French artist Philippe Parreno, known for his constant experiments with the traditional notion of art, has transformed Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art into one giant “survey” project.
“Parreno suggests museum-goers experience something new and foreign … by presenting an out-of-box, almost concert-like exhibition,” Kim Sung-won, deputy director of the museum, said during a press conference Monday.
“Voices” is the 60-year-old artist’s first exhibition in South Korea, displaying a vast array of early and new projects, 40 pieces in total, encompassing diverse media ranging from video and sound to sculpture and drawing. It is also the museum’s largest-ever exhibition to date by a solo artist.
The museum said the artist “proposes the exhibition as a venue for experience beyond a mere event to bring together individual works.”
The individual pieces in the exhibition are systematically controlled by a sensory tower, commissioned by the museum and installed at the museum’s front garden. Fitted with artificial intel
ligence (AI) features, the 13-meter tower collects data on sound, temperature, humidity and pollution, among many others.
“Forty-two sensors produce data signals, and these signals and data are transformed into a language,” Parreno said during the conference.
To give the set of data “a human voice,” the artist worked with Korean actress Bae Doo-na to enable “the creature” to “talk through the voice of Doo-na” using the AI functions.
Constantly echoing in the exhibition hall, the actress’ voice “activates” Parreno’s works and “breathes life” into them.
Other installations include his previous work “My Room is Another Fish Bowl,” where fish-shaped helium-filled balloons float around the museum space at various heights, giving fodder for thought on alternate worlds and states of being. A visitor can aimlessly pass the floating objects that move around in changing air currents and natural light in the museum space.
Also on display is “With a Rhythmic Instinction to be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of
Life,” a time-based installation composed of his 238 black and white drawings of a firefly that flickers across a large LED screen.
“I always feel that whatever I do, it is never completed,” the artist said. “Apart from when I’m cooking. Because when I cook, you cook, you eat, and you’re done.”
“(My) art is always tied to this idea of incompleteness. You know, it is never complete. So I decided to go with it,” he said.
The museum’s Deputy Director Kim also added that the exhibition is not showing “a finished project,” but it “becomes complete only when it gets to interact with its environment and visitors.”
“I think I am a drifter too,” the artist said.
Born in Algeria in 1964, the artist has his work included in the collections of global museums, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition is slated to open Wednesday and run through July 7.
Source: Yonhap News Agency