HAEAHN PAUL KWON KAJANDER

Interview Ben Shannon Installation photos Franz Kaka Portrait Ben Shannon

In background: For Other Fears, 2019 lacquer, glutinous rice powder, textiles, ash powder, textiles

Stepping out of the cool, grey, damp autumn drizzle and into the clean, warm, white of the Franz Kaka gallery felt like someone had suddenly smashed the global reset button. Gone were the low, dreary, fall clouds. Spread out before me now is a clean, quiet, well-lit laboratory with equations on the wall. Puzzles worthy of Alan Turing beaconing to be solved.  

Viewing each piece as a stand-alone work of art is impressive, but it’s only once I start moving around the gallery that I begin to unravel the reoccurring motifs. A pattern in metal is repeated somewhere else in fabric, a concept in a photo is echoed across the room in lacquer. An expertly crafted thesis on Western-fuelled urbanization in South Korea begins to bubble to the surface. 

It was at this moment when I was deepest in contemplation and least aware of my surroundings that a door behind me opened. I was no longer walking in the woods alone. The creative collective HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander had entered the gallery. My guides had arrived.  

BS: You originally hail from South Korea (HaeAhn) and from Vancouver (Paul) — how did your paths first cross?

Paul Kajander: We were in Seoul and we met at the opening of an art exhibition and were fast friends. Then gradually, we became romantically involved and later collaborators.

HaeAhn Kwon: Yeah, we've been collaborating unofficially for a couple for years and we've been officially collaborating now for about a year… almost a year now.

Paul Kajander: I think we've been collaborating for longer than a year. Officially HaeAhn and I first performed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.  HaeAhn was a performer/backup singer in an exhibition called “All the Instruments Agree” that was curated around the idea of artists who have a musical side-project. That was one of the first creative projects presented publicly.

HaeAhn Kwon: Right! And earlier, back in Seoul, I invited Paul to perform in a music event at ArtSonje Center in Korea.

BS: Can you take me through the process of how the collaboration goes from concept to finished object?

Paul Kajander: No [laughs] we can't take you through that process. We don’t… it’s mysterious to us as well. A lot of the times it begins with a material curiosity and maybe a preoccupation… either an idea or history that we're mining for opportunities to respond to some condition, or some situation, or some circumstance. Then we, through a lot of exchange and a lot of attention to gestures and means of bringing things together, enter into this responsive dialogue where “it shouldn't be like this, or it should be like this, or it could grow like this, or what if we do this? What if we turn it this way? What if we add this or what if we approach it a new from a totally different direction?” And finally, we arrive at a point where we feel like, “OK this is something that could leave the studio.” 

HaeAhn Kwon: I think we both like to respond to things. A lot of improvisation is involved in the collaboration and many times, I would say, the process is about being open to each other and being vulnerable with our own insecurities. Or our temperament or our inklings. So, sometimes, Paul would take the lead in thinking about certain ideas, or a vision of something and then I would follow up… you know, once he had his own kind of path of making it, then I would respond. But it's not like, “now you go.” It's a much more porous and organic process.

Paul Kajander: I think we’ve realized over the past couple of years that we enjoy the arrangement of things. To arrange a situation or objects or materials, whether with some fixity or whether it’s temporary, brings us a lot of joy.  It’s really a way of prompting thoughts or responses in much the same way that poetry can make you think. Like when this word is next to this word, it starts to activate a different part of your imaginative process, your frame of reference, or your experiences. One of our favorite poets is C.A. Conrad and he has this attitude of “Oh, come on! Try not to collaborate!” emphasizing that it's almost impossible not to be collaborating or influencing one another in some way.

HaeAhn Kwon: And on that note, I would like to add that the reason why our names are intertwined is to kind of antagonize, or try to question that sense of strong identity that gets attached to the brand name that is the artist's name. And so it is really hard to remember what our name is [laughs].

Paul Kajander: [laughs] We get so much flak for the name. Everybody says it's too long.


