About the artist:

KOO JEONG-A, born 1967 in Seoul, lives and works in Paris. Solo Exhibitions (selection): 2002 121002very CCA Kitakyushu; The Land of Ousss, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; 2001 Yvon Lambert, Paris; To fall to dive, Shima/Island, Kyoto; 1998 Ousss, Ousss, Ousss, place Stalingrad, 75010 Paris; Moderna Museet Projekt, Stockholm; Group Exhibitions (selection): 2001 Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama; 2000 Manifesta 3, Ljubljana; Snapshot, Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore; From a Distance: Approaching Landscape, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; 1999 Hayward Gallery, London; Laboratorium, Antwerpen; Passage, Sategaya Museum, Tokyo; 1998 Unfinished History, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dust memories, Frac de Bourgogne, Dijon; 1997 Kwangiu Biennale, Korea; Cities on the move, Secession, Vienna. In her interventions and installations, Koo Jeong-a starts from the constitution of an exhibition location and simultaneously identifies the most advantageous form for the placement of her objects there. Koo Jeong-a's compositions are often more firmly rooted in poetic than in sculptural thinking, and they have the delicateness and lightness of dream worlds. In her subtle and meditative, but no less sober manner, Koo Jeong-a leaves the objects their banality, rather than seeking to enhance their value, but at the same time, she attributes structural positions to them with the constellation. The way in which it all comes together, the way in which the objects mutually relate to and condition one another, has nothing random about it. Instead, it follows an order, in which microcosm and macrocosm correspond. For the Secession, Koo Jeong-a has created a sequence of installations, to which the title 3355 offers an approach that is equally metaphorical and concrete. In Korean, 3355 designates the special situations, in which one can observe a group of people from a distance, the way in which people form small, not precisely defined groups, in order to meet, converse, or even to demonstrate for/against something. A pattern in between order and disorder that applies equally to the view from a coffeehouse window and a public square on market day. Contracted, however, 3355 can also be read as three thousand three hundred and fifty-five and interpreted as a date or a period of time: a dimension of duration that resembles a standstill, a frozen moment of time. With her precise placements, Koo Jeong-a creates lasting moments, atmospheric landscapes that call for watchfulness, presupposing a recognition and remembering on the part of the viewers in order to be accepted. With the works in the Secession, the question of perspective is also raised in the way that Koo Jeong-a stages the change of the viewers' perspective. The distanced survey of a worktable in the first exhibition room is supplemented with an interior view of the coldness of a white cell, which Koo Jeong-a places in the next room. Moments of hiding and a desired isolation define these independent interiors. Like in a dream, Koo Jeong-a thus achieves a correlation between inside and outside. Her intention is to publicly display what is one's own, but without surrendering it this way or for this reason. In the third room, there is a series of drawings, which are shown as a new group of works for the first time at the Secession.