Preserving death and shapes of living things- for 1793; to celebrate the birth of museum and the head of the king

 Preserving death and shapes of living things- for 1793; to celebrate the birth of museum and the head of the king 2009 홍윤정

Object functions as physical memory. Space does too. I am enjoying talking about past, death and present through my art activity with object and space. In these several years, I have been working about the birth of modernized public eye to question about what is the memory of mass subconscious, and how it works by using different types of space contexts under the title, “Preserving death and shapes of living thing.” The first series of these works, “For 1793: to celebrate the birth of the museum and the head of the king.” is drawn from the events of the year 1793 in France, in which King Louis XVI was publicly beheaded in the Place de la Concorde, also the birth year of the Louvre Museum. I proposed that between the moment of death and birth, there are compelling objects which have another life and meaning in that specific space reserved for public eyes. The motivation for this project was to pay homage to the birth of the eye and to reflect on the scheme of museums. It was an installation work in the Champaign County Historical Museum, as a part of my study about a site-specific approach incorporating a methodological view. This collection included Victorian-style moss terrariums, which reference the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, and miniature terrariums which have an abridged nature to reflect real nature. They are constructed of slivers of cubic rings made from dead fish and flash, and include a dead fish collection in resin, skins of animals, papers and holed hamburger patties coated with resin after having been eaten by ants, and animal porcelain collections which reference ancient Chinese taxonomy in the fiction of Borges as discussed by Foucault. This exhibition was the first work that allowed to me to bring to the foreground my central issues: archaeology and taxonomy, history and fictions, the function of the museum, collections as evidence of fiction, death and life, possession and memory.