Wednesday 28 July 2010

Part 2 Invitation


Due to the limited number of seats, RSVP is required.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Part 1 & 2


Part 1 : Does a mirage actually exist? If so where is it and what is it?
Contributors_Seung-Hyun Lee, Eunji Cho, Jörg Obergfell, Hong-Ki Kim, Kate Pickering, Soyoung Chung, Harry Meadows, Amy Choy, Hyunjoo Byeon, Jang Oh Hong, Sung Goo Yang, Young In Hong, Mixrice, Fiona Amundsen
Editor_Hyemin Son/ Designer_Uin/ art/ 297×210mm/ 96page/ 7 May 2010/ ISBN 978-89-964396-1-5 94600, 978-89-964396-0-8 set/ price_15,000won, 10pound/ Independent Publisher Rock-Paper-Scissors

Part 2: Tourists Dream
Contributors_ Uin Kim, Hyemin Son, Gee Song, Jungmin Kwon, Sôm Lee, Oksun Kim, Juhee Youn, Jeong-Hoo Lee, Hyunjoo Byeon, Eunu Lee
Editor_Hyemin Son/ Designer_Uin/ art/ 297×210mm/ 64page/ 6 August 2010/ ISBN 978-89-964396-2-2 94600, 978-89-964396-0-8 set/ price_15,000won, 10pound/ Independent Publisher Rock-Paper-Scissors

Sunday 25 July 2010

Dual Mirage Part 2 Tourists Dream

Here comes the summer!
You are planning to travel this summer. In your everyday working life, it is the most fantastic and entrancing moment when you’re biting into your sandwich during lunchtime and searching for the tourist agents. You haven’t yet decided where to go. You may go for an ancient temple in the east, a gothic castle in the west, an emerald sea in the south or even a beautiful mountain in the north. In front of your computer monitor, you’ve found the right tourist agent, but suddenly the advertisement of the tourist agent is slightly changing. All the words from the advertisement make a billowy wave that starts spinning in your mind.


When we plan to go on summer holidays, to get out of a mundane life… dreaming of somewhere we have never been before. We are experiencing the instant moment of a mirage. From the moment that we expect, from the place that we want to go, it is significant to note that the moment is full of the unknown. To have an extraordinary experience, as Urry mentioned, we are looking for other "times" and "real lives" out of our ordinary experiences.[1] We will pick up the right tourist agent and organise ourselves to go on vacation. Our desire for travelling reflects well on leaflets of touristic destinations, flight ticket bookings, leisure sports programmes, hotel chain network. It becomes significantly easier to move one travel destination to another and the leisure industry has pursued networking and globalisation to facilitate this.

Dual Mirage Part 2: Tourists Dream begins from the moment when we’re dreaming of travelling somewhere. The place that we want to travel to is somewhat in-between idealised and practical space, artificial and natural space. The moment of longing for somewhere else other than here is as an instaneous escape and is done in search of other utopias. It is presented as future and nostalgia. It is a mirage. In Tourists Dream, it also explores the mirage generated at the point at which the service industry circulates, within the "transitional space". This is achieved by considering industries such as the tourism and hospitality industry, financial sector and real estate business, all of which are highly entangled with each other.

The importance of taking holidays for individuals today is evident as it spreads out in the part of society. In Tourists Dream, the curators Hyunjoo Byeon and Jungmin Kwon and the artists Oksun Kim, Uin Kim, Eunu Lee, Jeong-Hoo Lee, Sôm Lee, Gee Song, Hyemin Son and Juhee Youn map and narrate territory, displacement, and the tourist industry around global mobility.
[1] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, (Sage publications second edition, London), 2002, 9p.

Part 2 Event
The event consists of the launch of the book Dual Mirage Part 2 as well as a video screening. The launching of the publication of Dual Mirage Part 2: Tourists Dream will be introduced by artist Hyemin Son. This is followed by the video screening Tourist’s Dream by invited curator Hyunjoo Byeon. Both the book and the video screening share and develop the idea of transitional movement in various aspects of global society, reinforcing the theme of tourists’ dream.

