There is a place for the unapproved, evicted, forgotten, and vanished in works of Heo Chanmi. Starting from her personal experience and expanding out into a social context, in her process, she fixates what she has encountered on the canvas in a quiet tone, like writing down a personal diary. However, it doesn’t actually seem like a diary, which is usually event-centric, but like a series of everyday happenings too trivial to be captured in a concrete form.

In this respect, as an attempt to understand the world surrounding her, she engages with materials that she finds, and turns them into tools for making art works. Starting from the matter of selecting a tool for painting, her concerns stretch out to the matter of the images she creates with the tool. She, for example, starts to work by unfolding a paper that she was given, and then fills out the paper with random, unappreciated things that she found while roaming around the area where she started unfolding the paper.

Artwork Inquiry 053-427-7736,7,9

The Busan based artist Chan-mi Heo (b.1991) concentrates on capturing small, banal, seemingly unimportant things and motives from the city life, such as weeds nestled between sidewalk blocks, a magpie sitting on a construction rebar, a manhole cover noticeable on concrete road.

In Heo's work, there is a poetically intensified place for things that are neither socially approved or pushed out, nor ideologically determined, nor representative for any purpose or even any intention. They are provisory, fragile, unattractive, evoking the ephemera of personal existence, while expanding into a social context of anonymous objectivity filed by poetical resignation.