PARK Gui-hum, UOO Saung-un

If spending their childhood during the 1980s and 1990s, many people would still remember plamodels (shorthand for Plastic Model) sold at stationery stores in front of a school and science malls. As passing adolescence and adulthood, it is believed that they got to know that the plamodels were Japanese replica and then most of them abstained from food and drink.

A style of a plamodel commenced with a model brand of ‘Frog’ of IMA in Britain when the year 1936 was almost over. In the late 1940s, American companies such as Hawk, Varney, Empire, Renwal, and Lindenberg began to produce plamodels. During the 1980s, detailed models emerged mainly from Tamiya and Bandai in Japan. Korea appeared on the market with poorremake models copied Japanese technology in the early 1970s, and the genre of a model started being derived from them. The first models had strong military features based on “the Second World War” or wars between nations, whereas they evolved into a broader range of types as recent models with the advent of SF Mecha Mall formed by Japanese animation in 1990 (Mecha: as a word omitting the back end of “Mechanism” or “Mechanical”, it is almost used as a synonym of a machine in Japan).

Today can be a period of transition to pioneer a genre of distinctive models as the Korean version of model production period is formed by the effort of some self-motivated modelers. Of these, an artist Sang Woon Uoo is building up a new trend of a model world with his personal design and interpretation. Ghi-Hum Park suggests a measure to change the frame of a serious and difficult art into an easy and familiar material, choosing a communication with the public through models.

These two artists produce an artwork which shares the boundary of “art and commerce” with the material of models. In a way it may not be natural for models compared to toys to wear a grandiose garment of art. However, they feel stifling in a narrow and manneristic tendency of the domain itself to locate their voice in a strange form of modelers. To the public gaze, it is meaningful that simply coloring ready-made models manufactured with a setting is far from an art which makes something out of nothing.

On second thought, from the point of view that one of many trends in modern art uses contemporary objects of industrial products, it can free from the above-mentioned public eye. The two artists make their own domain from much space of calling for art in business domains. Models have developed not into the exclusive property of the privileged few but into a means to realize the imagination of the future (movie scenes), existed to reproduce superficial events of the past (museum dioramas), and become a model to propose an alternative of reality.

We try to suggest an opportunity for the audience to recall past memories, not a serious artistic discourse in the Project Gallery. Modelers and club members called and ostracized as a hobby in the dark carry out a machine exhibition along with a joint project. Exhibited are a diorama and creative models setting up a scene with realistic models based on an enormous subject of machines and humans that modelers once who did not expand their own field due to disrepute of otaku mani+ac (mani+evil). Now, it is anticipated that this would pave the way for testing its expansion to a new territory of art in the sun.