Jaeim Jeong

Nowadays, people are becoming more familiar with virtual communities than with the actual gatherings of real people. The present exhibition is based on an analogy between the disappearing social communities in modern life with the words and acts of greetings that is also disappearing in contemporary societies.

Seeing a stranger and saying Hello to them enables people to recognize the unknown other and start to explore the possibility of approaching the inner world of each other. When the practice of greeting becomes a habit and a routine, it also becomes institutionalized as a means or a social convention that makes possible the caring and concerning for the members of community.

The nine artists participating in the current exhibition are outsiders: but they act as ‘catalysts’ in that they deeply infiltrate into the regional community and invite others to engage in the community members’ life. The artists’ engagement, moreover, requires the members to participate in the process of their art making. The ambivalent feelings of awkwardness and intimacy aroused between insiders and strangers are familiar to everyone. We know the feelings from our repeated experience of meeting and relating with other people.

During the past six months, nine artists built up relationship with residents and the history of five districts in northeast region of Seoul. The artists’ work helped the members of the communities recognize their own existence and each other’s and restore the sensus communis (in Kantian philosophy) which is urgently required in the age of virtual relationship and dispersed online communities.