Gwon Dong-hyun principally works with sculpture and Kwon Sea-jung with documentary filmmaking, but since forming a two-person collective in 2020, their modus operandi has been transdisciplinary in terms of thought experiment and production. Their works of art combine video, sculpture and installation, and some are often shown at film festivals. Their aesthetic interests lie in the entanglement of beauty and disfiguration, the transformation of bodies with regards to emotional layers, and historical speculation and speculative history.
Most of Gwon and Kwon’s projects are based on long-term research, whose starting point is in their everyday lives. "Seddy, How to Meet Dodo" (2021) began from the personal story of their dogs, Bamse and Dodo. After the death of Bamse, Dodo -- an old dog -- had a hard time, so the artists decided to bring in a pet care robot named Seddy to look after Dodo when no one was at home. They purchased a device that can be controlled via Wi-Fi, accessible through a mobile phone, and fitted it with a face cast of a family member with whom the dog felt familiar.
The metamorphosis of the appbot into Seddy, an avatar-like being, contributes to a restructuring of the field of vision. Seddy’s lens has a shorter focus distance than human eyes and sees the home environment from a low angle. In remarks accompanying the work, the artists wrote, “It can reduce the focal distance to less than 3.5mm, which human eyes can manage. It’s the opposite of a bird’s-eye view. This is a bug’s-eye view.” The super-wide-angle macro lens that enables the bug’s-eye view, gives humans a dog’s point of view.
Gwon and Kwon scrutinize the dog-human relationship further by tracing it back to early 20th-century Joseon in "Love Death Dog" (2023). They encountered a dry plate photograph featuring a dog, taken by Japanese anthropologist Torii Ryuzo in 1914 -- “A Jindo dog at the Navy camp in Haenam, South Jeolla Province," housed in the National Museum of Korea. A technique invented in the late 19th century, dry plate photography allows the camera to capture images in motion, with a shorter shutter speed than the wet collodion process that was more common back then. The photographer did not need to develop the plates immediately and could load them into cameras at any time after exposure, which was especially convenient for those doing fieldwork.
Torii sought to document Korean folkloric customs and the local landscape, excavating archaeological remains, and measuring Korean people’s bodies within the frame of eugenic anthropometry. The survey, conducted with the support of the Japanese Government-General of Korea, left a wide range of images, including photographs of Korean native dogs. Gwon and Kwon looked into how the dogs came to be part of the so-called scientific ethnography of colonialism.
In the film "Love Death Dog," the artists, inspired by the archival images, superimpose the relationship between the human and the non-human onto that of the colonizer and the colonized, and at the same time lay historical research over speculation, namely, the forming of a conjecture premised on the autonomy of the non-human world. The first half of the film is like an allegorical clipping of historical photographic images, while the latter part is like an essay-film with today’s images of dogs unfolding a speculative perspective in which the unknown narrator is neither human nor animal, neither ancestral nor contemporary.
When Gwon and Kwon show this filmic work in the context of exhibitions, they push forward with their imaginative conjecturing by placing a series of sculptures throughout the gallery. "Woman with Dog, Dog with Woman" (2024) shows moments of a woman caring for and caressing her sick dog at home, in which a human and an animal become a single sculptural entity. "Spectator" (2022), a silicone forearm with artificial hair and nails interlocked with a metal C-stand and a humidifier, represents the ambivalent state of humanness and animality.
In this way, the artists conjoin rigorous investigation and audacious imagination, and historical conjunctures and present-day states of affairs, all to problematize anthropocentrism. They are fluent in merging their mediums, transcending the confines of each one, to develop an artistic language to dig into the intricacies of asymmetrical power relations and hierarchical domination and objectification involved in human-centered vantage points. Before anything else, they let you learn how to self-reflexively think about your dog.
Kim Seong-eun, managing director of the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, is an anthropologist in art and technology. She was previously the director of the Nam June Paik Art Center. -- Ed.
