dying their nails as they await love, expanding notions of folk practice, femininity, and the liminal. Instead of answering or resolving these issues with finality, the works offer fluidity between placeness and non-placeness, presenting themselves as a haptic site between remembrance and flesh; the biotic, abiotic, and post-biotic. Within this site, Park’s works reflect on what makes a life, and how to care for it, and ourselves, long after that life has ceased.

Soeun Bae reflects on her own experience with othering and isolation, and seeks to build new post-biological and android bodies to care for. Through prosthetics, Bae imagines trans-humanist lovers and post-human entities in order to build new sites for tenderness, queerness, and intimacy. Silicone hugs glass, transparent bodies gather, and new forms of appendages gently brush against the floor. Through forms achieved through 3D modeling, mold-making, and casting, Bae creates a new reality not limited by cellular physiology that is situated among both physical and digital truths. Her forms are made from an archive of her own body interwoven with metal, plastic, silicone, resin, paper, and drawings. And her inquiry into care is equally trans-humanist as she conceives of new ways to touch, to stroke, and to tend to this skin and flesh.