15th Dec 2014 – 8th Jan 2015
by Asia House
Bada Song is a Korean artist based in London. She makes minimal works that subtly unfold references to Korean traditions as they undergo rapid modernization. A long running series of drawings by the artist refers to traditional tiled roofs now giving way to generic towering apartment blocks in mega-cities like Seoul. For Song the roof tile is also symbolic of human vulnerability and the need for shelter. The tile thus becomes subtly suggestive of a yearning for a Korean mother or homeland.
For Asia House Bada Song has assembled a group of recent works that seek to transmit a singular voice emerging from diverse processes – Video, Photography, Sound, Sculpture, Installation and Drawing. In keeping with curator Pamela Kember’s overarching Pamela Kember Drift theme the artist has chosen the title This Way & That. Individual works each illustrate this phrase in their own way while together they also evidence the kind of searching, wandering and becoming that makes contemporary art practice necessarily speculative, unsettled and indeterminate.
from: Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street London W1G 7LP
Dérive (Drift)
by Pamela Kember
At the beginning of his essay, on the Theory of Dérive the Situationist International founder, Guy DeBord, describes dérive as a mode of behaviour, one that’s linked to a”’rapid passage through varied urban ambiances”. Anglicised as the adjective, to drift, or drifting, he continues to explain, that dérive, involves “ playful constructive behaviour” as people negotiate whether to do their gainfully employed work or deviate towards their own activities. (Guy Debord, 1958) This approach to spending time walking or sitting, or writing and strolling through the urban fabric is quite different to the idea of a mapping out, or focusing on getting from point a to b, like a commuter or courier delivering goods. It is also to do with drifting without any preconceptions.
Underpinning my curatorial discourse is one of focusing on the disjuncture, between our awareness of being in the city, and our lived experience of encountering the minutia of otherwise, hidden;unknown or often overlooked elements of the fabric of our urban environment. It is to those experiences that can exist, between the past and its presence, the old and new, our sensorial – a familiar, smell, or sound, as well as our conceptual awareness of our built environment. How we encounter small spaces, slithers, or fissures, that exist in-between structures, all the while acknowledging, conceptual edifices that surround us daily, is as much as what I hope audiences will encounter, within the ‘real’ urban environment, made up of buildings, skyscrapers, and the dynamic movement of other human bodies in space.