05 l 2015
Vol. 69
Kim Bong Jung solo Exhibition Cho Yi Kyung solo Exhibition
Addiction 5, 160 x 124.5 εκ. / 63 x 49 in, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2014 Photo : Image provided by Kim Bong Jung
looking for midnight sky, 54x72cm, Stone powder on korean paper, 2014
“My works depict the inner workings of my mind; one that has been About the Act of ‘Seeing’ at the Visual Limit and its Meaning TITLE Cho Yi Kyung solo Exhibition sexually oppressed in order to conform to my cultural Confucianist PLACE Cyart Space TITLE Addiction DURATION 04.02-04.13, 2015 background.” PLACE Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete ARTIST Cho Yi Kyung DURATION 04.08-10.10, 2015 ARTIST Kim Bong Jung CONTACT +30.28310.52530
Bong Jung Kim’s painting installations evidence his interest in the phenomenon of cyber addiction. Internet addiction disorder or IAD, has to do with impulse control that in today’s world is more and more common. Thus, Kim’s interest in depicting IAD stems from his focus of investigation within the arts. Just as many use the internet to help overcome stress, Kim reflects upon it by painting the subject, in itself an obsession. The preoccupation that appears as internet gaming, shopping, or cybersex addictions is very harmful to the individual and the family unit at times leading to financial problems, a lowered production, interaction with family, intimate partners or friends. With the decentralization inherent in globalism and the split of the family unit, as well as, the provision by internet sources of constantly changing entertainment and information, IAD is an understandable occurrence. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other electronic devices, make it easy to be in touch yet many choose anonymous interaction rather than familial. To escape into the cyber world rather than face reality is increasing in a world wrought with problems and un-pleasantries. Many go to the digital space in order to relieve overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, sometimes to avert loneliness, depression or just simple boredom. Some people lacking in social support use it to establish new relationships and may be unhappy teenagers looking for a place to fit. But, it is a fact that this addiction leads to more stress, and isolation. Kim paints natural forms like flowers, overlain by broken computer parts. The fact that the digital machinery lie on the surface of the painting in key spots broken and dysfunctional, clarify Kim’s feelings about a computerized world. Perhaps he has personal reasons in depicting this subject as he does for he has two young sons.
Teenagers are notorious cyber junkies eschewing friends and nature to engage with the internet instead. In Kim’s paintings we see the flowers outlined through computer wires while broken pieces of computers dot his backgrounds. His colors are red, black and white and reference the poppy flower that itself produces the addictive substance opium. Kim scatters the broken computer parts over the central part of the poppy pistils as if saying that this is the most dangerous place of the flower from which the opium is distilled. Whereas the body of the flower is red, the pistils are black which Kim chooses to combine with the scattered computer parts. In his paintings, Kim shows the Papaver Somniferum that is a plant of rare beauty and healing powers but also of contraindications. In Kim’s case the poppy is the perfect metaphor for computer addiction but also to connote his own addiction to art. Like all interesting things it has dualistic and multiple characteristics that are both good and bad. Opium for medicinal use has been known to cure insomnia, shock and injury, and to lessen the paralysis from a stroke, as well as to rid the body of tremors or convulsions due to delirium tremens. On the other hand, it can be addictive when taken in excess. This is a similar thing to a computer obsession that can overwhelm the individual making him loose himself within a cyber-world too huge to navigate yet too interesting to leave. But, by bringing our attention to the issue, Kim helps us not only to see the problem, but also in some ways to control any addiction by setting goals as barriers. Kim’s art helps us remain connected to the offline world of culture, participation and experience. It acts like cognitive behavioral therapy in which we are given step by step directions in finding real life support and reconnecting while being comfortable with the real world rather than getting lost in space.
Artist Cho Yi Kyung has examined the relation between human’s visual sense and recognition of image. Focusing particularly on a fact that an opportunity can be offered to be awakened to human’s image recognition mechanism in a process where time and space are crossed when human encounters image through screen, she came to make a conceptual structure of exhibition with that fact as her motif, which arouses interest. The true nature of cinematic image which enables recognition of spatiality in the flow of time is actually an illusion formed through a media called light and when another ray of light intervenes in that video, it shows effectiveness of that image is only temporary. It means when images in a film projected by a beam projector are covered with light strong enough to make them disappear, they only become empty space and the temporal flow in the film seems to have stopped. By the time the light dims, those images come into audience’s sight yet again and it feels as if time went on. Even though a video is illusory space in which existence before one’s eye is made through projected light, seeing one is such a strong attraction sensately that one cannot help but fall into that illusion. When a pictorial image directs space halted at a moment in a flat 2D manner, images of video in film are made to recognize not only certain space it directs but temporal flow. And sounds come to simultaneously intervene in the film so it is characterized that narrative is read amidst layered structure by information delivered through two senses. At that moment, the artist lets strong light regularly intervene in video image to dissipate images in between while sound and video are delivered in harmony and takes the film’s narrative context apart intermittently. The artist delays visual recognition by adjusting amount of light, a necessary condition for visual perception, and shows that she can break up the consequent narrative structure which temporally progresses. If noise gradually grows louder than the original sound of music played by a certain kind of work, listening to the original music is disturbed or even impossible. Likewise, changes in visual environment inevitably affect one’s visual sense. As the artist came to be interested in the process of feeling and recognition itself, she seems to focus on conditions for delivery rather than actual contents delivery and to try to make them into works. The artist, in other words, intends to show not the contents delivered by video within work but the mechanism of how cinematic image is delivered or the process or conditions of how cinematic media is recognized through her work.
CONTACT +82.2.3141.8842
Film media in which cinematic images and sounds are combined has power to deftly hide its system as a media and to absorb audience into stories portrayed by fictional space. Thus, the artist loosens that power to enable the audience to see the film media system itself. As a strategy to awaken the audience that Illusion made by image similar to space which actually exists in dark space is eventually a phantom like mirage, the artist lets the light stronger than that of a beam projector intervene which makes film image and in that way, she brings the flow of film to a halt in between. Instead, she reveals empty space only with white wall left by the strong light to stop senses absorbed in fictional illusion. The artist brings in light repeated at the same time intervals while the video of film goes on to make it hard to focus on the film’s contents but to allow people to see the entire mechanism of an act of watching the film. Actually, film is a continuous showing of individual images at 24 or 30 frames per second and in the nature of human’s cognitive structure, those individual images cannot help but be perceived as a constantly moving shape. Human cannot perceive space between marginal borderline that they can visually sense, which probably makes the artist focus on such limits of sense. That the artist lets another ray of light exceeding that coming from the beam projector which is to make the video seems to prevent visual sense from telling the difference and consequentially to set a circumstance where images are removed. In this way, the artist appears to fill the temporal flow in between which resultingly exposes the video with bright light and empty the images for her intention to maximize limits of senses on which visual gaps established like a rest fail to be recognized but cannot but be of loss and to make people experience a structure hidden outside the senses. By doing this, it seems that the artist ultimately intends to make people experience the act of ‘seeing’ on the entire process of sensing and perceiving through awakened eye at a point where the images are emptied without being swallowed up by contents of image and to provide opportunity to appreciate the limitation of ‘seeing’ at the limits of senses and its meaning through her works.
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