Stop

This work was installed as part of a Nine Dragon Heads exhibition at the Cheong-ju Public Art Gallery in Cheong-Ju City, South Korea.

Materials are Korean script, masking tape, aluminuim plate and existing glass.

The rudely phrased instruction to Stop! was written in Hangul using masking tape and located on a glass partition at the top of the stairs leading into the gallery space. The work was placed so that everyone entering would be likely to see it on their way up the stairs.

Stop! was related to a performance the week before Please Wait - Wait - Stop!,  both works referring to an environmental protest against the Saemangeum Embankment completed in 2006. The protest movement that attempted and failed to save significant coastal wetlands from being destroyed by a massive development that spanned 25 years.

The shifts in language raise deceptively simple questions about who an intended audience for a particular message is.  For instance the Korean environment protest actions used English text on several occasions (words such as SOS and STOP!), presumably intended to generate an image for an international media rather than Korean Government.

In the context of an international art event in Korea where the default language is English, few participants seem in anyway self-concious about producing images that are also essentially about the West speaking to itself...a relocated art paradigm that does not recognise it's own solipsistic tendencies. This is another observation that I was attempting with this work.

Non Korean speaking persons, including most of my co exhibitors, who were unable to understand the meaning of the text understood the work only as a modestly decorative image, only able to see it as aesthetic texture.

For Korean speaking visitors the rudeness of the text was also potentially alienating. I was hoping however that by placing it in the gallery context would establish that I was doing something intentionally, and cause some people to take a moment and consider why I might have done such a thing. My intent was that the tone would convey urgency rather than arrogance. The rude sign was clearly  unreasonable, what was meant by calling for the visitors to stop before they had yet entered? It was insisting that something should cease, but what exactly was unclear and therefore impossible to obey. Some people paused uncomfortably halfway up the stairs, looking around them doubtfully for the reason for the stricture.

The work is also part of an ongoing inquiry into urban control systems with a particular interest in how these occur in public spaces. A key question for this series of work: where control systems become a process of social agreement, normalised and shifted into a form of vernacular. A goal for the work is to expose mechanisms of social consent to cultural restriction where the role of choice in social mechanisms (to obey or not to obey) becomes apparent.