KonneXus 2024: 
Mountains in Islands

---

KonneXus (AI Docent Video, Collaboration with Kyoo Lee - Philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York), 2024, D-ID, Eleven Labs, EPIK, single channel video, 29m 48s

Exhibition:

---

The Made in series is a body of work that began in 2013, in which the artist traveled to ten Asian countries to directly participate in and document the production processes of each country’s representative commodities. Through this series, the artist investigates how capitalist modes of production shape people’s senses and experiences, and how these processes ultimately settle into systems of thought and belief. By undertaking the complete production of everything involved in a single meal, the work reveals the layers of labor, resources, history, culture, tradition, and the shifting geopolitical conditions embedded within these processes.

Beginning with Made in Taiwan: Sugar in 2013, the artist has directly produced a wide range of commodities, including gold in Myanmar, rice in Cambodia, silk in Thailand, wooden tables in Indonesia, wooden chopsticks in China, coffee and rubber in Vietnam, palm oil in Malaysia, and wooden plates in Laos. The project was first presented publicly in 2014 at the Art Spectrum exhibition at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, where it received the inaugural Spectrum Artist Award established by the museum. The series was later exhibited at the Korean Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. Works from the series are held in collections including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art.

The Made in series has since expanded into the Made in Korea project, which examines how “traditions” severed during Korea’s modernization process are dismantled and reconstructed through Western standards and perspectives. Starting with Straw Shoes (2015), produced after learning traditional straw-shoe making from a laborer who played the role of a craftsman at the Korean Folk Village, the artist has continued to work on projects involving wigs (2015), salt (2022), hanji paper (2022), ink (2023), and bows (2023). These works are developed through the transmission of skills from intangible cultural heritage masters or through archival research, and are realized on site. The processes are presented through documentary video works alongside the produced objects.

Through this performative mode of practice, the artist addresses the transmission of information and the disconnection, dismantling, and reconstruction of reconfigured traditions. The series explores how senses and images—reinterpreted, distorted, and othered within collective consciousness—may nonetheless open up new forms of potentiality and possibility.