Seoul, South Korea, 20 NOV '23
The project "Site, Sight, Cite" is based on three homophones that share a similar pronunciation while carrying different meanings: site, sight, and cite. Each term refers respectively to place, perception, and reference.
Through the format of live painting, the artist’s personal working space was conceptually transferred into the exhibition environment. By encountering this space again in the exhibition setting, the project reflects on how places are perceived and recognized. The act of live painting in this reconstructed environment also continuously cites the artist’s everyday studio practice, referencing the repetitive gestures and habits of painting while reactivating them within the gallery.
Habit Encounters Immediacy
Site, Sight, Cite begins from this tension between repetition and the present moment. Rather than referring to the quotation of images or texts, the project understands citation as a form of repetition embedded within artistic practice itself. The gestures of painting that typically occur within the private space of the studio—repetitive, routine, and largely unseen—are performed again within the exhibition environment. Through this repetition, painting operates as a form of self-citation, as the artist’s gestures return to their own accumulated habits of making.
The project restages not only the act of painting but also the conditions in which it normally occurs. Elements of the working environment are relocated into the exhibition space so that both the space of practice and the gestures of practice reappear in a different context. What is presented is therefore not simply the production of a painting, but the repetition of a working situation in which artistic habits are enacted once again.
When these habitual gestures unfold live, however, their status shifts. In the studio, painting develops as a routine activity structured by repetition and familiarity. In the exhibition space, the same gestures become visible as they occur within a shared temporal frame. What once functioned as a private routine now appears as a time-based event. This shift raises a central question: what, then, is liveness?
Is it repetition, the citation (cite) of habitual practice?
Or a singular moment, the emergence of a site (site) in time?
Positioned between these two conditions, the live act of painting ultimately turns toward perception itself. In doing so, Site, Sight, Cite asks how the act of seeing (sight) negotiates the boundary between familiarity and novelty when habitual gestures become visible as they unfold.