Kim Kim Gallery blog: Byungjun Kwon's This is Me @ 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

http://www.4a.com.au/byungjun-kwon-권-병준-이것이-나다/

Byungjun Kwon is a musician and performance artist and pioneering figure of South Korea’s underground music scene. Beginning his career in the early 1990s as a singer/songwriter, Kwon released seven albums prior to relocating to Amsterdam to study sonology and work for STEIM as a hardware engineer, a centre for the research and development of new electronic musical instruments. Since returning to Korea in 2011 he has expanded his practice into contemporary performance art, composing and performing experimental audio-visual works. His prior work in rock music, dance music, original film soundtracks, theatre scores and fashion runway soundtracking form an unconventional basis for his approach to creating and manipulating sound to form complex pieces. Recent projects include This Is Me, Edinburg International Festival 2013, Edinburgh, Scotland (2013); Artificial Garden, Mediacity Seoul 2012: Spell on You, Seoul, South Korea (2012); and My Instrument My Sound, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, South Korea (2012), alongside several electronic instrument projects at various workshops.

권병준은 싱어송라이터로서 1990년대 초반부터 음악 경력을 시작, 얼터너티브 락에서 미니멀 하우스 장르를 아우르는 앨범을 냈고 영화, 패션쇼, 댄스, 극장, 전통 국악, 퍼포먼스 등 다양한 분야에서 직접 제작한 음향 장치로 작곡, 연주활동을 한다. 현대 음악부터 실험적인 전자식 어쿠스틱까지 장르의 범주를 넘나드는 미디어 아티스트이다.

This Is Me was first performed in 2013 at Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburg for the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival. This Is Me is an experimental electroacoustic improvisational performance involving multiple layers of reverberated and looped sounds accompanied by an interactive video programmed projection. Sonically comprising of sounds made by the artist orally and simple percussive bells, the piece is an exercise in the electronic manipulation of live recorded sound. Kwon’s performance is created concurrently with a piece of video recording and face recognition software. The artist is seated at a table while a camera scans his face and others drawn on paper throughout the performance while the software recognises these images as base data for face mapping. As the piece progresses, several famous faces of actors, politicians and artists are mapped to Kwon’s face via a projector, erasing the artist as if wearing a mask. In contrast to the self-assured title, This Is Me reflects on the inherent anonymity of our current digital era where our personal identity can be endlessly manipulated to erase all traditional conceptions of self.