Gyeongnam Provincial Museum of Art

Caring Society is a project that proposes ‘caring’ as a way to pursue the sustenance of life in the time of continuing disaster in everyday life.

Let’s think of the word ‘care.’ What comes to mind range from the ‘additional class for childcare’ and ‘care center for the disabled’ to ‘tailored care service for the elderly’... Caring seems to be something for ‘particular’ kinds of people who are considered to be in need of help. However, let’s take another thought on caring. Can anyone live without giving and receiving care to and from others? In fact, we all experience caring from birth to death. In this sense, humans are not independent and active subjects but imperfect beings that are in need of each other. Thus, interdependence is the essential precondition of our lives.

1. 문지영, 가장 보통의 존재, 2015, 캔버스에 유채, 130.3×162.2cm

However, caring has been devalued as it could not produce profit in the modern capitalist society and is regarded as an invisible and private activity within family relations. Since caring has been delegated to the market, it was outsourced and commodified, finally reproduced as low-wage labor and allocated to the vulnerable class, migrants, and the poor who live in the Third World. Caring shares the painful reality of beings who have been excluded from the history of indifference. In this sense, caring shares the painful reality of those who had gradually been excluded through ignorance.

The rampant spread of a pandemic in recent years exposed the blind spot of caring in a dramatic manner. The primary places impacted by the disaster were where caring had been suspended, such as the medical staff at quarantine sites who still suffer from the pressure of their work, the vulnerable children that are left without care due to the extended closure of schools, and various protection and correctional facilities that are prone to group infections. In the end, the crisis was also connected to everyone’s daily life.

Caring Society invests in the belief that art can lead us to the horizon of thinking and practice on things that should be considered important at any time even in tragic circumstances. As such, the exhibition investigates the structures of care in contemporary society and the conditions for drawing care to the center of our lives. According to The Care Collective, a multidisciplinary research group on caring, caring is a common ability possessed by everyone. Caring provides political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive—along with the planet itself.*

As a project, Caring Society employs The Care Collective’s notion of care. It aims to explore the structure of caring and asks for the new possibility of caring with six artists from Korea and beyond. As such, the project will shed light on the concrete realities where the requests and responses of caring are manifested. At the same time, it invites us to synesthetically perceive how the practices of caring for one’s body, family, community, and the earth can be organically connected and operated. The practices presented in the exhibition approach the multi-layered structure of caring that intersect pressing imminent global issues such as disease and disability, physical restrictions, labor insecurity, migrant communities, and environmental pollution.

The exhibition begins by examining the current symptoms that show how the dichotomous conditions and policies defining pain such as disease and disability in contemporary society have been affecting our perceptions and attitudes toward caring. When we understand that caring for a sick body is a process of embracing the fundamental human fragility, delicacy, and imperfections, we begin to sense the power of resistance and recovery that manifests through caring. In addition, the exhibition considers how everyday practices of taking care of oneself soundly can become an effort to reach others beyond hate and discrimination that are prevalent in our society. Further, it investigates the emotional and physical resonance of caring relations, tracing the affect generated in the process of giving and receiving care. Finally, the exhibition reaches an end by asking what it means to live in the uncertain future with the focus on the caring relationship—feeling a little more of each other’s existence, facing each other, having conversations, and living together.

Caring Society is an attempt to connect knowledge and practice through contemporary art. It is hoped that the exhibition will provide an opportunity to overcome rampant carelessness, and rethink a better life caring for ourselves and each other.

* The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, Verso Books, 2021, p. 18.