“UNBOXING PROJECT 3: Maquette” Installation view ©New Spring ProjectNew Spring Project presents a group exhibition, “UNBOXING PROJECT 3: Maquette” on view through May 12.
Curated by Hyunjoo Byeon and Minjin Chae, “UNBOXING PROJECT” presented its inaugural exhibition in 2022. Inspired by the enduring impact of small-sized artworks, which often evoke empathy rather than mere admiration unlike large-scale or spectacular works, the project aims to encapsulate the essence of an artist’s practice within a compact and mobile format. Providing participating artists with a specially crafted framework, such as small canvases and plinths within a portable box, the project commissions them to create new works resonating with the theme of each project. These artworks are then unveiled and exhibited.
“UNBOXING PROJECT” also explores how the framing of an exhibition influences representation, paradoxically emphasizing each artist‘s distinctive practice. Annually presenting different themes, the project showcases various media such as paintings, objects, and photographs, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the potency of small-sized artworks.
Following the previous two exhibitions, which showcased paintings that conveyed a large emotional impact through their small size, this third project presents an exhibition of small-scale objects. In general, maquettes are thought of as models that are the first experiments of an artist’s ideas in sculpture. However, this exhibition is symbolically and paradoxically titled maquettes to emphasize their meaning as small works that fully reflect the artist’s sense of sculptural form and scale and are completed by his physical, physical, and conceptual interventions, rather than maquettes as a preparatory stage.
The project invited 27 participating artists, including mid-career representatives of the Korean art world and emerging talents, to create small but ‘gigantic’ objects with the artist’s ‘intimate’ intervention, in a specially designed seating area, and commissioned them to create new works that recognize the space as an independent exhibition space. The result is 27 new works that respond to the intention and theme of the exhibition. The works in the exhibition, which represent the artist’s experience and interpretation of sculptural scale, will create a new sense of time and space, conveying a sense of transcending size to the viewer and opening a space for experiencing the sensory, aesthetic, and emotional power of three-dimensional forms.
