A new exhibit by installation artist Won Ju Lim opened Friday, April 11 at the Saint Louis Art Museum. A mix of sculpture, photography, film and drawings, her exhibition “Currents 108: Raycraft is Dead” is an exploration of privacy and paranoia that was inspired by personal experience with a nosy neighbor.
Lim was an architect before she became an artist, and her work reflects a continued fascination with the field, particularly the psychology of space. As an artist she is not limited by practicalities such as building codes and can instead focus on broader ideas.
“Architects, they have to solve the problem, and fix the problem that might arise in the building of a building,” said Tricia Paik, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. “As an artist, she doesn’t really have to address those problems…instead she can make an artwork from those problems.”
“Often times those kinds of problems… then can be pushed, dramatized, maybe even become absurd. And within the studio [they] become interesting issues to not solve but actually think about….conceptualized, often times formalized as well,” said Lim.
Paik and the director of the graduate school of art at Washington University, Patricia Olynyk, selected Won Ju Lim as the 2013-2014 Freund Fellow. As a Freund Fellow, Lim spent a month in the fall and the spring teaching at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art and created an exhibit to be included in the Saint Louis Art Museum’s ongoing Current series.
The result is “Currents 108: Raycraft is Dead,” which Lim describes as an exploration of the “ownership of space.” She was inspired to explore that theme by her interactions with a neighbor who used to own the property she lives on.
“My relationship with him has been a decade of feuding, and there are many juicy stories to tell, but I won’t tell those stories,” said Lim. “But for me this show is not so much about these feuds or even Raycraft…. As a result of that experience I got to thinking about ownership of space. Ownership of time. Ownership of spaces you don’t have physical or visible access to.”
Her exhibit can be seen in Galleries 250 and 301 at the Saint Louis Art Museum through July 27, 2014.
Related Event
Saint Louis Art Museum Presents Currents 108: Won Ju Lim "Raycraft Is Dead"
April 11 - July 27, 2014
Tuesday - Sunday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Friday, 10:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Galleries 250 and 301, Saint Louis Art Museum
For more information, call 314-0721-0072 or visit the Saint Louis Art Museum website.
Cityscape is produced by Mary Edwards and Alex Heuer, hosted by Steve Potter and funded in part by the the Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis, the Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
