A classically trained composer with a degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston, this multi-dimensional Korean artist currently focuses his creative energies on the production of visual art. Like his adopted name, Sasa, which means forty-four in Korean, is ironic, self-reflexive and playful; his work, which explores consumption trends, art trends, and the relation between them. It dovetails well with his collaborative work with fellow Korean artist Park MeeNa, which is widely recognized in Korea. In the spring of 2008 the couple's work, which is gaining notice throughout Southeast Asia, was shown at the prominent Kukje Gallery in Seoul. Sasa’s own work has recently been shown widely in his native Korea, in Israel and in Australia. He was also commissioned to make a permanent work for the Samsung Child Education and Culture Center, designed by the renowned architect Rem Koolhaas.
Sasa found Jerusalem to be an exciting, surprising city, and his stay was joyful and productive. Among the five new projects he worked on, one was based on his photographs of all the Korean cars he happened to bump into in Israel. He also chose to redesign the JCVA pamphlet as a work of art. Another welcome result of the residency was the exhibition in the summer of 2004 of his own and Park MeeNa‘s collaborative work How Much is Enough in the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, in the show Hilchot Shchenim chapter B (Neighbors’ Ways chapter B). The artists used regional “all natural” food products for the Holon exhibition, thus giving the work local flavor (so to speak) and immediacy.
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
This collaborative, site-specific installation, shown initially in Seoul’s Samsung Museum of Modern Art in 2003, included an in-gallery vitrine of actual food products, a wall of disturbing, sometimes famous quotes about art, all beginning with the phrase “Art is…” and an exit wall with the phrase “I’m always joking. It’s a defense mechanism,” taken from woody Allen’s Sleeper.
The food products, which MeeNa and Sasa were selling to viewers by credit card after obtaining the relevant permits for conducting such commerce, were displayed under the phrase “ONEHUNDREDPERCENTONLY.” A monitor hung on another wall showed a looping image of identical shoes in different colors rotating on a rail.
The installation interrogates the relation between the endless desire of consumerism and the kind of desire produced by artworks. Are buyers of the food products buying food to be consumed, or art to be preserved? Perhaps the two are not as different as we may think. The food purports to be a hundred percent “natural,” or “pure.” And the art? The surplus of consumer products is echoed by a surplus of art definitions, made near meaningless by their mechanical, alphabetized serialization: an arbitrary, hence empty, plenitude. This art also imitates the consumer products it studies by stripping itself entirely of the artists’ personal emotions, crafts, or presence. All of its materials – from video advertisements to street signs to other artists’ comments – are depersonalized. The artists’ borrowed exit line emphasizes the complicity they attest to: their critique of consumer society and of its evasion of personal responsibility is part and parcel of this selfsame society.
