ROH is delighted to share Kei Imazu’s ongoing display at the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024, themed silent apple.

Taking its title from a line in Ripe Apple, a poem by acclaimed poet Kim Hyesoon, the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024 lays the vertically erected sculptures of the city on a horizontal plane, bringing them down closer to the ground. This newfound horizontality moves freely between existing systems, offering a new mode of seeing the world around us even as it invites questions around the relationship between sculpture and language, labor and industry, local and regional. Just barely embedding itself into the backdrop of the city, sculptures outlast the given populations of a particular era and continue to evolve with the passage of time. With a spirit of excavation and attitude of connection, this approach reaches for a new perspective on what we have long understood to be the language of sculpture.

Scul, the etymological root of “sculpture,” means to carve or engrave, and shares valence with the act of “writing.” And it is the spirit of “writing,” in turn, that documents and preserves any city, summoning the countless beings who have lived in it through time. Taking on the multilayered temporal strata and locality built up by the sculptures and city of Changwon as its subject, the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024 actively explores and rewrites the traces that remain embedded in space. The participating artists work across a variety of forms that speak to sculpture, movement, and locality. Driving topics like sculptural horizontality, industrial change, women and labor, and community movements appear alongside landscapes in and around the exhibition, spanning intersections between factory floors and athletic fields, building terraces and tracks, trees and artificial waterfalls. Inside the exhibition hall, one can hear the sound being sent out into the world, and the zeitgeist of Masanmunhwa — a 1980s progressive periodical, mook — together with the knives in the kitchen, busy cooking, provide a stark contrast to the monumental sculptures of the public plaza.

silent apple claims four distinct spaces as both its “big apple” and its exhibition map, marking “viewing points” from which to gaze upon the sculptures that populate their surroundings. From the perspective of space-making, the biennale also invites visitors to move at their own pace to enact this gaze from different heights. The exhibition lays new paths across the city between those better worn, creating connections between Seongsan Art Hall, located at the heart of the planned city’s radial street system; the Changwon Cultural Complex Dongnam Ground, a base of literal movement for Changwon’s laborers; the Seongsan Shell Mound, discovered while surveying different sites for the National Industrial Complex; and the ChangwonCity Masan MoonShin Art Museum, which preserves both the ideals and works of the sculptor Moon Shin. Much like the apple peel in the poet’s imagination, creating a spiral path in the wake of its own carving, the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024 builds a horizontal sense of solidarity as city, sculpture, and visitors all create paths of their own, seeing and encountering anew, moment to moment.

Copyright belongs to The Artist

Organized and hosted by Changwon Special City/Changwon Cultural Foundation

Supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism; Gyeongsangnam-do; Korea Industrial Complex Corporation (Gyeongnam Regional Headquarters); BNK Gyeongnam Bank; Gyeongnam Mecenat Association

Photography by studio SUJIKSUPYUNG (Cheolki Hong)

Courtesy of The Artist, Changwon Cultural Foundation · The 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024, and ROH