BS: Well, you’re talking about the juxtaposition of ideas, but to organize and slot two names together is a lot more involved than just putting one beside the other.

HaeAhn Kwon: Yeah.

Paul Kajander: True. I think that became interesting to us also in terms of thinking about a patriarchal lineage. The way we've organized our names actually puts a little distance between us and our fathers’ names. [laughs]

Plaid Obscene (detail), 2019

BS: How do you decide when a work is finished? Do you have to reach a consensus? Or can one person just say, “That one's done leave it alone.”

Paul Kajander: Well, what immediately comes to mind is the amount of trust that's implicit. There can be argument or disagreement in that process, but generally the arguments are small and don't take up a lot of time because usually one of us has a clearer sense of where this one thing needs to go or the direction we want to take it. And that usually has activated the other in thinking, “oh yeah that is a good solution.” 

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes. I don't mean to infantilized our practice, but, a lot of times, the way I feel about the collaboration is that it allows me to play. So when I feel like I'm done playing with the piece is when I can say, “I think this is done.” It's a lot of that sequence of arrangement that we do, and so after a certain cycle, we just kind of land. Partially also because of deadlines but also just the sense of you feeling like you're done playing with something.

Paul Kajander: We realized through the process of installing and putting an exhibition together that, in fact, nothing is ever really done with any finality. There's no sense of, “this is now fixed,” and it can never be shown another way. We’re both definitely prone to reincorporating past works or new iterations of works. So that may be a way of thinking about how the exhibition is almost a distillation of where and how certain works are now. That's not to say that there might not be some alterations or changes if the works come back to the studio and we spend more time with them or have an opportunity to present them elsewhere.

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes, that kind of suggests how we like to undermine preciousness in our works, which also has to do with how we let things feel a little more impermanent.  That's how we engage with the objects — with a sense of, “Yeah, they can be rearranged.” It can kind of reappear or be recycled in a way. 

Paul Kajander: Maybe some fragility is there in the way that we want to antagonize or question the status of the discrete art object that's complete, unfinished and somewhat untouchable. I think that's part of the ethics. Things are as done as they are at the moment of presentation, but there's no guaranteeing they won’t change.

HaeAhn Kwon: [laughs] Which is another way to say that we're pretty indecisive.


BS: I like that idea. It is its own thing once it's out of your control, but it's still living and breathing if it's in your hands. Were there particular works in this show that you find conceptually or aesthetically triumphs for you guys?

HaeAhn Kwon: Triumph? The entire show! [laughs] I like to think of it that way because I want the viewer to experience each work as a part of the whole. And that's why I think it's an installation, not individual sculptures so much.

Paul Kajander: Yeah I'm just still stuck on the idea of “triumph” and I would love for the title of this interview to be The Triumph of HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander. [laughs] Gosh, we're so not able to think in terms of, “triumph.” In the case of this show, maybe a way of answering that question is to look very specifically at the material exploration — working with traditional lacquer for the first time. We've never worked with it before and we seem to keep doing this to ourselves. We take on a medium that we've never tried before… like we made a bunch of wooden blocks without ever having made wood blocks before, and as we were working on them, we were thinking, “Huh. It’s funny that we continue to choose things that we have no idea will work out for sure or not.” That kind of an adrenalized sense of whether or not something will achieve a level of resolution might be a part of the methodology. 

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes, it’s kind of like dealing with a constant state of unknowing.

Paul Kajander: If you go really lofty, maybe that's also a reflection of the precarity of our times generally. I mean, up until two weeks before we left Seoul, we were seeing that some of these lacquer works were having a hard time drying. We began wondering, are we going to be able to get these back to Toronto? Will they pass through customs if they're still a viscus, strange-looking, scabby substance? Will there be an exhibition? But I think so many artists work that way. Up until the day the show opens you're working until the last minute and suddenly — there's the show!

HaeAhn Kwon: And I think that that sense of “not knowing” just adds to the experimentation.

