UN-TACT2020 ACC Gwangju & Asian Artists Exhibitionincluding Works by Miao Ying

Museum Group Exhibition

Asia Culture Center

Gwangju

Republic of Korea

15 Oct 2020 – 14 Mar 2021

MIAO YING, Pilgrimage into Walden Twelve–The Honor of Shepherds, 2019-2020. AI live simulation, six-channel video installation. Color, sound, dimension variable. Commissioned by Asia Culture Center.

Reboot!
We are witnessing the black swan of all black swans.
We are now in the ‘pause’ phase of effectively resetting life on planet earth.”

– [1]

UN-TACT

Asia Culture Center holds 2020 ACC Gwangju & Asian artists exhibition UN-TACT from October 15, 2020 to March 14, 2021. Unlike the previous iterations of the annual local artists exhibition series launched in 2017, which focused on solo and duo exhibitions, UN-TACT is a special exhibition featuring multiple artists from Gwangju, Korea, as well as Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo.

“Un-tact” is a term coined in Korea that combines the word “contact” with the prefix “un,” which means negation or oppositeness. Its meaning encompasses the concepts of non-face-to-face and non-contact.[2] As the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our day-to-day experiences, “un-tact” has the potential to become the new normal in the post-COVID-19 era. In this exhibition, seven young artists with unique voices keenly respond to the rapid changes taking place in the here and now, and they present their projects as a forum for discussion and deliberation on our post-pandemic lives.

Blind belief in materialism and globalization (Lu Yang) has led to environmental destruction. Ironically, the destruction has motivated our return to nature (Haru.K, Yang Xinguang). The outbreak of a disease that affects both humans and other animals has provided people with more time to deliberate on the need for a balanced ecosystem (Zhang Xu Zhan), and to look back on the complexity of the human society hidden behind the weight of life (Miao Ying). In today’s world, we witness black swans in all corners of our lives from our homes (b-cone), religion (Lu Yang), and politics (Tsubasa Kato). It is our hope that the exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to face the bright and dark sides of the “un-tact,” to experience its convenient separation and expanded communication, and envision a new blueprint for the future.

Curated by Lucia Eunyoung Kwon

[1] Thomas Frey, one of the world’s top futurologists named by Google and the head of the DaVinci Institute in the United States, when asked to summarize the world after COVID-19 in one word, answered the question with the word, “Black Swan.” What he meant by the phrase was an event that takes place against everyone’s expectation. Kim Mikyung, Kim Mikyung’s Reboot (Paju: Woongjin Knowledge House, 2020), p. 147.

[2] The “un-tact” marketing, which provides information while minimizing human contact, caught the attention of academics early on. For example, Professor Kim Rando at the Seoul National University Department of Consumer Science mentioned it as one of the top ten consumer trends in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic has fueled the spread of this new trend. See Dictionary of Current Affairs (pmg Knowledge Engine Institution).

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(Asia Culture Center)