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Hite Collection is holding the 2022 Young Artist Exhibition “Last Things Before the Last,” which was exhibited by Rondi Park, WONJEONG DEPARTMENT STORE, and TZUSOO.

The exhibition brings the three artists together under the key word “Power.” While the direction and speed of their work in the exhibition are all different, the artists share a commonality in that their works have the power to enable art, propel life, and can ultimately enrich and foster the artists themselves. Whether it’s regarding a desperate and pressing issue, one of many identities, or a possibility for a future, such subjects become both art and strength in the artists’ works. Under the macroscopic lens of this broad keyword, this exhibition explores the works by the three artists each with a unique body of works. 

▲Rondi Park, Finding Im Sunhwa 2022, clover, dirt, vinyl,300x300 cm, clover installed by Padosikmul, supported by In Heon Hong (Food Clover Inc.) Courtesy of Hite Collection

Power, authority, and desire: Despite the vague discomfort in these words (let alone the question of whether “desire” is indeed something to feel uncomfortable about), this exhibition focuses on how these individuals develop their power and make artistic achievements in this low-growth, highly-competitive, ultra-capitalist, technologically-advanced society where the individual is ultimately bound to consume/exhaust themselves.

In this exhibition, WONJEONG DEPARTMENT STORE brings into the exhibition space an incomplete fantasy image that fleetingly appears and disappears in the private space, and transfers it into a sticky state and consuming movement.

By doing so, she renews herself as an avatar that has fused/lost both its real and virtual form. Rondi Park attempts to extract the power of the individual buried in the unidirectional desires of the supercapitalistic age by recalling events that have become the prototype of the desires that make up the present within an individual's past that has slipped into the public oblivion.

On the other hand, TZUSOO has already begun the migration beyond art in the traditional sense to the virtual space, operating her own ego and constructing a world of the transformative senses that accommodate the technological differences and the cycle of energy generated by traversing across the commercial and noncommercial, and real and virtual. As one can see, the boundary between the concepts of public and private, past, present and future, and material world and virtual world has long lost its meaning.

▲ WONJEONG DEPARTMENT STORE, 2022, 3-channel video edited to single channel video, color, sound,5 min. Courtesy of Hite CollectionSo then, what can be said about this world that these artists look upon, direct at and are advancing towards? The answer to this question can be found in the title of the exhibition. “The Last Things Before the last” are in a neutral ground where nothing is defined. Or, perhaps it can be understood as a place of things that cannot easily be defined by existing ideas or expressions. Of course, the idea is nothing new.

To borrow the term by Siegfried Kracauer, it’s a “waiting room of history.” “The Last things before the last” is the place of infinite possibilities that have not yet been realized; it’s a state of warped space-time, a conglomeration of future and past, fantasy, reality and nostalgia, deviated from the linear history. And thus “the last things before the last” inevitably reflect contemporary art.

The exhibition ultimately attempts to dock on the familiar but intangible, and somewhat incoherent word of "contemporaneity." This exhibition brings together things that will (or might) soon become history but have not yet actually become one, in the waiting room of history. Then it leaves behind the question as to how long “history” will stay a valid concept in contemporary art.

The exhibition is a demonstration of the conviction that this state—where nothing is converged, no flow is settled, and no ideas are conformed—is indeed the most authentic and genuine appearance and attitude of the contemporary time. Text by Jihyun Shin▲ TZUSOO, DALL-E's Aimy #5, Honey, Beta World Is Over Soon Series 2022, print on acrylic panel, glass neon, 50x50 cm, in collaboration with DALL- Courtesy of Hite Collection