« We become a lot more conscious about climate realities and the urgency with which we have to respond. »

Scab Brick with Excavator Inlay (detail), 2019

BS: Can you tell me a little bit about the environmentally conscious angle of using this lacquer?

Paul Kajander: Well, throughout the last couple of years, we've both been increasingly concerned with the byproduct of waste that artists often produce. We're guilty of having used materials that have an environmental impact. It's just something we feel conscious of in terms of the weight of shipping the sculpture or the materials needed for an installation. It’s a complex relationship.  The desires we have to be moved, changed, or to respond to work in a space, but also to feel a commitment to material practice. 

So, working with lacquer really arose through some research. We discovered that this dry lacquer technique, where you simply use fabric and natural materials like glutinous rice powder, ash, and lacquer would allow us to make these hollow husks that have a lot more durability than papier mâché, for example. Lacquer is really durable, heat resistant, insect resistant and can be used to make relief work as we've done here. It also offers a lot of possibilities to think about sculpture. In ongoing work, we want to investigate this material because it's naturally derived. It just comes from the sap of a tree, so it also feels like a sustainable way of working. Even acrylic paint: once you wash your brushes, all that acrylic, all those molecules go into our wastewater. I think that's something that so many artists are thinking about these days as we become a lot more conscious about climate realities and the urgency with which we have to respond.

We love to ask people to pick up that brick sculpture because it's a hollow form, so it's incredibly light! It’s something we can carry ourselves. As opposed to shipping work through the kind of usual circuits of an international art exhibition. There's usually a lot of material that goes into moving things around the planet. 

HaeAhn Kwon: Leaving a large carbon footprint.

Paul Kajander: Yes. So things that are light and sustainable in terms of their materials feels really exciting to us. We don't imagine that we'll be exclusively committed to only working with those materials, but we have an interest in taking on more practices that uses that kind of environmentally friendly consciousness.

HaeAhn Kwon: I also love the way lacquer is super versatile. It adheres to glass, ceramics, metal, pretty much any surface, and yet it's very durable. It's something that I personally have been looking for for a very long time. Something that is simultaneously paint, glue and resin. It can be kind of applied in such a way that it's just a surface, or to create these different textures, or it can be used to create forms. 

Paul Kajander: It can be shiny. It can be matte. It can be gloopy, gathered and textured… 

HaeAhn Kwon: But it can also be kind of… spontaneous. It depends a lot on the climate that it's drying in. So it feels like an art organism when you work with. 

Paul Kajander: It's another collaborator in a way because we don't know as things are drying exactly how they're going to turn out. There's a chance element in the way that certain parts of it pool and gather differently depending on how we've mixed it, treated it, or how much humidity we've exposed it to. I think we found that it was both a conceptual thread and a material thread.

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes. You know, the hollow lacquer forms of the things that we cast? They're kind of husks or ghosts of the found objects.

Paul Kajander: Maybe there's some melancholy in there too. Thinking about what these structures were. They come from urban infrastructure like sewer covers, burglar bars or paving bricks. Domestic security and protection devices.

BS: So you’re able to leave the object where it is but bring with you the idea — an index or an impression of “it.” 

Paul Kajander: Right. And also lighten the load as it were. 

BS: Other artists, like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons are using the most opulent materials, like rare metals, diamonds or even butterflies. Do you think your more environmental approach to art is just your personal journey?  Or, do you think that we as artists should be trying to work more with the earth, to try to have a balance with it… instead of just pillaging it for art's sake?

Paul Kajander: I would feel uncomfortable suggesting that artists should or shouldn't do anything because I'm quite often moved by a work that might not use environmental materials. I think one of the more harrowing features of capitalism is that — thanks to a previous generation of short-sighted powerful individuals — the artists of the future would be limited. That feels heartbreaking to me. 

