[ ] (Seoul Art Space_Mullae, 16 August 2012)

Me and Heewoo had a work-in-progress exhibition (entitled "[ ]") at Seoul Art Space_Mullae on 16 August. We made three different works: (1) The Pyeongcube (2) A Life-sized Comparison between the Typical Apartment Layouts in Seoul and SIngapore (3) What people think their houses look like on the inside?

The very existence of a "default", “common”, or "typical" size and layout of apartments/flats in both South Korea and Singapore shows that there has been an attempt to quantify and define how much private space people should be allocated. But how much space do we need for living? How much space do we want to live in? What is the shape of our spaces? How do we want to shape our living spaces?

For preparatory work, we collected a survey in both Singapore and Seoul of people and what they thought their flats looked like on the inside. We visited traditional korean houses, modern apartments, and showflats to get a feel of apartments in Seoul. As the space in the gallery was very large, we decided to maximise the use of the space by making a life-sized outline drawing of what would be a typical 3-room flat in singapore, next to a typical 24-pyeong flat in Seoul.

We also looked at the "pyeong", a unit of area used in Korea to measure the size of houses. Most people can describe houses in terms of pyeong, but many do not know what one pyeong looks like, as one is more accustomed to speaking of it in terms of pyeongs in multiples (eg: 24 pyeong house). A pyeong is anecdotally said to be the size of an average man with his arms and legs stretched out, so we made a "pyeongcube" in which people could stand inside and be photographed/documented standing inside. We created a wall of polaroids of visitors and their size in relation to the one pyeong square on the wall.

Setting Up

Opening Night & Artist Talk

The Work

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Many thanks must go to Seoul Art Space_Mullae for having us living and working there for the 3 weeks in Seoul, especially Suyeon and Miri for their assistance during the project; thanks to Substation and Khai (who came down to join us for a few days), thanks to Huyun (for doing the video documentation), our capable technicians (and their remarkable speed and impressively professional work), Murim (for all his help around the Mullae area), and all the friends who came down to see it (Kat, Kieran, Bin, Nico, Jerry, Yangjah, Jeongjoo, and so so many others; I'm sorry I can't spell all your names)! AND of course, thank you Heewoo for the great time working together!

For more images: [See the Full Flickr set of images]