■ 2020 Random Access Project

GyeongGi Cultural Foundation Nam June Paik Art Center (Director Sungeun Kim) introduces emerging artists who share Nam June Paik's experimental artistic spirit and conducts a random access project to examine trends in contemporary media art. The name of the project ‘Random Access' comes from a work of the same name that Nam June Paik showed in his first solo exhibition, Exhibition of Music-Electronic Television (1963). 〈Random Access〉 is a work in which a tape from an audio cassette was taken out of the case and attached to the wall at random, allowing the audience to freely move the magnetic head to create sound. With keywords such as improvisation, non-determinism, interaction, and participation found in 〈Random Access〉, the Random Access Project selected and introduced six artists (teams) over the past two years. In 2020, three artists were selected, Juyoung Oh, Seungryol Shin and Hyekyung Ham.

■ Random Access Vol. 9 Hyekyung Ham 《A Small Island I Call Peace》 exhibition and introduction of works

Nam June Paik Art Center introduces new works of the same name in the 2020 Random Access Final Project, Hyekyung Ham's 《A Small Island I Call Peace》 exhibition. Artist Hyekyung Ham reconstructs fragmentary sentences to create a narrative and edits the collected footage to visualize it as someone's story.

The new work <A Small Island I Call Peace> started with the intention of the artist to contain 'something slightly positive' in this difficult period. The narrator in the work talks about his life, crossing the past, present and future. His story portrays intimate psychology in a calm atmosphere as if talking to a family member or friend. When you face a “someone's” story that contains relationships, love, desires, successes, and frustrations, the story may soon come into contact with your own story and our story. The private story of the narrator in the work contains the thoughts that everyone in the audience came up with at least once in their lives, and thus metaphors the reality.

His life that the narrator describes in his work is a ‘normal life’ that is calm and quiet, but somewhere in vain. The artist says that he wanted to take the “anonymous” and “ordinary” speakers out of this world, who seem to live a life that is somewhat boring and meaningless. The audience finds their own meaning in the story of the speaker, in the vague boundaries between fiction and reality, in the various interpretations that occur between images and images, and between images and texts. I hope that the process of immersing in the work and finding each message will be a time to comfort everyone today.

▲ [Photo] Hyekyung Ham, 〈A Small Island I Call Peace〉, 2020, single channel video, color, sound, 00:13:30, commissioned by Nam June Paik Art Center

■ Artist Introduction

I start talking at the level of light relaxation. I want to start with what everyone knows and talk about something deep and intimate. My work is derived from the movies, events and people who inspire me. I work with a theme, a kind of atmosphere, and a character, but there is no continuous plot. I am interested in connecting small things in everyday life, but above all, I want to pay attention to the spiritual area in the minds of the main characters. I think that it is important to focus on the simplicity of the story nonetheless in the art world where the subject of the work is not read at a glance, and the story of someone who is extremely personal is not welcomed by either. . I want to give meaning to the present life that feels meaningless and to draw a concise form of striving to escape from solitude. I want to create a story that mixes fiction and reality about things like past time, uncertainty, shame, pride, loneliness, boredom, and stubbornness.

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