Within

Frankie Chu, Kirsten Dryburgh, Jae Hoon Lee, Yvonne Shaw, Ryan Sun

Crown Range Cellar Wine Lounge
251 Parnell Rd, Auckland

5 - 14 February 2021

Curated by Ryan Sun/Original Art Association in association with Crown Range Cellar Group

Response by Yvonne Shaw for PhotoForum

What is the purpose of an art exhibition? What are the ideal conditions for the art? For the audience? For the artist and curator Ryan Sun, exhibitions are an opportunity to create a conversation between different makers and disciplines. In his hybrid approach to exhibitions he is interested in connecting artists to spaces that are not necessarily traditional exhibition venues, in order to bring about a novel experience and to create new audiences for the artists.

Sun’s most recent show Within was exhibited at Crown Range Cellar, 251 Parnell Rd on 5 February 2021. The space, which normally functions as a commercial site for selling wine and as a boutique venue for private functions, had some challenges when it came to installing work. Works were placed on the floor and in windows as well as hanging from the ceiling and, projected onto hanging drops of paper. An exhibition is aways a response to the space it is in and when the space is not a traditional white cube, a highly creative response is often required. The reward is however, spontaneity and surprise – for the audience and for the artists.

In Theater of Exhibitions, the writer and exhibition maker Jens Hoffman asserts that, “The peculiarities of the exhibition as a unique social ritual are myriad. Its making involves elements of staging and theatricality, and its viewing is likewise a performance, willingly giving oneself over to the things presented, or encountering an unusual arrangement in a familiar environment” (2015, p. 11).

In the lounge room of the Crown Range Cellar, tables and chairs were moved outside into the courtyard, leaving space for Sun’s artwork Eyes of Hundun to be suspended from the ceiling and Kristen Dryburgh’s ceramic works to be situated underneath, together with two small paintings by Sun. Frankie Chu’s work Off the Maternal was projected onto hanging drops of paper, casting an ever-changing light on Sun’s and Dryburgh’s artworks as well as on the evening audience. Chu’s abstract images, which evoke a foetus growing and turning in the womb, flickered and wavered - the incessant movement of life. I felt the connections between the people and the art and the wine and the space. All those things combining to bring people more alive in that moment.

Hoffman asserts that “Curators should ideally be curious and inquisitive human beings. They must feel compelled to wrestle with, study, and analyze essential questions of the human condition. And since these questions relate not only to the production of culture but also to the creation of histories and even reality itself, curators should consider themselves as operating outside the borders and the confines of traditional academic modes of inquiry” (2015, p. 83).

The exhibition Within addresses a number of questions that Sun is curious about,

“Where will the happiness be? We are going through an era of self-blur with viruses and environmental degradation around us. Where am I, who perceives happiness? Self-awareness redemption was not absent in any previous era, but it was made known under different symbols. We find that more profound ideas are encoded to protect knowledge from loss in time and human nature. They are encoded by symbols and metaphors to protect esoteric knowledge from desecration.”

The production of both art and wine requires time and knowledge, a knowledge that is gained from study and observation and endless experimentation. The audience of Within could sample from both types of knowledge, enjoying the experience and hopefully being provoked to ask questions, to make links between themselves, the artworks, the artists, the curator and the winemakers.

In this exhibition the artwork that, to me, exemplified a type of coded knowledge was the photograph Fishrock by Jae Hoon Lee. Lee’s photographic images are usually compiled from various sources. He photographs different surfaces in order to construct a new landscape - a new reality that is made up of many different perspectives. Fishrock is an ambiguous mass suspended above the surface of the sea. Swirling patterns which are derived from photographs of ice form the skin of this rock creature. Yet although this photograph is clearly a constructed image it contained a truthful suffering that moved me greatly. The artist works intentionally with multiple images but his process also allows an intuitive, new creation to come forth – it emerges like a performance from the consciousness and the unconscious of the artist. This image, with its complexity and gravity, made up of mercurial ice forms, seemed to me to represent the vulnerability and strength of our relationships with each other, and with the earth.

In a traditional stark gallery, lit evenly by overhead lights, Fishrock would be perfectly illuminated and monochrome. Instead during the evening of 5 February at Crown Range Cellar, it is warmed up by the purple hue of Chu’s projection. It becomes a mirror. We cannot see the artwork without seeing our own reflection in it. The exhibition space changes the artworks and they become fluid – as we are, affected by our environments and all whom we encounter.

By Yvonne Shaw

Reference:

Hoffman, Jens. Theater of Exhibitions. Sternberg Press, 2015.