Soohyun Koo

Creator Soohyun Koo has always been interested in relationships and roles determined by social systems and structures and most recently, her focus has been observing targets within the art community.
Using her experiences she gained from different jobs (staff member at galleries and exhibit halls, docent, intern curator, installation assistant) in the art industry for nearly 10 years, Koo tries to observe and analyze her surroundings and focuses on understanding behavioral patterns and emotional states of people with different roles.
She began thinking about the structural positions of individuals and societies through her work, which involved collecting and repositioning ordinary everyday objects.
Her relational exploration on exhibitions, creative processes and artists started through her project, called she has been working on since 2012. The project is Koo’s way of researching and collecting statistics on contemporary art and she schematizes objective indicators of the mainstream art community.
Through her 2016 solo exhibit, 《A Collector’s Secret Storages》(6 spaces in Eulji-ro, Seoul, 2016), Koo created an imaginary collector and portrayed the absolutely essential, physical circumstances that are required for artworks to be exhibited and traded.
By highlighting various, seemingly minor conditions and neglected elements in the world of contemporary art, she was able to show how those conditions and elements are interconnected and look at the systems and structure of contemporary art world from a new angle.
In her recent works, 《MAGIC WHITE MAGIC: Just what is it that makes today’s white room so different, so appealing?》(This Weekend Room, 2018) and , Koo showed her own analysis of the labor issues, economic value and pragmatism which are not sufficiently discussed in the contemporary art community.