Beomsik Won: Archisculpture

A dome climbs onto a taller dome, a balustrade reaches across to meet the next, and the tower keeps rising—yet no such building was ever constructed. For Archisculpture, Beomsik Won photographs buildings by a range of architects, cuts the pictures into details and reassembles those details into structures no city could hold. The series, begun in London, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2015 as an English-language hardcover of eighty pages with eighty-seven photographs.

Won, born in South Korea in 1972, has described his work as discovering another world obscured by scenes familiar to our eyes and not easily revealed. In these collages it is the familiar that fails. An exaggerated tower pagoda can read as convincingly exotic to a Western viewer, while a storefront crowned with a Baroque dome declares its artifice at once. The series amounts to a deconstruction of the urban landscape that permits new arrangements and connotations, and tells unexpected stories.

The artist says his fragile constructions are meant to provoke alarm: a stab, in the sense of a Barthesian punctum. The claim gives the work an argument about how photographs are read. Cultural convention and blind spots do part of the work of belief; the cut interrupts it.

The book was edited by the ILWOO Foundation and designed by Andreas Platzgummer, with texts by Marc Prüst and a foreword by Suejin Shin.

For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction of a precise, unsettling idea with a publication that gathers eighty-seven photographs from the series in one place. Won’s buildings exist only as pictures, never as architecture, and the book allows the proposition to be examined across a body of work rather than guessed at from a single framed sheet.

The dome gets taller and taller, one balustrade spans the next—yet this spectacular tower was never built; it is merely the result of the collage technique applied by the South Korean artist Won Beomsik (*1972): the series initially begun in London assembles and combines details from photographs of buildings by a variety of architects. A deconstruction of the urban landscape that allows new arrangements and connotations, and tells unexpected stories. Archisculpture plays with cultural conventions and blind spots: while Won’s exaggerated, exotic tower pagoda seems realistic to the Western eye, we quickly detect the expressive artificiality of a bold construction consisting of a storefront with a Baroque dome. According to the artist, his fragile structures deliberately provoke alarm, a stab in the sense of a Barthesian punctum.

Edited by: ILWOO Foundation
Designed by: Andreas Platzgummer
Texts by: Marc Prüst
Vorwort von: Suejin SHIN
English
June 2015, 80 Pages , 87 Photos
hardcover
ISBN:978-3-7757-4030-2

Publisher page editorial text:
The dome gets taller and taller, one balustrade spans the next—yet this spectacular tower was never built; it is merely the result of the collage technique applied by the South Korean artist Won Beomsik (*1972): the series initially begun in London assembles and combines details from photographs of buildings by a variety of architects. A deconstruction of the urban landscape that allows new arrangements and connotations, and tells unexpected stories. Archisculpture plays with cultural conventions and blind spots: while Won’s exaggerated, exotic tower pagoda seems realistic to the Western eye, we quickly detect the expressive artificiality of a bold construction consisting of a storefront with a Baroque dome. According to the artist, his fragile structures deliberately provoke alarm, a stab in the sense of a Barthesian punctum.

Publisher source ↗