Jin Heewoong
Work of Rest

From November 14, 2024 to January 18, 2025
Opening on November 14 at 6 pm
— Facebook event

Jin Heewoong works with found objects and everyday materials to create sculptures, installations, and videos that explore the complex nuances of displacement and belonging. In Work of Rest, Jin Heewoong is interested in the unique itinerancy of artists residencies. The project stems from the artist’s participation in a residency in South Korea while living there, where his need for rest was at odds with the residency's expectation to produce art. To address these pressures, Jin Heewoong issued an open call for proposals, and selected a participant to whom he could outsource his work. Sending the participant, referred to by contract as “the traveler”, to Manila he gives them instructions on what photos to take and where. In doing so, the artist, referred to as “resting-artist”, intervenes with the art world’s systems for selecting, funding, and contracting artists.

In the present exhibition, the artist sets out to remediate the traveler’s photographs through a series of assemblages. Here, repurposed, found, consumer-grade materials are neither raw material nor ready-made. Stacked and splayed, they are neither abstract nor referential, floating signifiers resisting utility — resisting work. Both playfully and precariously, however, they animate the photographs, some printed at disproportionate scales or obscured by more materials. These assemblages take on an intuitive movement and way of looking at the sites, people, and things that make up this vicariously lived place, foreign to both the traveler and the resting-artist. 

Despite outsourcing his labor to another person, however, the resting-artist does not completely rest. In their daily conversations, he expresses concern for the traveler’s safety, and adapts his instructions to the circumstance and mood of the traveler. His engagement with another person, even if clearly marked by the boundaries of a contract, indeed becomes an engagement — less systematic and more of a process of collective resourcing.  

Jin Heewoong is a Korean artist residing in Montreal. Integrating personal text and footage, his works transform the mundane into symphonic arrangements of objects that propose obscured layers of relation and cooperation. In Montréal, he has had exhibitions at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and in Korea at Cheongju International Craft Biennale, Real DMZ Project, and Art Sonje Center. He co-founded Quite Ourselves, a collective promoting independence, experimentation, and ‘sustainable mobility’ for minority artists in Mooniyang/Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.