Ten Years, Please
Synopsis
“Ten Years Please” is an object-oriented performance, comprising artist Jewyo Rhii’s art objects, given movements and very particular stories around herself for a long time — over ten years.
In 2007, Jewyo Rhii and curator, Hyunjin Kim initiated their exhibition, “Ten Years, Please” where Rhii’s works from the past were entrusted to voluntary individuals for a decade. This was a result of the artist’s imperative situation at the time. She could not find an appropriate long term storage space for her works during her course of travels between Amsterdam to Seoul for a dozen years, leading to an inevitable situation where she might have had to abandon her works after several exhibitions. Despite the extemporaneousness of safekeeping artworks in her friend’s hands, Rhii’s decision came to be embodied as a considered event to ‘give a rest’ to her works. As a result of the exhibition, the artist could entrust most of her works – dozens of works in drawings, installation pieces and other objects - to friends and others who willingly kept and enjoyed them for next ten years, until 2017. Rhii brings those works back to the public, in the space of theater, confronting the thickness of the time accumulated on the artworks after being detached from the artist. The artworks — particularly characterized as feeble, possibly forgotten and neglected in the corner of personal space, or maybe in some instances treated as special things — now emerge beautifully as the figure of the aged, still stand autonomously.
Mode of the Performance
The narrative of the performance was composed by weaving together Rhii’s script of object-making, personal stories of the caretakers in a relation to the work and finally equivocal dialogues on “weariness”, adopted from Infinite Conversation, written by Maurice Blanchot.
The feeble lives of the artworks often imbued with the sense of otherness, penetrate the stories of Jewyo Rhii’s works, as they resonate in the theater with strange voices that talk tenaciously about their weariness. The objects appear and disappear repeatedly in the darkness, while speaking through their silent texts, lyrical music, and human voices. The narrative creates an intriguing tension between the tough realities of being an artist juxtaposed with some of the most intimate stories of the works. This work is presented in an estranged form of theater making by subverting conventional practices of the theater into an entirely raw and stripped down arrangement. The objects take on a kinetic life with the assistance of operators, while the performance unfolds within Rhii’s idiosyncratic installation itself.
It is conceived by Hyunjin Kim, and co-written and co-directed by Jewyo Rhii and Hyunjin Kim