With Gallery Ether’s ‘Slow Matter,’ the test of time unfolds before your eyes

How does matter remember time? “Slow Matter,” a two-person exhibition opening Wednesday at Gallery Ether in Seongsu-dong, eastern Seoul, takes the question at face value.

Rock holds the pressure of the strata that formed it, dried clay holds the shape of water that has gone, metal holds its own oxidation. Artists Kim Woo-young and Seo Seung-jun both work with materials that keep a record, and the show is arranged so that their records unfold at different speeds.

Kim’s collection on display took more than 10 years to gather. He was among the first generation of Korean advertising photographers in the 1990s, working in portraits and fashion when that work was setting the terms for everyone else in the art world, and then he put it down and turned to fine art photography. 

Since then, Kim has moved between the Mojave Desert in the United States and Phelan, the oasis town at the desert’s edge, returning to the same sites in the same season at the same hour, year after year. The granite rocks Kim captures in his photography change expression with the angle of the light. Stripped of color, the black-and-white frames keep only the erosion of the formation and weathering left behind. He calls it "found" time. Nothing here is new work; the show selects from the decade-long desert series.

“Standing in the same spot at the same hour, the landscape looks different every time,” Kim said. “The camera wasn’t learning that. I was.”

Seo’s new installation, paired with Kim’s photography, points to another direction.

Fired ceramic spheres are stacked in layers with sheets of lead inserted between them, and the final form of the circular objects is decided by the weight coming from the above layers rather than by the artist’s hand. The lead material bends and folds in proportion to what it carries. Where the pressure is greatest, the mark left upon them goes deepest.

Kim’s photographs deal thematically with processes and time that have already taken place, while Seo’s installation is still being made while you stand in front of it. Visitors meet the large black-and-white prints first, then move toward the installation.

“Slow Matter” is also the opening entry in “Portrait,” Gallery Ether’s long-term archive of 100 Korean contemporary artists who cross genres. The criterion for selection is not the medium of art but biography: a narrative with a turning point.

Seo qualifies with 20 years under his belt as a theater actor, musical director and advertising art director, then a long time spent in Hawaii where he touched clay for the first time, then ceramics, installation and sculpture — and throughout it, the same question from the field: Is this a ceramics exhibition or an art exhibition? Kim, moving between commerce and fine art, fits into the archive the same way.

Gallery Ether becomes a publisher and bookshop with the opening of this exhibition, and each exhibition will accumulate as a “zine,” short for magazine, with the first set to be published in the first week of September.

“Slow Matter” runs through Aug. 30. Admission is free. 

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]