South Korean architect, Minsuk Cho, has created Archipelagic Void outside The Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. I went to see it yesterday.
The title makes no sense to me but maybe it has been translated badly from Korean – what do you think? 군도 공허
It was hard to interpret it visually. Perhaps its components are the archipelago and the empty spaces are the void? Here is what I saw yesterday.
The orange netting is a climbing frame. Journalists were invited to use it at the opening. Nobody was using it yesterday and frankly it looked a bit dangerous. For risk-adverse visitors there’s a cafe – a sine qua non for Serpentine pavilions – a library called Unread Books and a sound installation inside the barn with purple plastic windows. I missed all that.
If you want to make sense of Minsuk Cho’s vision look at it from above, which of course you can only do by looking at a photograph.
Possibly I would have preferred Yinka Shonibare’s exhibition inside the gallery: Suspended States. He is a British-Nigerian artist with a CBE to his name. I’d never heard of him but a review in The Guardian displays familiarity with his work and asserts it hasn’t changed a jot in more than twenty years. If it’s good why change anything, I assert. But I did not see the exhibition because dogs are not welcome. Instead we went to Ognisko, where Bertie always gets a big hello, to meet a friend for lunch.