Arario Collection Exhibition: Banana and I

Arario Gallery Cheonan introduces a group exhibition entitled from March 7 to May 26 2013, as its first spring event. “Banana and I” is based on Arario Gallery’s colorful collections, which have been presenting the newest trends in the global art world including Korea, China, Southeast Asia, India and Europe. The exhibition features 20 works by artists from India and Southeast Asia including Subodh Gupta, Agus Suwage and Mariano Ching; American and European artists including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Thomas Ruff, and David Schnell; Chinese artists such as Ji Dachun, and Yuan Yuan; and artists from Korea, including Kang Hyung Koo, Dongwook Lee and Myung-jin Song. In particular, the exhibition will present the gallery’s most recent collection, including works by Agus Suwage, Mariano Ching and Myung-jin Song. The unique title of the exhibition, “Banana and I,” refers to the fixed meaning of the word banana. Through this word, which points to a tropical fruit, we are instantly reminded of the shape, taste and other properties of the banana. It is difficult to associate anything other than the yellow color, soft texture, tropical origin, sweet taste, long shape, and soft and the squishy touch with a banana. Our preconceived notion of all objects and actions related to art includes fixed stereotypes like the images and feelings that connect to the imagery of this particular fruit, such as the unity of the artist and the art work, elegance, expensiveness, significance, genius and creativity. Dismissing such preconceptions as mere products of the mass’s demand for simplicity and entertainment or the lack of information or knowledge only petrifies the distance between the realm of art and the viewers. The attitudes of those who are tied to the process of collecting, exhibiting and distributing artistic objects and actions are in fact often based on pre-fixed understandings. We already know how artists, their works and exhibitions are conveniently introduced based on the simplest categories, such as region, age group, materials or subject matters. This exhibition aims to step out of such categorizations based on region, age or topic, and invite the viewers to feel a sense of incongruity in facing the objects about which we hold a preexisting notion. The exhibition encompasses a wide variety of works by artists from diverse regions and age groups. Discovering individual correlations among the works would be a rather difficult task. However, gazing at the collections Arario has compiled over a period of two decades, the viewers may find the vestiges of “the intersection of life and death,” a key topic in contemporary art. The banana, which begins to develop dark spots all over its yellow peel when left out in room temperature for extended hours, effectively visualizes the traces time leaves behind in its swiftly flowing current. In this exhibition, thematizing the temporality of life and death in its eternal yet fragmented cycle, represents topics such as childhood, vestiges of old glory, dreams of a future never to come and the consequent despair, and life as a projection of death in the form of specific objects’ surfaces and allocations, incorporates these motifs in the macroscopic system of history and society, and mixes them into the textures of daily life and physical sensations. In encountering each work in the exhibition, the viewers will be able to project themselves on to the banana as an object of art, reflecting their individual states of mind, dreams, and hopes. We hope the exhibition will provide our viewers with an opportunity to discover lost times, countless conflicting concepts that comprise the self, an alternate ego.