Some live with dogs or cats, some water plants at home, and we love to go out to see pretty flowers. As such, we are used to being around plants and animals, but once we are not ‘close’ to them, they become (intangible) strangers, unknown beings who seem to spread and roam in a faraway realm. The exhibition FloraFauna Society presents the wild nature of plants and animals, including humans, through contemporary art works in various exuberant forms mixed with silence and uproar, fragility and strength.
The members of flora and fauna all have their own society and sense of time and distance. The participating artists do not try hard to understand the system of such society or try to narrow down time and distance. They acknowledge each other’s ‘comfort zone’ and encounter ‘the others’. Park Seungwon expresses the relation between the existence of animals and human, between human and the ecosystem in a concrete frame through corporal expression in <Siara M>, <Well roared Lion!>, <Homo Artex> and <Homo Magicus>. Park Sunmin’s <Shortsighted Jungle> portrays the gap between darkness and light, growth and extinction. Sophie Dupont’s <Marking Breath> breaks barriers between artistic act and act of living through the repetitious meditative work of marking each ‘breath’ from sunset to dawn. Charles Fréger <Wilder Mann> series and Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth’s <Eyes as Big as Plates> series portray the animal-like, plant-like images of human beings as part of natural ecosystem. Performances and objet works <One-Actxxxxxx> of KIBIAN(aka Ahn Kanghyun) maintain the process and attitude of organic movement in continuous addition.
The exhibition does not begin with a complete form. The works appear in the venue and disappear, intersect each other and change. Along with the exhibition, a mixture of performance, video screening, booklet, etc. allows endless new relations among them. Rohwajeong participates as exhibition designer, creating the ecological tone of the exhibition while rendering the space with profoundness.
Gallery Factory attempts to create intensive collaborative projects since 2015. The ‘team factory’ form applied in this exhibition enables conversations among participating artists as well as with peers working in various fields such as curator, editor, designer, video artist, to enlarge the scope of the exhibition. FloraFauna Society opens its doors on the 7th of May with KIBIAN’s performance and a part of the exhibition will be intersected on the 2nd of June.
