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Yen Noh (DAI, 2019) invites us to The Departure of 且8⎜BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE. Two walking exhibitions: 24 November in Tokyo and 1 December in Seoul

The Departure of 且8 / BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE
| tags: Seoul, Tokyo

Dear friends,

The past two-year commitment to the projects DidLineMurdertheCircle, Or the Courses Between No.Z100 and Butterfly and Can We Talk About MAVO? would have not been possible without support and love that I have received from many people. Doing a project was not much about doing a project and seeing how much I could go further, but rather looking to the reduced circumstances of its economy and trying to find alternatives to and within them, even though they were only rough estimations. This turns out to be a collective work which does not necessarily need to evolve from a shared aim and solidarity, but from different textures of a collective mind.      

I'm happy to announce the last presentation of the projects under MAP fellowship, and cordially invite you to The Departure of 且8 and BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE, two walking exhibitions which will take place in Tokyo and Seoul. For those who will not be able to be there physically, I wish to have other forms of the collective dérive in the near future.  

Warm regards,
Yen

Departure & Arrival


The Departure of 且8 

 
Departure
16.00, 24. November 2018 
3Chome-10, Kanda Jinbōchō, Chiyoda-gu, Tokyo

Arrival
19.00, 24. November 2018 
ASAKUSA (https://www.asakusa-o.com/)
1-6-16 Nishi-Asakusa, Taito, Tokyo


BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE 


Departure
11.00, 1. December 2018
Isang’s House
154-10 Cheongunhyoja-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul

Arrival
14.00, 1. December 2018
The Book Society (http://www.thebooksociety.org)
22 Jahamun-ro 10-gil, Sajik-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul

 
Please send an entry form for participating the walk
 

2017-2018 MAP Promising Artists Support Project Fellowship


DidLineMurdertheCircle, Or the Courses Between No.Z100 and Butterfly

Can We Talk About MAVO?

 

24. November 2018, Tokyo ⎜ 1. December 2018, Seoul 

Yen Noh's long-term research projects DidLineMurdertheCircle, Or the Courses Between No.Z100 and Butterfly (2018-) and Can We Talk About MAVO? (2016-), which take various forms and iterations, focus on Korean architect and poet Ri Sang (1910-1937) and the Japanese art collective MAVO (1923-1926). Having so far organized a temporary library and two-day assembly as a public stage for reactivating their practices, the projects trace and reimagine the architecture of collective thinking that both Ri Sang and MAVO envisioned as a counter-agency to the Imperial Japan's spatial appropriations. This involves an imaginative reconstruction of occupied Gyeongsung (now Seoul) and post-earthquake Tokyo.
 
Ri Sang, who lived through the era of the Japanese colonization of Korea, carried out his writing while employed by the Governor-General of Korea for the colonial city planning of Gyeongsung. He lived with his partner Geumhong, who worked as Kisaeng[1], and took part in the literary group Guin. All of this activity revolved around his bar Jebi. In “the Lowest Paradise” of the prostitute quarter, he witnessed the force and agency of the body and its sexuality against the police's brutal “health measures,” which attempted to sanitize and control the body. Written under and with these circumstances, Ri Sang's writings move outside the modern “utopian” paradigm and imperial systems of knowledge—breaking, inventing and encoding language to intimate a sociality that is always already present in a given situation of daily life, but never to be drawn to a scale of measurement.

Amidst the barren vegetation of colonialism, Ri Sang conceived of walking not only as an inquiry into everyday life, but as an attack on nationalized, institutionalized and commodified forms of knowledge by opening infinite lines of deviation. This is only possible by walking with a limp collectively (“BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE”) so as to refuse the orders and organizations authorized by the nation-state. By doing so, Ri Sang calls for ancestors from the future whose ideas “travel faster than the speed of light”; rather than revered historical heroes, these are figures of possibility.

In October 1936, Ri Sang moved to Tokyo and wrote the essay “Tokyo.” He settled in Jinbōchō (literally meaning “God-protected town”), the area that surrounds the Imperial Palace, which had experienced drastic transformations due to natural disasters and imperial reformations. The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake was the major event that physically eradicated the area, which at the time was renowned for schools, universities and second-hand bookstores. MAVO, a Japanese art collective, decorated temporary structures or "barracks" in the wake of the calamity, and one such barrack project concerned a bookstore in Jinbōchō. At a time of rising internationalism in art as and socialist consciousness in Japan, MAVO’s appropriation of the strategies of Western modernism aesthetic was aimed against its appropriation by the Empire of Japan and its art institutions.

Walking in the city after the earthquake was fraught with difficulties due to the deployment of the Imperial Army to suppress further disturbances; MAVO member Yanase Masamu was arrested for walking in the streets and imprisoned. With the barrack project, MAVO viewed the chaos of the post-earthquake as a “necessary first step of any substantive renewal,” ultimately aiming to construct a new society against the reconstruction of the Imperial Capital. Some of MAVO's most significant actions were carried out amidst the echoes of the earthquake, violating architectural norms by integrating MAVO’s anarchic aesthetic into “the possibility of a radical renewal.” 
 
BOITEUX∙BOITEUSE and The Departure of 且8, two walking exhibitions which will take place in Tokyo and Seoul, attempt to draw lines between two cities by practicing the walking of Ri Sang and MAVO in the present.  
 
[1]     Considered as one of inferior social classes, Kisaeng were traditionally enslaved women who worked as a government’s legal entertainer in Korea. Trained in poetry, painting, singing and dancing, they provided sexual services. During the Japanese colonization of Korea, the Governor-General of Korea reformed the class under its authority so as to function for it.   
  
 
 
Concept and curation    
Yen Noh
 
Research assistance     
Jaehoon Shin, Satoshi Ikeda
 
Performance   
Mai Endo, Sakurako Yamamoto, Sakiko Yamaoka, Sam Stocker, Yen Noh 
 
Sound     
RHOMBVS (Yorm Han), Satoshi Ikeda
 
Coordination     
Jaehoon Shin, Satoshi Ikeda
 
Advisory group for mapping
Jungtae Eun,Byum Soon Shin, Omuka Toshiharu, Soga Takaaki
 
Graphic design   
Dongyoung Lee
 
Photo and video documentation
Jina Jeon, Kyoungho Kang, Joohui Jang, Mori Bozzo, Michiko Tsuda
 
Thanks to
Nobuko Aiso, Shinya Aoyama, Dongbeom Cho, Mai Endo, Jungtae Eun, Yorm Han, Alata Hasegawa, Satoshi Ikeda, Jens Bjørn Jensen, Isao Kanemaki, Namsoo Kim, Yu Kiyohara, Dongyoung Lee, Sven Lütticken, Mika Maruyama, Tsuyoshi Namigata, Koichiro Osaka, Byum Soon Shin, Sahara Shiori, Sam Stocker, Soga Takaaki, Ryota Tomoshige, Omuka Toshiharu, Clara Saito, Jaehoon Shin, Hypatia Vourloumis, Hiroki Yamamoto, Sakurako Yamamoto, Sakiko Yamaoka, Ito Yoshiyuki, ARCUS Project, Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum, Seoul Museum of History
 
Supported by
Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul Art Space Mullae, ASAKUSA, The Book Society