South Korea 20 NOV '23
Site, Sight, Cite (2023) is a live painting project. Developed with the support of the Dongdaemun Culture Foundation and presented as part of the foundation’s Artist of the Month exhibition program.
The project 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.
The artist’s working space is conceptually transferred into the exhibition environment. It is encountered again under different conditions of viewing. Within this context, the act of painting cites the artist’s everyday studio practice. Repetitive gestures and habits reappear and are reactivated within the gallery.
Dongdaemun Culture Foundation, Seoul
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.
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?