Hotel Artwork

The Present of the Century reinterprets the colorful forms of Classical and Baroque columns using the artist’s own module-stacking method and vibrant colors. In addition to the joy of viewing art, the work conveys long-established meanings of tower in different traditions and history and sends a message of love and hope to the viewers. The viewer can easily become an artist by taking commemorative photos, participating or sharing the outcomes. At the moment, the work becomes a monument and creates a vibrance to daily life. Art is not by far and high, but at close and low. Not just as a mass of giant sculpture, the work is completed as an art by visitors with a desire to remember and relate to the moment forever.

John Chamberlain’s (1927–2011) distinctive metal sculptures, often made of crushed automobile steel, reveal both the stately grace and the expressive plasticity of industrial materials. Exploring the interplay of color, weight, and balance, Chamberlain tapped into the energy of Abstract Expressionism, the premanufactured elements of Pop Art and Minimalism, and the provocative folds of the High Baroque.

By renouncing the brush and the traditional emphasis on painting a picture, and opting to use his fingers to cut, tear, puncture and glue the paper together, Kwon Young-Woo put repetitive action and the paper’s materiality and tactility at the forefront of his practice. Early in his career, Kwon explored figurative abstraction using Chinese ink, a common Korean painting material. In 1962 he decided to use hanji (Korean paper) as the primary medium for his artistic production. His focus on the delicate hanji’s layered texture had expanded to three-dimensional shapes and rhythmic compositions that cover the entire surface. He rediscovered Korean painting materials through his innovative techniques, and created a new vocabulary to expand and transgress the definition of traditional Korean painting.

Airy Navigation is a site-specific installation for the twentieth-floor atrium in Hotel Naru, Seoul. Consisting of eighty blinds in four different colors and resembling an unfurling staircase, the work soars in a diagonal course across the three-story space. The structure of the work, gradually unfolding in concert with the ascending height, draws the viewer’s gaze to the water of “Mapo Naru” beyond the glass windows of the hotel lobby. While the wooden ferry boats sailing up and down the Mapo Naru, once a significant site of trade and transportation, are long gone, the term “Naru (river port)” and the dynamic assembly of blinds invites to recollect the bustling past scenes of the Mapo area. The blinds that are connected at varying heights float in the air like a ship in full sail navigating up the river. Composed of different colors, the intersecting groups of blinds create a constantly changing effect as they organically overlap and transform according to the viewer’s shifting perspectives. When looking up from the lobby, the combination of the gradated colors and the net-like shape created by the blinds creates a sensation of activating movement. Airy Navigation combines the subtle tones that emanate from the local natural elements of river, sky and land, embracing the light that pours in through the building’s large windows and melts into the flow of the seasons.

The name ‘noneloquent’ means ‘not functional’, and it has started from the characteristics of traditional Korean objects. The traditional Korean objects are often unclear in their purposes because since the maker and the user is identical, they are tailored completely to the person’s habits, body sizes, and intentions. In such circumstances, other people use the objects in ways that fit their own situation or lifestyle. Therefore, the object’s function is interpreted based on different era, environment, and user experience, leading to diverse uses. Noneloquent started as a project to encourage such thought process. When a randomly assigned form is given to an object, a user may initially wonder, “What is this for?”, but soon are led to naturally discover its diverse use and purpose.

Photographer @Yongjoon Choi