The Apotheosis Of The Fish Market

About

Curated by Director Ken Tan, the exhibition features more than ten new site-specific installations by Korean artists Jong Oh and Jinsu Han.

In the October 1976 issue of Artforum, the cover story by Nancy Foote, titled “The Apotheosis of the Crummy Space”, featured the Rooms show in what was then the recently opened P.S.1. Foote appreciated how the site “can be ‘amended’ subtly by small additions that comment on its nature and adapt their posture to its own; it can serve as a medium, directly or indirectly, also as subject,” and noted a “disaster area ambience.” Ever since the 1970’s, the unpolished, dilapidated quality of abandoned spaces have been favored by avant-garde artists who not only worked within but on the space itself: its floors, walls, ceilings and architectural features.

284 Grand Street was home to a Chinese family-operated seafood market, offering everything from baby shrimps to exotic sea urchins, but about two years ago the fishmongers vacated. In “The Apotheosis of the Fish Market”, a nod to Foote’s eponymous review, the site is finally exalted to the zenith of its existence before it makes way for a new building that will be constructed the following Spring. In reaction to its spatial configurations, Jinsu Han and Jong Oh have transformed two floors of the building into a gritty, sensory experience with their respective site-responsive installations.

Jinsu Han

For the past twenty years, Han has been inventing mechanized sculptures that are part Dada, part Steampunk. Each autonomous machine is programmed and designed to fulfill Han’s single-minded goal: they endlessly play out the inescapable nature of change through their repetitive movement. Han believes, as Heraclitus did, that change is fundamental in the universe: All is Flux, Nothing is Stationary.

For this exhibition, Han repurposes junk objects retrieved from the space and installs each work in locations that best suits its behavior. His mechanized work moves with surprising grace. In “Spanish Dancer”, a single industrial belt is galvanized into motion by a motorized pulley attached to the ceiling. Because of the high-speed revolutions, the animated wire becomes a beautiful spectral form that hypnotizes the viewer with its unpredictable dance. In another setup, brush-wielding robotic appendages continuously spread paint around a canvas. The action of painting is executed unemotionally according to the kinematics of their rigid systems.

Naturally curious, Han reminds of someone who takes apart his clock to see its inner workings, then reconfigures its parts to tick to an altogether different heartbeat. In-between metaphor and material, his work exudes character with effortless authenticity.

Jong Oh

Jong Oh’s sculptures are ethereal, ephemeral and considered. With a minimal language of string, Plexiglas, tiny chains and weights, Oh makes renewed claim to the power of the understated. His site-responsive installations accentuate negative spaces and render them palpable. They form a reciprocal relationship with their environment.

Encountering his works in this crummy space is a purification of the mind: one would not expect to discover works this delicate and poetic. In the full room installation, Room Drawing(objects) #4, structures slowly become perceptible as senses sharpen. Suspended from the ceiling and extruded from the walls, long strings stretch through the room to form geometrical configurations that echo the windows, floor tiles and more. Like drawing in the air, Oh colors portions of string black so they that oscillate between visibility and invisibility. Ambulation is encouraged for the full experience: viewers have to move in and around the work to experience a disorienting sensation of shifting perspectives. In an aerial installation, rectilinear forms hover above the staircase, guiding the descent of visitors as they exit.

Taney Roniger’s Brooklyn Rail review of Jong Oh’s one-person show in 2016 gets it just right: “hybrid constructions point not just to the invisible medium” (space), “but to a still, subtler realm of invisibilia: that which lies hidden within, in the cognitive structures unique to our humanness.” Oh’s work transpires not only in the eyes, but also behind them.

As historical spaces in the Lower East Side of New York such as 284 Grand Street evolve to its generation’s demands, Han and Oh’s art within the space calls for a reflection on the transience of being.