Marking Gallery VER’s 20th anniversary, Jinjoon Lee’s solo exhibition The Sacred Mountain asks what we hold sacred, and how we might sustain our relationship with nature and with machines, in an age when AI treats even the human mind and memory as things to be decoded and reconstructed.
The exhibition brings together the artist’s daily breath, hands that burn and polish driftwood, a machine that repeats a ritual, sound generated by a model built on the connectome of a fruit fly, and a mountain remembered from the artist’s childhood hometown. Audiences walk into a symphony orchestrated by the artist and become part of it.
In Thailand, Mount Sumeru stands at the centre of the Buddhist cosmos. The meru, the crematorium of a Thai temple, is named after this mountain, and Thai funerals traditionally conclude in fire. Charred driftwood gathered in Thailand is placed alongside a mountain burning on screen, while a machine repeats the gestures of mourning.
When a machine performs ritual gestures, is the longing within them transmitted? When a vanished landscape is regenerated, where does the time lived there persist? As resolution effaces mystery, where does the sacred dwell? Can art still set us free, and can nature still save us?
information provided by event organizer
