Kim Sung woo established the nonprofit arts organization Primary Practice (PP) in 2022 to both continue telling and retell Korean art history’s lineage. With an interest in exploring the underrepresented curatorial and exhibition practices in Korea in order to share artistic meaning and produce critical value, PP showcases exhibitions that blur the boundaries between commercial and noncommercial sectors. Often, woo spearheads collaborations with external institutions and galleries to further its barrier-breaking agenda, too.
Whitewall spoke with woo about how PP furthers dialogues between artists, curators, and critics, and how, by questioning the reality of the art ecosystem, we can connect over, create, and perpetuate great art.
From Curating the Gwangju Biennale to Launching Primary Practice
Courtesy of Kim Sung woo.
WHITEWALL: You were previously the chief curator at Amado Art Space from 2015 to 2019, and an independent curator who organized the Gwangju Biennale in 2018 and was a curatorial advisor for the Busan Biennale in 2020. How did these experiences lead to launching PP?
KIM SUNG WOO: Balancing the role of a curator in a specific art space and engaging in independent curatorial activities allowed me to explore and examine various artistic experiments and discourses that may have been overlooked or omitted in the geography of the contemporary Korean art scene.
Moreover, with the launch of Frieze Seoul in September 2022, the Korean art market has garnered unprecedented attention and prosperity. The market-driven aesthetic tendencies have become significant forces in the art, operating more strongly than ever. The evaluation of artistic value seems aligned with market demands and supplies, and the media appears busy generating issues within that dimension.
In the system I encountered as a curator, there were practices overlooked, and in the current state of the Korean art scene, Primary Practice aims to embrace significant discourses and experiments overlooked in the contemporary art scene. Through the curatorial methodology in contemporary art, Primary Practice intends to explore and address the intrinsic meaning and value of art, as well as art history and visual language, without being dependent on capital and market.
Primary Practice and FORMULA, photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong).
WW: How does the organization’s mission reflect these overlooked practices?
KSW: Primary Practice is established to capture today’s art in an expanded context with contemporary curatorial practice. “Practice” means exploring the attitude of the artist in depth, which is the genesis and origin of the work, rather than the representational level of work. And to examine the relationship between attitude, meaning, and form within contemporary conditions is the ‘primary” value of this space. On the other hand, “PP,” an abbreviation for the name of the space, sounds like children’s excretion—“pee-pee.” This means that Primary Practice advocates the artistic practice and thoughts as excretion, valorously revealing the points that today’s system overlooks or cannot contain.
PP values the dialogues between artists, curators, critics, designers, and more. It raises questions about the reality of the system that operates the art ecosystem and recognizes the peripheries and marginals that deviate from the trend and center as important values. These constitute the backdrop for all projects happening in the space.
We ultimately want to be a temporary, but long-lasting, time and space to diagnose our present condition and status via contemporary art.
Kim Sung woo Establishes PP within the Contemporary Art Landscape of Seoul
Courtesy of Primary Practice.
WW: PP is a nonprofit organization. How does this impact its positioning within the art world of Seoul?
KSW: In the late 1990s, alongside the economic crisis in South Korea, alternative spaces began to emerge. Since then, they have evolved in various forms and missions. The current nonprofit spaces in Korea differ from their predecessors in terms of their mission of discovering and incubating young artists. And in today’s nonprofit/alternative space, there seems to be a more effective focus on constructing a genealogy from the past to contemporary art, attempting to understand it in different viewpoint, or generating coordinates for contemporary art scene.
In this context, Primary Practice seeks to examine the genealogy of Korean art history that has been ongoing and establish a lineage that will continue from this point forward. Additionally, we have a deep interest in the relatively under-researched field of curatorial history and exhibition practices in Korea. These practices provide artistic meaning and produce critical value within the contemporary discourse that commercial galleries often overlook. Furthermore, we have recently collaborated with external institutions and galleries, crossing the boundaries between commercial and noncommercial sectors, and contributing to the production of discourse within the art community.
“I am interested in rewriting history,” —Kim Sung woo
Primary Practice and FORMULA, photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong).
WW: How do your roles as a curator and a writer impact your thoughts on the contemporary art market?
KSW: In Korea, there is a somewhat distinct separation between the noncommercial and commercial art scenes. Artists are often categorized into biennale-type artists and commercial-type artists. Biennale-type artists are those whose works are based on the context of contemporary discourse and hold art-historical significance. While not all artists fall into this category, in Korea, there are artists who, separate from the contemporary art scene, only focus on market-driven practices. Although their works may be intriguing, they are often perceived as artists following market trends and are read merely as aesthetic objects.
Curators, closely associated with the art institution and policy, sometimes navigate between the realms of commercial and noncommercial, working to blur these distinctions. We may showcase so-called biennial artists in gallery exhibitions, aiming to break down the existing perception of separation.
Primary Practice and FORMULA, photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong).
WW: What topics are you or the artists you present interested in communicating right now?
KSW: I am interested in rewriting history, focusing on individual narratives that diverge from official records. Through the construction of counter-histories derived from these personal narratives, I aim to explore the dynamic relationships within the image of the present we inhabit. This inquiry ultimately extends to issues such as the dynamics of knowledge and power, as well as hierarchies between the Western and non-Western perspectives, and so on.
Courtesy of Primary Practice.
