Kyungwoo Chun
Two works including Most Beautiful, 2024, Performance and installation. Courtesy of the artist. ⓒ Kyungwoo Chun.
Inspired by the 2016 artwork* of the same name, Most Beautiful is a participatory project instantiated at the PODO Museum. The artist invites the audience to participate in a drawing performance, sketching the face of “the most beautiful person in the world, the one (you) most want to see.” Any museum visitor who wishes to participate may enter a small booth set in the center of the exhibition hall, one at a time, and draw the face that is most precious and beautiful to them—all while keeping their eyes closed. As the wall of the museum gradually fills up with these anonymous portraits, participants find themselves recreating the “most beautiful person” they can think of via a necessarily imperfect approach. In this way, Kyungwoo Chun (b. 1969) demonstrates that beauty lives in the memory and emotion of the individual, and that despite the impossibility of perfect expression, the meaning and value of this artistic endeavor is found in the process.
*Produced in France in 2016, Most Beautiful was a project in which a group of street sweepers in the suburbs of Paris were asked, upon returning from their shifts at dawn, to close their eyes and sketch the face of “the person (they) most wanted to see in the world.”
