GOBI

Hi Jin! Thank you for having us in the studio. Let’s begin with a really basic question. What brought you to Los Angeles?

Jinseok

I came to Long Beach in California back in 2011 as an exchange student. Although I’m not very good at adjusting to new environments and mingling with new people, I loved what I was exposed to: diversity in culture, ethnicity, and politics. This was both challenging and fascinating to me and it changed the way I look at my art. I don’t think I had a clear idea about what my art practice would be about at that time, but I knew I wanted to immerse myself in this environment and see how it shapes my work in the long term.

In 2016, I came back to California as an MFA candidate at CalArts, hoping to settle down and build my career in Los Angeles. Like anyone else that came to this country as an international student, I have been battling the language barrier, dealing with visa issues, and struggling to build a sustainable work-life balance after graduation. Nonetheless, I still enjoy how diverse the art world is here, how my work evolves based on these experiences, and the community I became part of.

How has your work evolved? What kind of ideas are you exploring at the moment?

Since graduating, I have worked as a fabricator for either other artists or clients who have  commissioned me. Having a day job got me thinking about physical labor, the relationship between my body and the labor, and how all this becomes part of our society. In retrospect, this was a natural thought process because I have been researching the history of global trade and how Asian labor has been deployed across the Pacific Ocean in favor of capitalism. But because this subject matter is overwhelmingly vast, I began making work about this issue based on the personal level, investigating my own experience as a fabricator within the US. Thinking about how I can materialize my experience, I started to collect leftovers from my fabrication jobs.

And what were these leftovers?

Mostly wood scraps, both hardwood and plywood, as well as lots and lots of sawdust. These are all byproducts created from my fabrication projects. I personally hate wasting materials. I inherited this trait from my parents who grew up in the working class during the late 50’s to early 70’s in South Korea where saving every penny and recycling everything was the only way to survive. Instead of dumping all the leftovers, I decided to turn them into my art materials. Not only because it saves me materials cost, but also because they are already signifiers of my labor and time – they are the negative spaces created from my fabrication labor.

The sizes and shapes of these scraps are “awkward” in the sense that they are too small, too thin, or too weird to be part of functional products. When I glued or screwed them together, they created a “landscape” of the physical labor and the time I spent to sustain my life.

You mentioned sawdust as well. What kind of material significance does this have?

Dust in general is tied to quality of life. The existence or nonexistence of dust draws a firm line between white collar and blue collar jobs. When I fabricate, I need to make sure I wear a reliable mask. Otherwise, my lungs would not be protected against all the sawdust that is floating around in the studio. Sawdust is one of the most harmful substances woodworkers deal with, but if I turn it into incense by adding a few ingredients, I can burn it, inhale it, meditate with it, and rest myself. Through this process, I am transforming my enemy into my friend.

Sculpturally, the sawdust-turned-incense dough is used as an additive material (similar to clay), which is the opposite of subtractive materials (like wood). I used the incense dough to capture indexical gestures of my body and movement, which was very liberating, since traces of the human hand are most often preferred to be hidden in fabrication work.

Both the small pieces that sit on top of the bigger structure as well as the hand shaped pieces called Between Our Palms are made of incense. How do these compliment your larger body of work?

Small incense sculptures are to be burnt for the audience to inhale. I wanted the work to be more than just an object for viewing. I wanted it to address physical labor and its meaning in our lives through multiple human senses prompting the audience to acknowledge their bodies in space. As the audience walks around Town Square or burns one of the small sculptures, they inhale the incense, creating a physical interaction between the work and the person. In a way, I am inviting visitors to contemplate on the existence of labor in our everyday lives.

You briefly mentioned the title of this work – Town Square. Could you talk a bit about the work’s title?

As I was making the work, I thought a lot about solidarity and how it relates to labor conditions. The work is made of various leftovers from different projects holding each other to create the structure. I imagined a Town Square where people from different backgrounds get together in solidarity. A place where stakeholders gather and make something big happen. Town Square represents that magical moment and place.

What are you working on these days?

I am currently working on a series of mask sculptures that are inspired by traditional masks and made with the same materials as Town Square – byproducts from my fabrication work. These works are aligned with similar ideas, such as labor and life.

Traditional masks are intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. First, most of them are in the shape of mythical beings that are collectively created over generations. There are no single authors that control the stories. The stories constantly multiply through word of mouth, reflecting people’s life experiences. Second, the narratives around the masks tell a lot about humans and how they navigate life. They carry not only people’s lives and desires, but also their fear, hatred, violence, and the likes. Basically all kinds of ugliness the human kind embodies. For now, I am recreating the traditional masks with a specific material choice, but moving forward I want to design my own creatures and masks hoping to contribute to the collective creation.

When developing new projects, where do you look for inspirations? Are there any books, podcasts, or films you’ve recently been tuning into?

Recently, I have been reading about monsters, especially essays, blogs, or books written by contemporary writers. The way they talk about monsters that exist in historical archives is interesting because often, they deliver the story with their silly imaginations. For example, a chemist and science fiction writer, Jaesik Kwak, wrote a book titled, Monsters X Science Guidebook. In the book, he combines his playful imagination with scientific knowledge to “scientifically answer” silly questions like “How much blood does a Dracula have to intake to get enough nutrients?” or “To get the right amount of blood, how long does a Dracula need to suck blood out of a person?” The more he tries to answer these questions scientifically, which of in itself is absurd and ridiculous, the more I get to dissect the imaginary features of the creatures that are hundreds and hundreds years old in today’s perspective.

What is the most ambitious project you have in mind? It can be one that’s impossible to create!

I have so many ambitious ideas! An idea that is aligned with the works we’ve talked about today is a conceptual project that addresses the relationship between an established artist and their assistants. This project would come with conditions. First, I would have to be a well known artist who can influence people in the art world. Second, I would already have to have a team of assistants that works for me. The traditional artist-artist assistant hierarchy is the key to this project. Third, I would need a commercial gallery that is willing to sell this work. And the work will be in the form of a printed contract that I and the assistants sign on. The gist of the contract is, first, when the work is sold, the profit will be equally distributed between all the people who signed on it. Second, when the work is resold by a collector, a certain portion of the profit goes back to the artist and the assistants. I hope I can be in a position where I can realize this idea soon:)

Lastly, what is an object, other than your own creations, that has been meaningful to you in life and why?

I have this purple stuffed dinosaur that my mom gave me when I was a little kid. It’s not a character from a cartoon or a movie, but a very generic, not quite detailed, four-legged dinosaur. It only has two black plastic dots for its eyes, two stitched dots for nostrils, one curvy line for its mouth. I don’t know why I still have it because there were lots of other toys I enjoyed playing with that I did not keep. The attachment that I have with this stuffed dinosaur, I think, simply comes from it being the first toy my mom got me (or at least the first one I can remember). It’s been sitting in my room my entire life. When I look at it, its simple and generic look gives me a heartwarming feeling and I start to forget about the anxious things happening in my life, not because of any special memories attached to it, but because it has always been there, in the corner of my room. I didn’t even realize that it had been meaningful to me until I had thrown it in a trash can at one point. But for some reason, I couldn’t let it go. I took the stuffed dinosaur out of the trash can and placed it back where it used to be. Now it lives in a room that used to be mine in my parents’ place in Korea.