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Four Urinals- the Seoul Independent Exhibition, 1985
MARU –The Seventh Point Touched by the Wind
Works That Do Not Remain (1985–1996)
Lucy: Should the object installations you made between 1985 and 1996 be understood as an “early period” or a “formative stage”?
Sangghil: Yes. From that time on, my focus was already on methodology. Positioned between two tracks that appear similar but are in fact very different—Korean art and contemporary art—I was reading the present through a sensibility distinct from that of Western artists.
It was a process of finding my own path while passing through the rapid transformations of Korean society with my whole body.
Lucy: You presented Four Urinals at the Independent Exhibition in 1985, didn’t you?
Sangghil: That was my first public work. I understood Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) not as an object, but as an event that overturned entrenched assumptions about art.
For me, the urinal was presented not as an object, but as a concept.
At the time, I was reading modern and contemporary art in search of answers, and I wanted to unsettle myths that had already hardened.
Lucy: That 1917 readymade wasn’t really addressed at an ontological level.
By contrast, your object installations from 1989 feel much quieter.
Sangghil: I wanted to show rather than assert.
That’s why I avoided adding explanatory statements to the works.
untitled 89-2, root, branches, etc., 1989
untitled 89-2 for MMCA Exhibition, root, branches, etc., 2020
Lucy: Is that related to the fact that the works were never fixed in place?
Sangghil: I didn’t bind them or refine them.
I brought the objects into the exhibition space and presented their existence as such, but they had to remain unfixed—vulnerable enough to be disturbed by a breath of wind or a viewer’s footsteps.
Lucy: So rather than instability, they were oriented toward an open world.
Sangghil: Exactly. From the beginning, those works were conceived as a process:
objects that existed somewhere in nature, like myself, were temporarily moved into the exhibition space, became artworks for a while, and then returned to their original places once the exhibition ended.
Lucy: So that nothing would remain.
Sangghil: The work does not remain.
It leaves behind only a residue of sensation, passing through time.
(Silence)
Lucy: That’s quite different from producing a new formal style.
Sangghil: Yes. I was using a language similar to that of Western artists—Duchamp, Neo-Dada, Arte Povera, Minimalism, even Lee Ufan—but I was not standing on the same sensibility.
Lucy: So it was a kind of “re-reading” of object-based art.
Sangghil: Exactly. It wasn’t about simply adopting Western art, but about proposing a different sensory route beyond that reception.
Lucy: Does that mean you were already asking the same questions then that you’re asking now through drawing?
Sangghil: In retrospect, yes. Then as now, I’ve been drawn to things that are not fixed, not completed, that do not remain.
Whether through objects, video, or drawing, even if the form or technique changes, the question continues to pass through me.
And I suspect it always will.
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untitled 89-4, pigment with powder of red bricks, etc, 1989
untitled 89-4 for MMCA Exhibition, pigment with grinding coffee beans, etc, 2010
Lucy: At times, it seems as though you feel compelled to explain a great deal.
Sangghil: There’s a significant gap between contemporary art and Korean art.
They are important issues, yet they are not easily read within either framework.
Lucy: So it’s a position that doesn’t allow for easy legibility on either side.
Sangghil: When I returned from P.S.1 in 1997, some people in the New York art world asked why I was going back to Korea.
They said there would be many good opportunities if I stayed in New York.
Lucy: But you chose differently.
Sangghil: Yes. I told them this: New York might offer me opportunities, but Korea provides the reasons and motivations for why I must be an artist. I said that I had already decided what it was I needed to seek.
Lucy: And that decision led to your idea of “re-reading.”
Sangghil: I formally began Re-reading Korean Contemporary Art in 1999, when I became director of a private art museum.
But in a broader sense, my entire process of learning and making has always been a form of re-reading.
It is a way of re-reading contemporary art through the sensibility and DNA of being Korean, within the cultural and historical conditions of Korean society. It is there that I have opened a different horizon of perception and understanding—one charged with a certain kind of tension, or elasticity.
This is where the seventh Point Touched by the Wind of MARU end.
You are always welcome to return.