Poster image of 《Somewhere, Here Below, Somewhat Inside, Beneath It All Yet Close Enough To Hear, Sleeps Several Silent, Whispering, Slow Beating, Constant Nevertheless Sometimes Broken Hearts.》 © The WilloW

A solo exhibition of works by visual artist Chris Ro, 《Somewhere, Here Below, Somewhat Inside, Beneath It All Yet Close Enough To Hear, Sleeps Several Silent, Whispering, Slow Beating, Constant Nevertheless Sometimes Broken Hearts.》, is the first event of its kind curated in-house by creative space The WilloW.

Building on the keyword “Layer,” the curatorial approach seeks to unpack the multi-layered nature of the object, taking “Space” as its starting point and expanding the discussion to include “Person,” with a stopover at “Artwork.”

The artist’s own works, which have themselves expanded from the linear plane of the canvas into the realm of three-dimensional installation, combine the physicality of their (semi-)transparent material with the material characteristics of silkscreening as a medium, playing not just with the concept of layers but with the very fact of their materiality.


Installation view of 《Somewhere, Here Below, Somewhat Inside, Beneath It All Yet Close Enough To Hear, Sleeps Several Silent, Whispering, Slow Beating, Constant Nevertheless Sometimes Broken Hearts.》 © The WilloW

The WilloW is housed in a building that predates the establishment of the larger Gyeongdong Market area by about 5 years. Built in 1955, the structure’s transformation into a creative space was made official via a grand re-open in August of last year.

Opening now, some 10 months into its operations, this inaugural exhibition by The WilloW necessarily found its genesis in a series of conversations about the inherent placeness of the Gyeongdong Market area that surrounds it. As a curator, I wondered what this space — said to “have more potential than could ever be captured by an image on social media” — might actually hold beyond the flattened image: a question, in turn, that linked directly to ongoing questions about temporality that I have been interested for a long time.

Therefore, the narrative of this exhibition is not limited in scope to the literal location of the Gyeongdong Market and its surrounds; rather, the implied approach here is one that centers respecting — and seeking deeper encounters with — the object, which in turn claims its own layers of time.

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