So I wouldn't want to suggest that there's only this one way forward. It’s part of a conversation that we're having with a lot of peers. What can we do with what's already here, for example? One of the artistic tenets that I think we sometimes explore is this Douglas Huebler line, “There are already enough ideas in the world.” [“The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in terms of time and place.”] So, we could maybe just arrange the ideas that are here, and we could just arrange the materials that are here. In some sense working with found objects and materials feel a little bit more sustainable, and that certainly activates a way for us to feel excited about some future projects.  However, I also know that the minerals that are in the chips of my laptop are incredibly flawed and contradict a lot of our own motivations to be environmentally conscious.

HaeAhn Kwon: I think we wouldn't want to moralize. Moralizing only leads to debilitating a sense of creativity, and I don't think that's our intention. We're just really excited to share this material and share our excitement about this material. This pre-capitalist knowledge is allowing us to actually do something now that is mindful of the environment. 

« What can we do with what’s already here? One of the artistic tenets that we sometimes explore is this Douglas Huebler line, “There are already enough ideas in the world.” So, we could maybe just arrange the ideas and the materials that are here. »

BS: You are definitely leading by example. You are showing that these are viable materials. They produce a finished product that is on a par with something that requires tons of effort and waste.

HaeAhn Kwon: Using lacquer is not about moralizing a certain aesthetics. We just love letting people know about it. It really is a very uncommon material. I mean, I guess my enthusiasm tells that [laughs] people don't know about this! 

I think a lot of people in the West don’t know much about it partially because the tree doesn't grow here. The climate here just doesn't allow for it, but also it's categorized as a toxin or toxic material because it has this poison called urushiol which is like a poison ivy. So it gives you an allergic reaction, but Koreans kind of joke about it. Like, “Oh you don't die from it.” 

I'm not saying that everybody should suffer urushiol rashes, but I wonder how much of our fear of contamination kind of… well, how many boundaries do we create for ourselves, right? It's just our worrywart mindset. We want to be more conscious of that. 

Jail Needs to Feel Like a Home, 2019 Archival print on paper, acrylic case

BS: Can you tell me a little bit about home as a prison? [referring to the piece Jail Needs to Feel Like a Home]

HaeAhn Kwon: Wow that's an amazing question. I'm glad you asked that. It's very complicated. It has so many layers.  I relate to this idea from multiple points of view. Being an Asian woman in the West, the idea of home is really tied to colonialism for me. Home is what has been colonized. So, dealing with that history of modernization through Korean industrialization, the new liberalism in Korea… All of that has to do with the idea of home. That is not… free. 

Paul Kajander: The imagery we're working with tries to open up some questions around the necessity of having burglar bars on a home. These notions of modern urbanization took hold in South Korea subsequent to the Korean War. The idea of private property and a home that resembles the aspirational model, of say, the US. South Korea imported certain notions about what constitutes a “civilized,” domestic space. The idea that you need a yard and grass; these are all features that don't exist commonly in South Korea today. 

Also, as we were looking at the kind of material history surrounding burglar bars, the ones that we were drawn to come from this mid-century, non-standardized period.  When all the windows were different sizes, different shapes. The bars were clearly handmade by a metal worker. Nowadays, they're being replaced by aluminum bars which look exactly like the cartoon iconic image of a jail cell.

I think one of the irresolvable conundrums about private space and the aspiration to own property is kind of at the core of this question of neoliberalism. Ownership of land is the way in which you keep people out — either intruders who will do violence to you or people who want to take your stuff. In a way, you’re creating a sort of jail. That's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it became an interest for us. A way to think about how quite often through our exhaustion, fatigue or our sense of the place that we have in society is to erect boundaries, walls, borders, et cetera, instead of looking at some of the systemic problems which might result in thefts or violence.

We would sooner imprison ourselves and be stressed out about maintaining our ability to acquire goods. To strive to earn enough to accumulate more stuff, as opposed to going, “Hey wait a second, why do those people from the next district over want to come in here while we're on vacation and steal our stuff?” What might that be an indication of?

