Jewyo Rhii : Night Studio

Night Studio is a project by Jewyo Rhii in which the artist, in the form of a series of open houses, opened to the public the row house apartment in the Itaewon district of Seoul. She lived and worked in the place for approximately three years, beginning in 2008.

The Itaewon market street, the background of Night Studio, was exceedingly noisy in the morning and daytime hours, but became desolate to the point of silence after the storefronts had lowered their shutters at night. Influenced by this environment, a starkly contradictory day and night existed at her studio, which was located at the end of a cramped market street of shops dealing in bags, socks, Korean souvenirs, old U.S. Army paraphernalia, and imitation designer goods. Once the daily hustle of eking out a living had subsided, a poignancy of consciousness and sensation found itself converging with the controlling space and time; Rhii called it Night Studio.

The artist examined the practical decisions as well as the aesthetic and semantic choices that arose by necessity due to her working in her living space, and utilized the conceived or transformed objects, drawings, and installations emerging from those acts both to understand her own environment and to generate a record of the stories that transpired. Thereafter, under the title Night Studio, Rhii opened her live-work space to the public on four occasions, with each open house limited to a certain number of visitors. Many objects and things appeared while they did not have names. The forms and purposes were free to be precarious in their process of transformation in the house. Later, Rhii gave a title to each open house depending on their respective situations and circumstances; these were New Comer, Far Sight, Wall to Talk to, and I Can Tell the Time.