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Lot Essay
Exploiting the viewer's assumptions about knowledge and seeing, Cha Min Young playfully explores these presumptions through his deceptively innocent sculptures and carefully calibrated artistic oppositions. Acutely sensitive the process of visual perception, Cha assembles found materials with his own sculptural execution of miniature rooms to present a work that subtly combines an intimacy between the viewers and the artist's aesthetics of humility and understated charm.
Conditioning our vision twice in appreciating his oeuvre- first by the suitcase shell and second through his sweetly attended execution of the Two Conditions (Lot 1654) rooms, he consciously dupes us with the realistic depiction of the room as a truthful portrayal of an environment by utilizing the emblematic function of lens to maximize and verify the authenticity of the existing object to further heighten the truth in his images. With his supple handling of clay, wood, and zinc to adroitly handcraft miniatures, Cha constructs two rooms in symbolic contrast; a warm, brown aura of a shoemaker's studio instilled with remnants of life and work; and an empty room tiled with cool white, generating a static atmosphere, where time is only indicative through a shrewd placement of a ticking clock. By conjuring two divergent emotions in tandem, he inserts visual cues of rusty tools, aligned shoes, radiator and the spotless room that decide the emotions and sense of time felt by the viewer. The taut combination of precision and ambiguity of the duties of daily lives and vacant boredom outside our societal responsibility in both the rooms are placed in jarring atmospheric juxtaposition to provide different events and moments for the viewer's cognitive enjoyment, as Cha relieves our inborn curiosity by allowing us to peek into the lifestyle and homes of others through exposing worldly angles of quotient narratives that in reality, unfold simultaneously at the same hour, minute and second. Knowingly complying with our inquisitiveness, he fabricates sceneries that serve and satisfy our perceptual need, supporting our aesthetic experience by encouraging us to imagine and interpret a meaning into the two rooms he crafted, hence, guiding our vision from merely looking to actually 'seeing' his works with our self-defined, subjective interpretations.
Conditioning our vision twice in appreciating his oeuvre- first by the suitcase shell and second through his sweetly attended execution of the Two Conditions (Lot 1654) rooms, he consciously dupes us with the realistic depiction of the room as a truthful portrayal of an environment by utilizing the emblematic function of lens to maximize and verify the authenticity of the existing object to further heighten the truth in his images. With his supple handling of clay, wood, and zinc to adroitly handcraft miniatures, Cha constructs two rooms in symbolic contrast; a warm, brown aura of a shoemaker's studio instilled with remnants of life and work; and an empty room tiled with cool white, generating a static atmosphere, where time is only indicative through a shrewd placement of a ticking clock. By conjuring two divergent emotions in tandem, he inserts visual cues of rusty tools, aligned shoes, radiator and the spotless room that decide the emotions and sense of time felt by the viewer. The taut combination of precision and ambiguity of the duties of daily lives and vacant boredom outside our societal responsibility in both the rooms are placed in jarring atmospheric juxtaposition to provide different events and moments for the viewer's cognitive enjoyment, as Cha relieves our inborn curiosity by allowing us to peek into the lifestyle and homes of others through exposing worldly angles of quotient narratives that in reality, unfold simultaneously at the same hour, minute and second. Knowingly complying with our inquisitiveness, he fabricates sceneries that serve and satisfy our perceptual need, supporting our aesthetic experience by encouraging us to imagine and interpret a meaning into the two rooms he crafted, hence, guiding our vision from merely looking to actually 'seeing' his works with our self-defined, subjective interpretations.