Into the Exhibition: Artist Jo Kyung-jae on the Joy of Seeing and Thinking for Yourself
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
Photographer and performance artist Jo Kyung-jae, on view at Gallery Paljo in Daegu through Jan. 10, encourages viewers to complete his works with their own interpretations. Trained in Korea and at Münster University of the Arts in Germany, Jo rejects prescriptive explanations, believing artworks gain life only when viewers bring personal thought to them. His practice moves from photographed found objects to large, hand-built objects staged, painted, and sometimes destroyed to create theatrical scenes that appear in his photographs. Jo describes the making process as 99% scene-building and 1% shutter click; objects lose their original function and become visual actors in plays of light, time and space — the “invisible actors” that title the show. The exhibition highlights his ongoing interest in installation, performance and photographic printing; his work is held by several Korean and German institutions and he has shown at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) and other major venues.
