IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast at SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art

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The SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, hosts an annual exhibition called Title Match. This year’s Title Match asks IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast, who work as both visual artists and filmmakers, to exhibit the essence of their artistic worlds of diverse themes and artistic genres.

The thirteen artworks that comprise the 2022 Title Match exhibition recount the story at various speeds. Instead of examining IM Heung-and soon’s Omer Fast‘s numerous works, the exhibition concentrates on displaying the two artists’ most recent works that capture the essence of the worlds they create. Such an approach will allow you to fully understand the moments when the artists’ distinct languages reach their height and yield successful outcomes. In addition, IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast debut new pieces in this exhibition, titled The Waves and Garage Sale, respectively. In terms of framework, composition, substance, and narrative method, these two works incorporate intimate and meta-elements. They unfold philosophical and complicated thinking on the multi-channel screens to investigate the origins of the self and the world.

The current show focuses on the meeting between IM Heung-soon and Omer Fast and what the worlds that the two artists describe embody. Their work depicts facets of existence as memories, the past, and history remain in time and develop in various ways. They seek to affirm the world as it is and to investigate the journeys of the beings who inhabit it. There is a creative will inherent in the belief in the present world, not another, which is to perpetually reconstruct the “world that remains to come even after it has been lost.” When combined with such artistic will, the way the two artists compose the format of their work and interpret their medium endows their works with a powerful political component. IM Heung-art soon’s emphasizes the emotional components of the setting by using sound as an impact dispositif. The installation of the screens allowing the audience to walk throughout the area simultaneously displays inevitability and impossibility. IM also investigates the potential of a political community through his joint works. All of this culminates in a focus on the ethics of the other and poetic hospitality. Omer Fast’s work, which is based on cinema, straddles multiple disciplines, including photography and painting. Through the dramatic collision of numerous techniques ranging from 3D to motion capture and how the subject matter is conveyed, his work creates a complex cinematic atmosphere. This adds to the aesthetic politicization of his art. As such, IM Heung-and soon’s Omer Fast’s works analyze the mediatic properties of video and achieve a large aesthetic project that investigates the possibilities of an ethical subject from the ongoings of the times and individuals.

The exclamation at the end of the long title of an annual exhibition, “Cut!” is a film director’s “OK” gesture. It also represents a linguistic idea unique to video and acts as a metaphor for editing approaches. The scenes themselves, constructed by countless hours of shooting and editing to build a universe, are ultimately a “series of cut images.” IM Heung-soon vs. Omer Fast in the 2022 Title Match “Cut!” takes over the term “Title Match.” It also stands at a position where it works as a seam linking the tradition and carries on its heritage by becoming part of the yearly exhibition’s ongoing tradition. As such, it creates a scene in and of itself as an image that identifies itself while also connecting various things. The audience is encouraged to complete various situations inside the worlds described by the two artists’ works and the narrative recounted by the figures on the screen. In doing so, the exhibition envisions the audience as a component of a circular construction with no beginning and no end. A scene in the exhibition, like the threads that connect them, comes to us as a story that is unwound and wound on another scene. The possibilities that transform our life are then transported from within us to the screen. As a result of the overlap of two universes, which eventually point to the same place despite differences in subject, point of view, and language, the 2022 Title Match: IM Heung-soon vs. Omer Fast “Cut!” will generate a deep resonance.