DOOSAN Curator Workshop program is a professional nurturing program which is devoted to supporting promising new curators and developing Korean contemporary art. The program selects three new curators every year, and holds regular workshops and seminars, and an opportunity for them to co-organize an exhibition at the DOOSAN Gallery. The 2nd DOOSAN Curator Workshop in 2012, Michelle Dayeong Choi, Michelle Soyoung Kim and Minhwa Yun were selected. Various workshops and seminars took place throughout one year, and an exhibition co-organized by the three curators was opened in January and will be opened July, 2013, jointly at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul and New York.

The exhibition 'Translate into Mother Tongue' began by examining the life and art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). For Cha—who produced a diverse range of work as a photographer, video and performance artist, and writer—“language” was of utmost importance. Her interest in language originated in her formative childhood years, during which she was required to consciously undertake the study of foreign languages such as English and French. Cha took a profound interest in a language’s grammatical structure and systematic arrangement of characters, and accordingly realized diverse artworks that scattered characters, erased and repeated contexts, and reduced themselves to their fundamental components. Throughout this process, Cha remained fixated on the transformation of language and its meaning, as determined by its function and application. Three curators invited eight artists to create artworks with the motif of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The curators gave the artists the book Dictee, which the artists subsequently dictated again, and encouraged the artists to incorporate a layer of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha into their own bodies of work. As such, this exhibition takes notice of the obsession with and resistance towards one’s “mother tongue” that emanated from Cha (who was herself bi-lingual and tri-lingual), and each participating artist accordingly translates this resistance and attempt at language into a new narrative. In this exhibition, these new narratives are connected via defiant and dislocated dictation (Kichang Choi and Young Eun Keem), the collision of grammatical structures and tenses of differing memories and languages (Hong Goo Kang and Sasa Shun), the weaving together of metonymics (Sanghee Song and Young Gle Kim), and the difficulty of flawless translation (Miyeon Lee and Ji Hyun Jung).

Courtesy of Doosan Gallery