RAINBOW LOOP:
TOWARD A SPECTRAL METHOD
DIEGO BEHNCKE ALLAN GARDNER JUNG HSU & SARA WUSOLLEE KIM NICK KLEIN MAKOTO OSHIRO OOLONGRADIO
무지개 고리:
스펙트럼적 사유를 향하여
디에고 벤케 앨런 가드너 룡 슈 & 사라 우 김솔이 닉 클라인 마코토 오시로 우롱라디오
RAINBOW LOOP:
TOWARD A SPECTRAL METHOD
The collaborative trio spoke about the urgency of actualizing their ideas within the canonical and underground art histories that inspired them. Ideas for starting a school in the lineage of Black Mountain College, CalArts, or The Bauhaus were floated. Key Sound, New Media, and technologically optimistic festivals like Ars Electronica—as well as a wide swath of artist-led exhibition spaces that fostered transitory and definition-evading practices—were spoken about and romanticized over, as was the possibility of residencies where artists could formulate work on a “clean slate”, leaving the exhibition open to being something that would have no pretense outside of its own process. In the end, the trio created work and coalesced a group of artists they admired, who engage the multiplicity of form, and who root collaboration and exchange as a basis for how they make art.
In a moment in time where art can often parody itself, bottlenecked as a static ritual of consumption and indifference, Rainbow Loop : Toward a Spectral Method calls for a positive disruption in the formatting and presuppositions of the phenomenology of the art experience. Diego Behncke and Sollee Kim employ large-scale sculptural installations: While Behncke utilizes ghosts and apparitions to explore notions of depersonalization through spatial and social relations, Kim deploys a hyper-personal narrative around her relationship to her cochlea, using modular sculptural forms that embrace the viewer through intimate arrangements of form and sound.
Allan Gardner and oolongradio both play on grounded art histories and the development of future histories within the exhibition. Gardner mines contemporary art history to evoke key figures of minimalism and imbues them with his personal narratives of Scottish folkloric themes. In parallel, oolongradio subverts the geographical, architectural, and functional notions of radio stations, redefining it as a sculpture and temporal disruptor of frequencies between Berlin, Germany, and Daejeon, Korea.
The aim of the project ambitiously challenges conventional exhibition formats that present artistic works as fixed, finite objects, confined to a specific moment in time. Such structures encourage the consumption of art as a completed product, neglecting the fluid and transformative nature of artistic practice. Traditional gallery and museum exhibitions often impose predefined parameters, limiting the potential for spontaneity, process-based creation, and evolving interpretations. In contrast, this project seeks to cultivate an open and dynamic space where artistic practice unfolds continuously, embracing iteration, adaptation, and dialogue.
Unlike other institutional exhibitions bound by market cycles and demands, this project foregrounds artist-led experimentation, enabling autonomous modes of expression. While each participating artist retains a distinct creative identity, the exhibition fosters collective creation alongside active reciprocal dialogue, where works interact, transform, and generate new meanings through shared engagement . This approach repositions the exhibition itself as a site of critical inquiry and artistic becoming.
The use of medial activation, architectural interventions, sound and sculptural repurposing, as well as geographical cues creates an endless variable loop, a “rainbow loop,” where the constant braiding of process-oriented creation defines total understanding, instead inviting the viewer to be in dialogue with an active framework and sit through the complexity of the artists’ decisions in total. While aiming high in its goals of positive corrosions, the exhibition is aware of the great canon of art history it wedges itself to participate inside of. In 2025, with massive shifts in social, economic, and globalizing standards of artistic practice constantly in flux and subject to precarity, the art makers here take a moment to squeeze out reflective catharsis. For now, if this lane for art in the city of Daejeon can be a starting point for new avenues of discussion, then perhaps it can be a model for spontaneous and ecstatic decency amongst people, far beyond the confines of the exhibition space.
Nick Klein, 2025