I went to visit the gallery of Wu Ju Lim’s Ruined Traces (West Gallery) and Broken Landscape (East Gallery) opened at the Patrick Painter Gallery in Santa Monica. I chose her because I was quite interested in her work when I was searching online for which museum or gallery I should go.
Won Ju Lim is know for grouping foamcores and Plexiglas architectural forms illuminated by still and moving projections of urban and industrial landscapes.
In the Ruined Traces (West Gallery), it is a multimedia sculpture-based installation, where it is an entire dark gallery space full of different colorful projected moving landscapes, images and reflections of her miniature encased environments. There are reflections effect on the wall which were made by those colorful glass casings. Surrounded by those cases are a few large size plants that give the whole scene a jungle feeling.
Ruined Traces presents a construction of memory through light, space and time as well as layered imagery and the mix of real and fake life. Lim make the viewer enter into a dream-like world. She used both natural and synthetic materials to make a play between the real and the hyper real. It illustrates the contradictions between the material and the space it occupies. This element furthers Lim’s subtle commentary on fragmentation and falsification of memory, as well as an explication of the synthetic Los Angeles lifestyle.
In the East Gallery, Broken Landscape is a series of haunting constructed and deconstructed landscapes. She broke down the landscape paintings into sharp fragmentations and pin them onto foam board. She added spaces between the pieces instead of pinning them back altogether. The gaps and the cracks that she made represent our own memories that often have holes and vacant spaces.
However, it is these spaces that we fabricate realities of the past based on our own perceptions. I think in today’s world, people seem to have very short memory since technology helps us a lot. We do not have to remember things at all as long as we have computers. Sometimes, we just do not care about what we have lost in our memory. We do not care if there are gaps in our memory or even worse is that we forget what we have forgotten since we are too busy to think.
Overall, I like her art because of her way of producing art is new to me as well as I can interact with her work, especially the Broken Landscape. I like her way of breaking down a drawing and then pinning them back together on the foam board. The work is just amazing. For the Ruined Traces, I was a bit lost when I first entered to the gallery since this is my first time to view an installation. But I love the feeling to explore the space and light in such an dark area.
