Internet becomes an art medium for resident Korean artist
With over 90 percent of South Korean homes plugged into a broadband connection and 2 million people considered “Internet addicts”, it is no wonder that visiting Korean artist Hee-Kyoung Bae has chosen the Internet as the basis of her artistic expression.
As the 2010 overseas recipient of the Arts Centre/Asia New Zealand Foundation Arts Residency Exchange, Hee Bae will present her artwork in Christchurch for two weeks at the end of May.
Bae, a painter, uses digital prints of images obtained from the internet that are a mixture of real places, online characters or the artist herself online, using Skype. She then paints upon these images. One of her works produced during her residency uses an image of the iconic Christchurch cathedral, taken from a New Zealand tourist’s video posted on You Tube which Bae watched on the internet in Korea.
Hee Bae completed a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. Her paintings and video works are an exploration of identity and distance in our contemporary, internet-savvy world. After collapsing time and space using the internet to obtain her ‘canvas’ of Cathedral Square, Bae is now working upon the image, passing through the ‘real’ square in her daily travels. Bae’s paintings are a response to her contemporary life in which internet access is a given. Her artworks explore the feeling of dislocation that comes from being distanced from other people and places and then interacting with those people and places, via a computer monitor.
Silent March marks the conclusion of Bae’s three-month residency at the Arts Centre and will be presented in the Observatory Art Room in the Observatory Building and her studio-cum-project space in the adjoining Botany Building in the Arts Centre’s South Quadrangle from 26 May - 6 June. It will be open from 11am - 5pm daily, excluding Mondays.
Christchurch’s Scott Flanagan - the New Zealand recipient of the exchange - is now in Seoul, where he has taken up residence at the National Museum of Contemporary Art’s Goyang Studio in place of Bae. Flanagan and Bae met briefly pre-residency in Christchurch and will meet once again on 9 June, post-residency to discuss and compare their experiences in each other’s countries. That evening, a celebratory event involving both artists and members of the arts community and wider public will be held at the Arts Centre. Both Bae and Flanagan will speak about their residency experiences and answer questions from the audience. Later this year, Scott Flanagan will present a component of work produced as a result of his Seoul residency, at the Arts Centre.