Dual Mirage Part 2
Tourists Dream
Publication launching
& Video screening
Friday 6 August 2010, 6-9pm
Project Space 2 at Rivington Place
Admission free

Saturday 24 July 2010

Dual Mirage Part 2 Event

Tourist’s Dream

Participating Artists: Kyungah Ham, Yang Ah Ham, Stuart Hawkins, Adrian Paci, Lisl Ponger, Jaye Rhee, Hiraki Sawa, Bo Kyung Suh

Curated by Hyunjoo Byeon

Kyungah Ham, Travel & Journey, 2003-05, single channel video, 10min
Yang Ah Ham, Tourism in Communism, 2005, single channel video, 6min 36sec
Stuart Hawkins, Souvenir, 2006, single channel video, 22min
Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007, single channel video, 5min 30sec
Lisl Ponger, déjà vu, 1999, single channel video, 23min
Jaye Rhee, Mediterranean, 2009, single channel video, 7min 50sec
Hiraki Sawa, Migration, 2003, single channel video, 6min
Bo Kyung Suh, Citydel, 2005, single channel video, 4min 59sec

Accompanied by the launch of the book Dual Mirage Part 2: Tourists Dream, the video screening Tourist’s Dream draws on varied tourists’ dreams and the underlying political, cultural and socio-economical elements that construct their dreams in this age of global mobility. Through the artworks by eight international artists, Tourist’s Dream is aimed at navigating the current issues around subjects such as: tourism, the tourist industry, territoriality, cultural identity, mobility, dislocation, migration and global communication. It explores the ‘mirages’ which tourism provides by rebranding spaces in a capital-saturated society and interrogates the fantasy of consuming a given culture. In addition, Tourist’s Dream interprets tourists not only as people who travel to and stay in places outside their usual environment for leisure purposes, but also to the extent that it defines people who are in diverse migratory movements. On reflecting their desire for a better life, as tourists, Tourist’s Dream questions how global mobility expands a sense of geography by positioning oneself in a space away from everyday life and transforms the way to perceive the world; examining also the effects it has on the various migratory movements in our time.

In the screening, Kyungah Ham's Travel & Journey (2003-05) investigates the fantasy of experiencing exotic cultures and cultural hierarchies in tourism by exploring the phenomenon of theme parks in Asia that replicate the symbolic monuments and landmarks of Europe and America. In her Tourism in Communism (2005), Yang Ah Ham travels to the only possible tourist area in North Korea, Mount Kumgang, developed by South Korea’s Hyundai Group. The artist argues and depicts how tourism can only be a superficial exploration which is isolated from ordinary life, as the video was also shot on a touristic horse-drawn carriage. Stuart Hawkins playfully illustrates the artificiality of a touristic approach through her journey in search of the anthropologically perfect native CoCoMan in Souvenir (2006). The journey also reveals the pervasiveness of globalisation through its profound connection with the media culture, having caused the strange reaction of a seeking out of notions of pure cultural authenticity. Lisl Ponger´s déjà vu (1999) captures our desire for distant lands through its documentary sequences. This collective cliché of exotic otherness, combined with a series of narrations in various languages without subtitles, exposes the western-centered mode of perceiving the world and its hidden colonialism, consequently raising the awareness of our limited perception of reality. In Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (2007), which is named after an Italian refugee camp, Adrian Paci transforms an airport, a symbol of global mobility in our time, into a displaced space. A group of people standing on an aircraft boarding staircase represent migrants who are stranded “in between”, yearning for a better life, and thus the inhumane side of our ever-globalising world is revealed. Whilst Paci draws on the harsh reality of migratory movements in this age, the tiny humans and animals wandering around in the artist’s flat in Hiraki Sawa’s Migration (2003) poetically represent a restless journey in our lives; and simultaneously portrait of our paradoxical nostalgia in the global age where we constantly dream about different lives and lands. In Mediterranean (2009), Jaye Rhee creates her own Mediterranean setting in her studio with objects which embody images of the location of the Mediterranean. Rhee discloses how tourism and its industry construct common desires through distribution of a signified image, by envisaging the place with objects that can be found in daily life. In the work Citydel (2005), two separate videos parallel the passers-by looking at a girl in a bikini and a girl who enjoys her vacation on the artificial island in the Han River, which is located in the middle of Seoul. By creating a subtle rupture between them, Bo Kyung Suh questions what we dream of through travelling and where the mirage exists.