reviews IAN KIAER
Ulchiro Project, 2007
(installation view),
mixed media, dimensions
variable. courtesy the
artist and Alison jacques
gallery, london
ian kiaer
AlIsoN jAcquEs gAllERy, loNdoN
15 NovEm bER – 22 dEcEm bER
Compared to Ian Kiaer’s quietly fugitive and fragile sculptures and If these things make muted allusions to impermanence and change,
installations, most contemporary sculptural work just shouts, points its and to the personal and social experience of urban transformation, they do
finger, insists on telling you something. Kiaer’s erudite work is a rare example it with Kiaer’s customary displacement of spectatorship and perspective.
of minimal means really exercising maximum effect. His scrappy, tentative A minimalist approach to the objectivity of relative scale hangs in
assemblages and quasi-models have previously referred themselves to tension with the fantasy of panoptical sight which is the privilege of the
art history, and to classical and modernist moments of utopianism in modelmaker. In an anteroom, Ulchiro Project: Pond apparently refers to a
architecture, subjects appropriate for work which, balanced between the bit of reconstruction in which a sewage system and a flyover were replaced
ephemeral and the residual, speaks constantly of things that are possible by a canal. What we’re presented with is an upright slab of light blue foam,
and things that have passed. under whose broken corner a small blue Tupperware nestles, marked ‘china’
In this new show at Alison Jacques, the source material has moved in faint marker; a little painting of a lily pond hanging to one side; and a
more comprehensively into the present – to the market district of Ulchiro, in flimsy two-tiered assembly of translucent plastic and yellow cardboard.
Seoul, to be precise; a district, we’re told, that has undergone rapid, ad hoc Building over, revealing, disappearing, containing – without the backstory,
redevelopment. For the more literal artist, this might be a good moment this is what we understand and appreciate in these objects.
to say portentous things about globalisation and accelerated living. Kiaer’s If there’s a criticism, though, its that in turning to the here-and-now
Ulchiro Project (all work 2007), by contrast, makes that kind of real-world for material, away from an excavation of past-future projects, Kiaer has
experience something to be discovered and questioned through the work somewhat narrowed the cultural narrative of what his formal metonyms
itself, regardless of rhetoric. hook onto. Southeast Asia may appear dynamic and change-driven
The main gallery is dominated by a large white inflatable made compared to the mothballed pace of urban transformation in the West,
from Korean bin bags, and a teetering, spindly metal A-frame which seems but culturally at least, actual change isn’t equivalent to the spirit of change
to suggest an empty billboard or hoarding. On the floor a slab of pink embodied in utopian visions. Utopianism is always deferred, not realised,
Styrofoam is partly overbuilt with a cluster of little cubes and panels whose and it’s this deferment which has previously connected so strongly with
surfaces are collaged with panels of anonymous manga, of the domestic, Kiaer’s interest in ambiguities, scale, presence and place. By stepping closer
teen-drama sort; nearby, a battered surface of propped cardboard hints at to the everyday in its most evident moment of flux, the performance of
a high-rise complex, while on the walls are hung a couple of worn-looking transformation that runs through Kiaer’s work has slightly slipped away; and
monochrome canvases and a larger sheet with some indecipherable inked that’s an odd experience indeed. J.J. Charlesworth
Korean typography.
artreview 112
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 112 4/12/07 15:26:00
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