2011

Space Study

Open Space + Production Plan

in collaboration with Sung goo Yang, architect

This project is conceived as an experimental collaboration in which an architect responds to the artist’s work and proposes a new joint intervention. Marking the reopening of Rodin Gallery, the exhibition approaches the fundamental cycle of creation and disappearance within space from a personal and sensorial perspective, while simultaneously engaging urbanistic and architectural contexts.

Soyoung Chung’s Open Space begins with the construction of a white cube—the defining unit of exhibition space—at a minimal scale of 2×2×2 meters, which is then dismantled. By disassembling architecture, one of the most representative artificial structures created by humans, the work expands a latent, enclosed space into an open field of potential. Reduced and collapsed onto the floor, Open Space returns the artificial structure to a landscape-like state, revealing the cycle of decay and regeneration embedded within the notion of ruins. Spread across this dismantled structure, architect Yang Sung goo proposes an intervention that transforms the natural element of light into illumination through industrial steel plates. Suspended in parallel above Open Space, steel panels engraved with the blueprint of an industrial waste incineration plant interact with the collapsed cube below, generating tension between the two elements.

As light passes through the engraved steel plates, the incised blueprint is projected and translated into illumination. The drawing of the incineration facility—an emblem of urban production systems—introduces a narrative of generation within the ruin of Open Space. Through the question, “What kind of architectural space must first become ruin in order to be newly produced?” the artist and architect seek a point of convergence where dismantling and production meet, proposing destruction not as an end, but as a condition for the city’s continued functioning.