WE CALL THIS WORK

Like a three-dimensional photograph made of ceramic, Cain’s floor-piece bears the physical traces of labor. Collaborating with LC members (the Learning Council is the body of Korean citizens, artists and Artistic Director who worked together to make the ”Garden of Learning”), the artist asked people to perform daily activities at their workplace.Cain was particularly interested in contemporary work processes (in the service industry, for example) where the physical body is almost absent.To register the body’s imprints, a large group of wet clay tiles was laid out on the floor. The people remembered and demonstrated their movements on this precarious stage. Tiles inevitably cracked in the process of firing, which – as one participant mentioned – might be a strong metaphor for the unpredictable nature of work processes.The artist added several clay balls and pipes to the glazed tiles, thereby suggesting a family of forms whose orthodoxy stems from the minimalist repertoire. Cain’s ambition, however, is less to create a museological narrative for his work than to re-infuse modernist forms with their once original connection – to the presence of bodies and the materiality of labor.