So I think this title [Jail Needs to Feel Like a Home], which HaeAhn really came up with, manages to articulate all of that. In a way, it’s almost beguilingly familiar, and the image resonates with some of those questions about private property and private space.

HaeAhn Kwon: Yeah. Within that work specifically is a lot about private property in relation to the way modernism was imported to Korea through Japanese occupation and the way we recognize that as a Western audience.


BS: Your work also shows pages from an old catalog advertising that there were Korean craftsmen ready to make tweed and tartan for the world market.  Then directly beside that you have burglar bars that mimic the same tartan patterns. As if the bars are an immediate byproduct of the riches brought about by doing business with the West. Like the power of craft has given too much wealth and now it must be protected from others.  So if those are pages from a catalogue advertising South Korean craftsmen from the past, are the business cards underneath that lacquer brick you mentioned earlier from current South Korean craftsmen?

Paul Kajander: Exactly!

We felt it was important to use manufacturers locally while we were in Seoul.  The district Euljiro is facing a lot of re-urbanization and renewal, which is starting to push out those people who have workshops and studio spaces, labourers working with specific materials such as steel and aluminum.  We were interested in working with them.

I think part of that is a desire to use our economic agency so we can support a person who is up for improvising with us. We sort of enter into a dialogue with them and then the finished result is done within a couple of days. They'll make something of a very high level of quality but without a lot of the kind of bureaucratic or administrative procedures that we find quite commonly in North America. The cards underneath that brick are from the people that we worked with. We really wanted to include them and the brick that we cast in lacquer was also from that area.

As we were working, we started to see more and more of these excavators just razing entire parts of Euljiro. Which sadly doesn't really mean much to anybody apart from us. All the pearl inlays on that Brick are silhouettes of the excavators, diggers and their tank treads. We traced them onto different shells, pieces of mother of pearl, abalone and snail, and then cut them out. It's almost unrecognizable but there's a lot of pushing and pulling with decorative impulses here. For us, putting Pearl inlay onto this brick, this infrastructural paving stone, it's all so tied with the idea of urban development.

Then to have this kind of absurdly light paperweight brick holding down some of the cards that acknowledge the craftsmanship and the work of these people from that area that helped facilitated the production of parts of our work — work that, given the constrictions of our budget and our kind of spontaneity, I don’t think we would have been able to make in Toronto.

HaeAhn Kwon: I want to emphasize that it’s our way of honouring the craftsman of this district in Korea that are being basically force evicted, forced out of the city because of the urban development within Seoul.  It’s not all black and white though, because the modes of production within that district are outdated so the workers are not protected, but, it has this beautiful ecosystem of labor distribution. It's nostalgic.  I think it relates to us also given the real estate crises within Toronto. Here young people are also being forced out of the city. 

Empty Itch, 2019 lacquer, glutinous rice powder, textiles, ash powder, over-sized zippers

It Fits (Center Outside), 2019, door-bell from abandoned Gaeryang Hanok, sea-shell, beetle

BS: You do see a lot with traditional crafts people being pushed out by modernization. It’s very sad, but thankfully artists like yourselves, Ai Weiwei, Alan Belcher and Annie Koyama are able to collaborate with some of these traditional Eastern craftsman before they are pushed out. Comparing the two countries, who has gotten urbanization more wrong or more right?  Canada or South Korea? 

HaeAhn Kwon: I'm kind of recognizing that the public transportation system doesn't work in Toronto and that is partially because of the private ownership of all these cars. With no reliable public transportation people just default into having a car. In the 90s in Seoul they had to go through this transition period where they started building bus lanes. Then the buses became totally reliable. People could get to work on time. That's something that I see as an example of urbanization done right.

Paul Kajander: But, it’s also really important to acknowledge that it's a totally different scale of population, and a lot of the infrastructure in South Korea was built under the auspices of a military dictatorship. Part of the imagery that we were looked at and examined was from this period of state sanctioned, promotion. Showing the world what South Korea was able to do and how others should invest economically in South Korea.  A lot of the images we saw would be people literally holding flaming torches at night illuminating the labourers pouring concrete for the highways.

