Youngeun Sohn
Openings: Night, Paper, Glass
forever gallery, Seoul
31 December 2024
- 11 January 2025
Night, Paper, Glass—Scenes Weaving Time
Openings: Night, Paper, Glass is a solo exhibition by Youngeun Sohn structured around three opening performances. Expanding the concept of “opening,” the exhibition is a multilayered exploration of the process and documentation of performance. The “opening” is an act that marks the beginning of an exhibition, opening a space and inviting an audience into a specific time and place. This exhibition, however, alters that formalized expectation by transforming accumulated texts, images, and objects into performances, installations, and books, treating the process itself as an evolving, time-based event. The physical surfaces of the exhibition space—glass windows, walls, floors, ceilings—are initially inscribed with texts and images beforehand, and later bear traces and remnants of the performances, continuously shifting each scene and generating an ongoing dialogue. A parallel process unfolds in the book Openings: Night, Paper, Glass, where the interplay between live performance and the book’s material form reflects Sohn’s broader approach to storytelling through gesture, installation, video, and clothing. This intermedial practice extends story beyond language, activating it through the performative potential of objects and surfaces.The three keywords—Night, Paper, Glass—derive from the performance texts that structure each opening, serving as both thematic anchors and material references within Sohn’s practice. The first opening performance, Night, begins with the piece Chim Chim (2024), set in a space scattered with texts and images transferred or printed in graphite on black paper. Here, together with the audience, the artist navigates a constellation of collected images and texts, illuminating them with handheld flashlights as she deciphers the script embedded within the paper’s darkened surface. This performative act of reading—both literal and gestural—reveals the work's layered history and the memories woven into it. Sohn interweaves an array of visual and textual fragments: Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower (1889), the blooming cycle of four o’clock flowers at dusk, fragments of lullabies, X-ray images of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), revealing a hidden face beneath the paint layers, a 17th-century dress salvaged from deep-sea mud, a dress covered in mold, and garments found in her own wardrobe. These elements coalesce in a layered invocation of time’s material and ephemeral residues.
The second opening performance, Paper, unfolds around two works: Crumples (2023), a large-scale scroll covering the gallery walls, and the Sea Clothing (2024) series suspended from the ceiling. In Crumples, Sohn juxtaposes the transformation of tree pulp into paper with the natural drying process of seaweed attached to rocky surfaces, creating a sculptural analogy. This massive paper scroll is both durable and stiff, producing rhythmic beating sounds as it unrolls, resonating through the space. Here, the artist engages the paper corporeally: grasping its edges, wrapping it around the body, stepping upon it while articulating the script embedded within its fibers. The material properties of dried seaweed, which form thin yet structurally cohesive sheets, parallel those of paper, and their sequential arrangement into continuous chains reflects the process of weaving together fragmented narratives. Once the performance concludes, the paper remains frozen at the moment of vocalization, bearing the traces of its performative encounter. In this process, the artist deconstructs the written word (scripture) through the act of vocal articulation, then reconstructs it into sculptural (sculpture) forms, physically inscribing the spoken text into the surrounding space.
In the third opening performance, Glass, the transparent windows of the exhibition space become an active medium. Window Cleaning (2020) investigates the semiotic and material properties of glass as an interface of visibility. The audience observes the performance through the glass, witnessing images appearing and vanishing as Sohn’s scarf adheres to and peels away from the surface. A smartphone affixed to the artist’s forehead transmits an external perspective to a monitor within the exhibition space, introducing a mediated interplay between inside and outside. As layers of transparent surfaces—glass, smartphone, and monitor—reflect and refract one another, the scene continuously shifts, revealing and obscuring unseen perspectives. The temporal accumulation of images and speech, intersecting through acts of vocalization and visual relay, forms a structuring principle of both this exhibition and Youngeun Sohn’s broader practice.
Sohn’s opening performances operate as sites of story construction and deconstruction, where temporal fragmentation and spatial inscription unfold in tandem. The artist vocalizes fragmented and discontinuous stories, visualizing non-linear and associative thought trajectories across exhibition space and book. Her “texts,” valid only in the ephemeral moment of performance, acquire physical form within the space through specific objects, reactivated in subsequent performances. Paper, graphite, seaweed, a photosensitive-treated silk scarf, scrolls, glass—before language is inscribed, these materials exist as physical entities. In Sohn’s practice, materials function not as inert substrates but as dynamic agents that respond to the contingencies of time and environment. Just as pulp alters its form based on humidity and temperature before becoming paper, language in Sohn’s work manifests sensorially, possessing distinct materiality. This suggests that “text” in her practice extends beyond linguistic signs to sculptural elements that are inscribed, articulated, and transformed through gestures and sound.
The book Openings: Night, Paper, Glass serves as another site and potential tool of performance. Initially produced as a dummy book prior to the exhibition, it contained a preliminary table of contents, selective excerpts, images, and deliberately blank pages. As performances continued to be held, photographic documentation and handwritten annotations were inserted, gradually expanding its volume and transforming its material composition. Particularly in Night, carbon paper placed between pages captured the fingerprints of readers flipping through the book, echoing the use of black paper in the performance. After the exhibition, Sohn revisited the book, layering additional texts and images through an iterative process akin to re-reading and re-performing. This collage-based methodology simultaneously preserves the temporality of the performance—akin to pressing flowers between pages—while leaving open the potential for future reinvention. Now, as the book meets yet another opening, it extends an invitation to the reader, engaging them within a temporality that is both past and perpetually emerging.
Text by Miji Lee