〈Branches, Claws, Bones and Threads〉 Statement
Seoripul Gallery 2025.08.05. - 08.30
At some point, everyone has imagined the shape of a person or an animal emerging from clouds or tree branches. Humans often tend to perceive patterns among unrelated things. Psychology calls this apophenia—the cognitive disposition to recognize connections or patterns where none exist. Just as we find faces in the sky or animals in stains, we instinctively perceive sensory simultaneity within disorder, creating order and relation.
《Branches, Claws, Bones, and Threads》 brings together artists Jean Song, Jongyeon Lim, and Taemin Joo, who each collect and reconstruct othered beings, focusing not on humans as fixed entities but as beings gradually formed through relationships with others. Through apophenic perception, they closely observe nonhuman entities such as plants, animals, organisms, and objects, then reconfigure, merge, or dismantle them through their own formal vocabularies. By attending to the marginalized, the exhibition retraces how the human has been perceived and defined in relation to the other. By highlighting nonhuman others, it paradoxically reflects on the boundaries and conditions of humanity itself.
Jean Song has long examined the survival and life-death cycles of nonhuman beings, particularly plants and animals, to draw attention to suppressed and hidden, formless existences and events. She focuses on marginalized beings in society’s blind spots, questioning habitualized values from the position of an observer. Through encounters with the nonhuman, her work destabilizes anthropocentric thought and reconsiders the meaning of boundaries. Her hybrid figures—such as <Hookie>(2025) and <Dragofly> (2025), composed of combined body parts of diverse species—interrogate the norms of “normality” beyond biological or social divisions. Building a database of pigeon images as a starting point, she expanded her practice into hybrid creature drawings and panel works. These hybrids disrupt biological conventions and species boundaries, prompting reflection on the very concept of the “normal.”
Formed from fragments of the familiar, these strange figures reveal the arbitrariness of socially defined norms and the fluidity of their boundaries. The hybrid series extends into imagined ecosystems in which hybrids, humans, animals, and plants intertwine, generating unprecedented landscapes and temporalities. Particularly in the <Gazes> series (2024–2025), golden lines traverse the works vertically or diagonally, binding relationships with hybrid beings. These lines function not as decorative elements but as visualizations of a nonhuman gaze. Following these golden trajectories, viewers unconsciously trace the beings’ positions and interactions, blurring the boundary between subject and object of the gaze. Wandering among the works, the audience experiences sensory collisions produced by wordless forms, sensing vibrations between the familiar and unfamiliar and probing the boundaries of “existence.”
At the rear of the gallery, the “Multi-Hall” further clarifies this collaborative structure. Here, sketches, drawings, fragments of objects, and sculptural experiments are displayed in layered arrangements, revealing the “in-progress” state of the works. The space activates apophenic perception itself, encouraging viewers to construct meaning from disparate fragments. The byproducts of the work no longer serve as mere references but function as “body parts” imbued with equivalent sculptural questions, requiring the audience’s own imagination and perception to form a network of meanings.
The othered beings in this exhibition operate not merely as objects of observation but as mirrors reflecting the human condition. Through encounters with these forms, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the boundary between the self as observer and human existence itself. By evoking this structure of sensory judgment, the artists’ acts of selection and reconstruction ask us again: What do we choose to give meaning to, and what do we choose to ignore?