SEOUL
Art Sonje Center
Hwayeon Nam Mind Stream
HWAYEON NAM, Larger than Life, 2019–20, still from four-channel video installation: 25 min 47 sec. Courtesy the artist.
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Hwayeon Nam’s installation Mind Stream (2020) seems hardly the sort to anchor an exhibition by one of Korea’s eminent contemporary media artists. The work’s minimalist formal language asserts a presence that is both more experiential for the viewer and more abstract, in contrast to the artist’s otherwise demonstrative video oeuvre. Six LED lights turn on and off in a slow sequence, obliquely reflecting off a glossy expanse of black flooring, vaguely illuminating blank sections of wall, or being absorbed by empty space in the darkened gallery. Backed by a soundtrack of ambient classical music, Mind Stream proposes a decontextualized abstraction of an imagined choreography by legendary dancer Seung-hee Choi (1911–69), offering an eloquent tribute to this polarizing figure. Born in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Choi traveled to the metropole as a teenager, where she developed a new style of dance that reinterpreted traditional Korean and Eastern movement methodologies. Despite emerging as a bona fide international celebrity in the 1930s, Choi struggled to transcend her complex identity as a subaltern attempting to straddle modernity and tradition in a time of shifting nationalist dialectics. Nam’s exhibition served as a capstone to the artist’s longterm research into the progenitor of modern Korean dance, interweaving Choi’s biography and choreography to consider
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broader notions of movement, contact, preservation, as well as subjectivity. Installed in the same gallery as the understated Mind Stream was the exhibition’s only multichannel video, Larger than Life (2019–20). Projected across four adjacent screens, this work established the exhibition’s leitmotif of ocean waves and functioned as a foundational reference for interpreting the rest of the show. The video opens with a series of four letters from the artist’s friend Hirofumi that describe the seasonal changes he observes at a small beach near his house in Japan, followed by a voiceover soliloquy by Nam that considers Gustave Courbet’s ocean landscapes in relation to his own fraught relationship with protecting French cultural patrimony. This framework allows for loose associations that connect Courbet’s waves with maritime art objects in the collection of a Kyoto museum, as well as Choi’s transatlantic journey by ship from New York to Paris during her acclaimed world tour in the late-1930s, outlining a chronology across centuries and cultures that informs Nam’s research-based practice. The artist’s multilayered approach to synthesizing aspects of history, representation, and performance was on full display in the top-floor gallery, where five single-channel videos were installed alongside archival materials related to Choi’s career, documentation of Nam’s research process, reference photos for several of the exhibited works, and an array of sculptural figure studies. The documentarystyle Against Waves (2019) evaluates Choi’s legacy through the perspective of a senior instructor of Korean traditional dance, Kyunghee Lee. As an ethnic Korean raised in postwar Japan, Lee tells of how Choi’s choreography became canon for Japan’s Zainichi Korean community, where traditional Korean culture was encountered at a remove from Jul/Aug 2020
its original context. Through Lee’s poignant narrative and restrained dancing, the video probes polemics of cultural displacement, authenticity, and preservation while considering the role of performance in reconstituting one’s identity. Unexpected ripples of interpolation reverberated across the remaining videos. In The Night of Chilseok: Archive (2020), Nam draws parallels between the perceived convergence of solar bodies during eclipses and an East Asian folktale about two lovers destined to live on opposite sides of the Milky Way, save for one night every year. Handwritten choreographic notations appear throughout the video, thematizing dance’s innate ephemerality in the context of documentation, mythology, and liminal celestial events. Contact between orbiting entities was also central to Study (2020), a video in which contemporary Korean dancers rehearse a duet premised on the notion of sculptural movement. Here, two bodies are seen alternately joining and separating as they move through a series of poses, punctuated with the dancers’ ongoing dialogue as they conceptualize their approach to interpreting an inherently subjective choreography. The sparse arrangement of elements in “Mind Stream” necessitated deliberate movement as viewers made their way through the show, while the placement of several video monitors directly on the gallery floor invited a conscious positioning of one’s body in relation to these works. By allowing for ample space between the elements on view, Nam suggested a diversity of trajectories through the gallery that formed their own choreography, activating a continuously evolving performance of circulating bodies projecting mind streams of their own. A N DY S T. L O U I S