In 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…100, Sohn will reflect upon living in an increasingly expensive city. She will address experiences of displacement and relocation, and themes that have emerged from them such as control, obsession, idealized space, and melancholia.

In the middle of the gallery Sohn will sit beside a three-inch tall abstracted steel house, striking the house 100 times with a metal hammer, while counting each strike aloud. Next to her, a stack of white paper is already cut to manifest as a self-standing house when folded in half. With every 100 strikes, Sohn will realize one paper house. The paper houses will slowly fill the gallery as the steel house loses its form. Through the repetitive nature of this work, Sohn will embody and process the forces that have influenced the way she lives, and also respond to these forces by acting out.

“All my works are essentially both physical and mental challenges which I must endure with both sincerity and irony to achieve a quantifiable answer,” Sohn says.

In the front window of the gallery, a looped video will play throughout the course of the exhibition, showing Sohn traveling around different Bay Area neighborhoods while reading aloud the house numbers. The viewer will not be able to tell which house she is reading from or on what street she is standing.

Minji Sohn (b. 1990, Japan) is an artist based in San Francisco. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a B.F.A. in 2012, and received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in May 2015. The obsessive, repetitive nature of Sohn’s practice illustrates an attempt to control and the inherent failure that exists within this attempt. Through performance, installation, and object making, Sohn visualizes the dilemmas between order and chaos, pleasure and pain, and sincerity and cynicism. She has exhibited at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Right Window in San Francisco, Bass and Reiner Gallery in San Francisco, and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.