HaeAhn Kwon: It was called the New Town Movement.

Paul Kajander: Right! Or people digging the trenches for sewer systems which didn't get implemented until the 60s! Kids, grandmothers — everybody had a shovel. I can't imagine Canadians being willing to answer that call. [laughs] 

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes. It's the rhetoric of overworking, right? That's the legacy that Korea has now. Where people feel like they have to be over-productive. That's from this history of violent industrialization. 

Paul Kajander:  For me, as an outsider, each time I get on the subway I'm saying to myself: “it costs $1.20 to take the subway and it's so efficient? Amazing! How come we don't have a functioning rail system? How come we don't have buses that run on time?” That would be incredible. But it’s all tied to this really complex history. 

Scab Brick with Excavator Inlay (detail), 2019

BS: Will you explore that in your further works? Or, is there something else that you plan to tackle?

Paul Kajander: I think we have an ongoing relationship with South Korea and that history. It's been part of independent projects for each of us as artists and it's informed a lot of our collaborative work. So, we do plan to go back to pursue more studies and hopefully invite the teacher we learned from to offer lacquer workshops for the community here. Or maybe facilitate some kind of an exchange. 

We also have a stockpile of burglar bars that we have stashed in every available, willing space of friends and family members in South Korea. [laughs] So we still have some work to do with those. 


BS: Can you tell me a little about the mentor who you worked with? The one who trained you in working with lacquer?

HaeAhn Kwon: Yes, he's actually around my age, born in the mid 80s. His name is Oh Jong-Hoon. He's a distributor of lacquer in Korea, but he also had an art education in South Korea through an art university, and fell in love with lacquer after that education. Which basically shows his passion for it.

Paul Kajander: I felt a real affinity with parts of his story because prior to working with lacquer I was really excited about ceramics, and he also began with ceramics. Looking at what ceramic could do but then finding that lacquer actually does all the same things, is less fragile, and doesn’t need a ton of energy to get cooked into it’s solid state.

HaeAhn Kwon:  And that kind of aligns with the way we came to lacquer which was through looking at Eileen Gray's lacquer works, a modernist architect who worked with lacquer in the 30s and 20s. We tried to find a master of the dry lacquer technique within Korea, but often the craftsman or the masters have their own way of doing it. They kind of have these very traditional values about how to use lacquer. So, it was actually very good to find this younger teacher who was much more open to the idea of using lacquer as a “material.” Someone not so attached to their own way of doing things, or a traditional way of doing things. 

Paul Kajander: When we were meeting with some of the older generation of practitioners, we were a little bit concerned. On the one hand, we were very clear we didn’t want to offend our misuse a very prized ability or technique, but we also found that there was such an eagerness to “pass on the torch.” Everybody apparently has their own secret like, add a little tofu at this point and you’ll get a different finish. There are all these kinds of proprietary tricks of the trade. One of the wonderful teachers that we were going to work with was actually demanding six days a week, eight hours a day of our time! We did want to get good, but we didn’t want to get that good! [laughs] 


BS: And you wanted to leave it open as a material for experimentation? 

Paul Kajander:  Totally! It was heartwarming because we would love to apprentice with them if we were just there to become traditional lacquer practitioners and make really nice bowls or something. But that wasn't our M.O. at the time. So our teacher was great because he was like, “You want to do this? Cool! I have some wild ideas for what I might want to do with lacquer too.”  Jong-Hoon was up for experimentation and curious about our position, being more aligned with what he recognized as contemporary art. 

HaeAhn Kwon: He was so excited that we (contemporary artists) were interested in using lacquer. There was such a generosity and kindness on his part, completely different from an economic exchange. Not like bartering for sessions or structured classes. Basically it was just the best way to be introduced to lacquer — through his spirit of generosity and sharing of knowledge. 

Paul Kajander: A lot of camaraderie. 

HaeAhn Kwon: Yeah.