Dongwan Kook pays attention to the contact point between individuals and society in her works, through various media such as drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos, and books. In this exhibition, she used words and phrases engraved in the minds of the public after the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, such as “I promise I stay”, “Please stay home”, “(Social) Distance”, “Occurrence”, “Outbreak”, “Group”, and “Connections”. Using these words as subject matter, she created detailed drawings inside the outlines of their letterforms, and enlarged them 900 times to work on paintings as well. A resulting series of landscapes that derived from the pandemic as subject matter allows viewers a time to take a walk through 2020, which may be a turning point in which everything changes.
    I focused on the fact that every drawing of Dongwan Kook is illustrated using letterforms as a skeleton of the drawing if you will, and that each drawing is paired with paintings that have been magnified 900 times. These drawings and paintings have the same form, but quite different details and textures. Paying attention to this, I tried to reflect this part in the structure of the catalog.

    I printed the actual sized drawing work on a translucent paper with graphite ink that’s similar to a pencil color. The translucent paper allows the letterforms (work title) on the next page to see through. On the page after is the painting work printed with concentrated black ink, and instead of showing the whole painting in its entirety, I kept it large to show every details (even the traces where masking tape had been used). These juxtaposed works that have been printed on different types of papers were arranged within the entire catalog, while keeping in consideration the saddle stitching structure.

Design: Jaemin Lee

Client: Dongwan Kook

Year: January 2021