2022 ASEAN-KOREA Innovative Culture Forum:

ENSEMBLE

OCT 25/26, 2022

Vientiane Center in Laos

Artists

Lugas SYLLABUS

Souliya PHOUMIVONG

ChangChun Project

(CHANG Jun Young & CHUN JiYoon)

Eun Woo CHO

Description

Ensemble, which is held at the Vientiane Center from October 25 to 26, 2022, is he part of side events for 2022 ASEAN-KOREA Innovative Culture Forum and was enabled by coopration of the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) and the Asia Culture Center Foundation (ACCF). Under the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in 2020, many people are still suffering from various mutations in the virus, but they are slowly heading towards the end of corona endemic. In this situation, like the theme of 2022 ASEAN-KOREA Innovative Culture Forum hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), Leap forward with Cultural Resilience, the exhibition of Ensemble soothes the hearts of people who would have been difficult with art, and try to visually reveal and feel the positive minds of humans.

Thus, the exhibition considers what the virtures of ‘Posthuman’ should have in the post-corona era caused by the counterattack of nature, and participates in the efforts of those who are concerned about ‘new subjectivity’ in which humans can escape from human-centered thinking and harmonize with non-human objects. When people heard the word ‘posthuman’, they could think of the combination of human and machine, but researchers who examine ‘posthuman’ did not just think of machine existence, but expanded the scope to ‘non-human’, which is not human beings such as weeds, animals, fungi, cells, viruses, discarded items in the city, etc., and began to pay attention to the relationship between human and non-human. This research effort provides a clue to the question of what virtues humanity can have as a posthuman during the Anthropocene period, which is the main character of the world and is leading climate change and environmental pollution.

The artworks introduced in this exhibition include commission works for the exhibition of Posthuman Ensemble in 2021, which Asia Culture Center Foundation tries to make tour focusing on recent environmental issues, ChangChun Project’s Random Forest, Eun Woo CHO’s AI, Brain Wave & Ideal City, Lugas Syllabus’s Step of Life ‘In to the World’ and Step of Life ‘The Ocean coming’, and there is the Laotian media artist, Souliya Phoumivong’s Flow. Random Forest focuses on the efforts of visitors to change their blunt or sad hearts to a happy mind in the process of reading artificial intelligence on the faces of various visitors who randomly visit the exhibition hall. And AI, Brain Wave & Ideal City induces positive alpha waves from visitors who use and experience EEG measurements. The two works provide a chance for visitors to experience their works to take care of themselves with a leisure of life for a while. Also, Step of Life ‘In to the World’ and Step of Life ‘The Ocean coming’ show the various nonhuman beings in nature that can be found around us, and show us that we can survive by coexisting with them, and that we can become a family with them. Flow shows what human beings are losing in the flow of matter, and suggests that the way out of materialism caused by human-centered thinking is the way for human beings to survive.

This exhibition reveals that there are various non-human beings on the earth other than humans, and suggests

solidarity and coexistence with them. The destructive acts that constantly think only of humans undermine nature and sacrifice even humans, so Ensemble hopes to make a leap of posthumans who touch human emotions with warm hearts by objectifying human emotions including beings that are not human beings.

Curated by RUE Young Ah (Senior Curator, Cultural Contents Marketing Team of Asia Culture Center Foundation)