Unding: Restoration of Existence

South Korean artist Wonmin Park presents his solo show, Unding: Restoration of Existence, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the concept of Unding, meaning ‘unthing’ or ‘non-thing’, coined by German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han defines Undinge as objective absences, insubstantial non-objects that are displacing real world objects through the increasing ubiquity of a digital reality.

In this exhibition, Wonmin’s artworks both exemplify and respond to Han’s theories through material negatives and opposites, displayed through his twin series Plain Cuts_Stone&Steel and Plain Cuts_Remediated. Wonmin’s Stone & Steel pieces, composed of volcanic rock and industrial steel, are positioned as ‘objects’, balanced against the coloured resin and glass ‘non-objects’ of his Remediated artworks.

Wonmin’s collections combine opposites that mutually define the other, seen in the juxtaposition of stone and steel, using one material to outline and emphasis the qualities of the other. He develops this concept in this exhibition, pitting object against non-object, only able to explore their distinct natures when one is contextualised against the other. Across the two collections, the absence and presence of certain material qualities and conceptual characteristics are compared throughout.

In Wonmin’s Restoration of Existence, he grounds his artworks in the reality of nature. Stone steel glass and resin represent the four elements via a form of synecdoche; each volcanic rock is taken as the core of the Earth itself; each aperture of coloured resin represents an inland sea. The poetic characteristics of each artwork, such as the incomprehensible age of each stone, or the unique interplay of colour and light deep within each resin block, are shown as immutable, unable to be converted into the information-based reality of Byung-Chul Han’s Undinge.