Guhong & Yoonkee is an exhibition by Yoonkee & Guhong, the web-based music duo formed by Kim Yoonkee and Min Guhong in 2023. It was held at Gallery Jiwooheon from July 3 to August 3, 2024. Min Guhong put the techniques used in Kim Yoonkee’s existing works into a set of rules titled 20 Ways to Fall in Love with Canvas. Kim Yoonkee selected and applied these rules to make twenty paintings, while Min Guhong also made a web-based video from the rule texts.

Before the exhibition, the two had helped each other with their work for more than ten years. Kim Yoonkee performed at the opening of Min Guhong’s exhibition, and Min Guhong designed Kim Yoonkee’s album cover. Min Guhong, who grew up listening to Kim Yoonkee’s music, says, “I like Yoonkee because he always makes me smile.”

Guhong & Yoonkee by Yoonkee & Guhong

Yoonkee & Guhong is a web-based music duo formed by Kim Yoonkee and Min Guhong in 2023. Kim Yoonkee, born in 1980, debuted as a musician in 2000 and has released more than ten albums. Moving between Seoul, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere, he has expanded his practice to painting, poetry, and other fields. Min Guhong, born in 1985, grew up listening to Kim Yoonkee’s music. After working as an editor, designer, and programmer, he is, as of 2024, the director of Ahn Graphics Lab, commonly abbreviated as AG Lab, while running the one-person company Min Guhong Manufacturing. In New Order, which describes itself as “liberal arts classes for modern people,” he also discusses and teaches coding as “practical and conceptual writing.” “I like Yoonkee because he always makes me smile.”

In a summer expected to be hotter than ever, the duo’s exhibition Guhong & Yoonkee, held for a month from July 3 to August 3, 2024, at Gallery Jiwooheon, tells a story about the two, made by the two together. In a space nestled among unpretentious hanok houses, they unfold their story in their own way. For this, Min Guhong enlisted the help of his one-person company Min Guhong Manufacturing to produce 20 Ways to Fall in Love with Canvas, a creative manual proposing various ways to fill a canvas. Kim Yoonkee randomly selected five methods and made a total of twenty works on canvas. Created separately and together, these works, like their activities, sometimes sound like music and sometimes read like novels. Their beautiful challenge—appropriating yesterday and unsettling the order of creation—offers viewers room for new interpretations.

Evolving where tradition and modernity, music and visual art, literature and technology meet, their work bends the boundaries of art and opens new perspectives on creation. Beyond simply combining genres, it is a process in which different senses and ways of thinking meet to open new artistic horizons. Guhong & Yoonkee is thus a fresh challenge born of the two artists’ experimental spirit and creativity, and an occasion to expand the possibilities of contemporary art and seek communication with the public.

For reference, their motto is “Let Us Play!” It can be read in two ways: “Allow us to play!” and “Let’s play!” It is a call to pursue creative freedom and pleasure beyond solemn, authoritative views of art, and an invitation for viewers to enjoy and participate actively rather than merely contemplate artworks passively.

How did you come to form a duo?

For more than ten years, we had helped each other out: Kim Yoonkee would perform at the opening of Min Guhong’s exhibition, or Min Guhong would design Kim Yoonkee’s album cover. Wanting to do something together came very naturally.

Why did you choose music as your subject?

Music brings us joy. This is true for the musician Kim Yoonkee, of course, and especially for Min Guhong, who grew up listening to his music. Min names Golden Mean Man and Portable Jesus among his favorite tracks. He was also a longtime subscriber to MDM, Monthly Deadly Medley, a magazine Kim Yoonkee contributed to. In a word, he was a fan.

How does what Yoonkee & Guhong intend to do meet or diverge from your individual practices?

Yoonkee & Guhong is a story about a gap we discovered while each was alone. It is the result of borrowing each other to fill the gap between Kim Yoonkee’s and Min Guhong’s respective states of being alone.

You made twenty works for this exhibition. Kim Yoonkee selected five of the twenty rules proposed by Min Guhong and turned them into paintings.

