Korea (Republic of)

Koo Jeong A (they/them) is constantly in orbit, living and working everywhere. In their practice, architectural elements, texts, drawings, paintings, sculptures, animations, sound, film, words, and scents play a significant role. Throughout the years, Koo Jeong A has investigated and blurred the lines between their artwork and the space it occupies. The artwork adds new layers to any given space and Koo Jeong A manages to merge small intimate experiences and large-scale immersive works.
The curatorial approach for the Korean Pavilion 2024 has been to combine some of the key subjects and sculptural elements that Koo Jeong A has worked with during the last three decades. With the new commission Odorama Cities, created especially for the Korean Pavilion, Koo Jeong A delves into the nuances of our spatial encounters, investigating how we perceive and recollect spaces, with a particular emphasis on how scents, smells, and odors contribute to these memories. With the pavilion itself, Koo Jeong A explores an expanded tactility. Some of the prominent interests in Koo Jeong A’s art, such as immaterialism, weightlessness, endlessness, and levitation, are keywords throughout the Korean Pavilion. They are embedded and engraved as infinity symbols directly into the new wooden floor, manifested as two floating wooden möbius-shaped sculptures and a levitating, scent- diffusing bronze figure, and last but not least symbolized in the scents that transforms the pavilion into a collection of olfactory memories.