A while ago, Kim Yoonkee asked Min Guhong to design an album cover. Already deeply interested in AI technology, Min Guhong provided a design prompt instead of attempting the design himself, and Kim Yoonkee designed the cover accordingly. The Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC, happened to take place on June 10, and ChatGPT was reportedly soon to be neatly integrated into iOS, bringing AI closer to everyday reality. How will artists’ roles change when the line between AI and humans grows blurry? Like prompt engineers who instruct computers through prompts, will artists also come to design rules and conditions and make works accordingly? This exhibition, in which Kim Yoonkee humanly gathered into a basket the rules and conditions mechanically generated by Min Guhong, is a preliminary experiment looking toward that future. Of course, it may be an old future already imagined and practiced by the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt.

How did you arrive at the twenty rules, such as “Draw a horizontal line on the canvas in any color and thickness” and “Write a Korean word that comes to mind now”?

Min Guhong analyzed Kim Yoonkee’s existing works, put their techniques into words, and organized them into twenty rules. He was curious about the results of making works by recombining those rules.

Did you have criteria for applying the rules?

Kim Yoonkee sometimes applied five rules and sometimes only one. Min Guhong’s twenty rules allowed Kim Yoonkee to exercise his own interpretation and style within infinite freedom. By selecting five rather than following every rule, he wanted to assert his agency as an artist. Art, after all, flourishes within constraints. Recognizing the given limits and exercising originality—is that not the artist’s true talent? Creating twenty works from five rules is also like endlessly varying a single theme. As one melody can yield many arrangements and performances, Kim Yoonkee brought different feelings and interpretations to each work within the same rules. Art is ultimately the act of making something new with the same materials. Kim Yoonkee’s twenty works are improvised melodies drawn on the score of rules, twenty variables produced by one algorithm.

Your collaboration crosses the boundary between language and painting. What does painting mean to Yoonkee & Guhong?

Painting is a classical art form that has represented human feeling. For Kim Yoonkee, it is both a meditation on his inner world and a metaphorical language for communicating with the world. Min Guhong conveys his messages through coding, the language of the digital age. Yoonkee & Guhong is also a meeting of analog and digital, past and present. Above all, we chose painting because it is the most primal and essential form of expression. Kim Yoonkee says, “Painting is simple and nice.” The images and colors unfolding on canvas stir viewers’ feelings and expand their imaginations. It is no coincidence that his works feel like music: rhythm and melody, harmony and discord coexist in them.

Min Guhong also made a web-based video collecting the texts of the collaborative rules. What interaction between video and painting did you intend?

Painting is fundamentally physical and fixed, but conceptually nonphysical and fluid. A web-based text video is fundamentally nonphysical and fluid, but conceptually physical and fixed. Everything holds this kind of duality. This is the “order and chaos” that Yoonkee & Guhong pursue. Min Guhong’s video work attempts to interpret and vary Kim Yoonkee’s paintings in another dimension. What chemistry might arise around the edges when painting, a still image, meets video, a moving image? Viewers will think of the video while looking at the paintings, and of the paintings while watching the video. Reflecting each other as if in a mirror, the two merge into one in the viewer’s perception. This reveals how art flows and communicates freely across the boundaries of media. One work breathes life into another, and the new work in turn influences the original. Like lovers with different tongues in continual conversation, Yoonkee & Guhong’s works whisper love in their own languages. When Kim Yoonkee’s canvas meets Min Guhong’s language, their romance is finally complete.

Did Jiwooheon’s spatial character influence the exhibition or the works?

The hanok structure itself did not influence the exhibition planning or the making of the works. What drew our attention was that Jiwooheon had originally been the private retreat of Design House’s president, Lee Younghye. Someone’s intimate taste opened to the public: this in itself touches on the nature of an exhibition. An exhibition is ultimately an act of exposing private taste. The courage to lay the artist’s soul bare to the audience’s gaze.

How does Yoonkee & Guhong’s motto, “Let Us Play!”, appear in this exhibition?

“Let Us Play!” can be read in two ways: “Allow us to play!” and “Let’s play!” Both readings evoke puppies running through a field. Play is an important force driving production. Playing is enjoyable, but watching someone else play is enjoyable too. This exhibition has allowed us to play, while also inviting viewers into that play.

There are currently three tracks on the Yoonkee & Guhong website. What work will we see there in the future?

So far, it has really been a beta-testing period. We intend to continue activities befitting the description “web-based music duo.” To put it in Kim Yoonkee’s terms, we may soon be displaying soap wrapped in baskets.