#54_Sylbee Kim by K.NOTe

K.NOTe no.54

Sylbee Kim

K.NOTe no.54

Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Taeseong Yi Educator

Sylbee Kim

Haeun Lee Intern Jisu Hong, Sooeon Jeong Designer Flaneur Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of Publication October 2018 ÂŠ Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.

The Red Liquid and Narcissus, 2017 Solo exhibition, 2-channel video, 4K, color, sound, 4’50”, 3’40”; jellies, isomalt sugar, sponges, moss, watercolor, mirror

4 Installation view, Nevan Contempo, Prague, 2017. Photography by Peter Fabo

Installation view, Nevan Contempo, Prague, 2017. Photography by Peter Fabo

The Red Liquid and Narcissus, 2017 Solo exhibition, 2-channel video, 4K, color, sound, 4’50”, 3’40”; jellies, isomalt sugar, sponges, moss, watercolor, mirror

K.NOTe #54 ReadyMade Allegory Hanbum Lee Art critic

question around meaning and not ceasing at the questioning of the meaning per se. In Kim’s Banned Songs: Così Fan Tutte (2013), characters and scenes from Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte (1790) are transposed to an entirely different narrative via music videos that look like a karaoke background. Viewers can internally ‘sing along’ in one way or another the mute lyrics that rhythmically flow

on the screen. We experience mutated allegories in the work in the

Appropriate images and forms produced within particular social

same manner we consume popular entertainment programs.

and cultural systems. From there, arbitrary elements can be

In this sense, Kim’s work is a collection of readymade allegories

subtracted, added, shifted, replaced or even superimposed to

and thus, approaching it solely through the elements related to its

systems of different categories. In this way, the ideology to which

meanings would indicate to discard the functional structure

images and forms are related can be dispersed and redefined in

of the rest. The focal question would be then how the work’s

another context. In other words, an allegory can be re-used – and

generic system structuralizes the actual experience of the work.

I perceive this re-use of allegories to be one of the key strategies

Understanding Kim’s form of artistic practice requires us to

found in Sylbee Kim’s work. The strategy can be inferred from a

determine what she chose among the forms that construct the

strand of experiments in rearranging objects and images, which

world and how she reconstructs them. We must also look at how

could be called to have been one of the most radical practices

ideologies come into visible shapes through this process. These

over the past hundred years of art history, starting with Marcel

shapes are not subject to be reduced to certain meanings, but

Duchamp and continuing on through pop art, conceptual art and

instead they are subjects of a new form that actively demands

Postmodernist. It is also a format through which digital and web

our engagement.

data-based contemporary media environment structures the world.

Lee, Danji, “An Interview prior to the Exhibition,” Misread Gods exhibition reader, Insa Art Space, 2015, p. 13.

It is a format that naturally invokes the notion of “readymade,”

aiming to expose its own critical standpoint. As an artist, what

Kim’s recent installation consisting of A Sexagesimal Love Letter

interests Kim is “observing which digital artifacts become settled

(2016), A Little Warm Death (2016) and Sisters in the Plutocratic

in particular places and how they are accumulated, then deciding

Universe (2016) are examples of dual readymade allegories. A Little

what to select and how to use it.” 1 And it is this questioning that

Warm Death is a massive and digitally processed print image, an

configures the structure of her aesthetic program.

anamorphic installation that crosses through the floor and crawls onto the wall. It reminisces the motif of skull, the memento mori

One remarkable point here is the twofold way in which readymade

in Hans Holbein’s acclaimed painting The Ambassadors (1533).

allegory operates in Kim’s work, namely the iconographic allegory

Within the round frame adapted from the style of Buddhist

and the formalistic allegory. Iconographic allegory concerns the

mandala, religious symbols are replaced by a compositional

rearrangement of meaning conveyed in a framed image, whereas

arrangement of anatomical images showing the internal organs

formalistic allegory displaces it into another formal frame to

and flesh of dead animals. The foreground of A Sexagesimal Love

restructure the layers where the actual meaning is circulated.

Letter consists of appropriated video images in continuous flow,

As a result, Kim’s work is faced with a curious double bind, posing a

while in the center of the frame a series of ancient Babylonian 9

characters indicating sexagesimal numbers is presented. As a numeral system, sexagesimal is no longer widely used, yet it still establishes the quantified time, a form of behavioral patterns in industrialized society that encompasses contemporary life more powerfully than any other ideology. Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe shows two performers enacting a choreographed performance in dialogue that is itself an allegory rather than representing any kind of narrative; at the same time, their bodies are green-screened to create a negative space where the found footages flow continuously. The images are historical material and samples of digital compositing from open web archives 2

“Monthly Review #1: Interview with Sylbee Kim,” http://www.thestream. kr/?p=2744, November 2016.

or platforms. 2 Each of the three works is full of numerous allegories, while the three interact closely within the physicality of the exhibition space. The obliquely distorted icon of mandala interferes to a corner of Sisters’ projection, and switches quickly between the visible and the invisible under the skin of negative bodies projected over it. Sisters was shot in the 16:9 ratio of digital moving image while Love Letter is rotated to have a proportion of 9:16. Depending on the movement and the standpoint of the viewer, the two channels overlap in different degrees, inevitably interfering to each other in the actual space. More precisely, they erase boundaries to permeate one another and disperse. Due to this aspect, in the three works both possibilties of overlapping over a same surface or of dispersing as individual elements are latent. Here, the exhibition space turns into a medium that articulates this dual state into a viewing experience. Whereas Conceptual Art artists historically perceived the formats of distribution as their artistic subject matter as well as criticality and engaged with inventing alternative spaces beyond the exhibition space, Kim re-appropriates the exhibition space itself as a formalistic allegory. Kim’s solo exhibition Misread Gods (2015) as well as previous

approach. An exhibition space is a spatialized representation and the experiences structured by those spaces may correspond to a 10

Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe, 2016 4K transferred to HD, 16:9, color, sound, 11’39” ›

Lersta and Her Relatives (2017) are good examples of this

works such as Emily D.: The Latent Collaboration (2012) and

A Sexagesimal Love Letter, 2016 HD, 9:16, color, sound, 6’18”

Manovich, Language of New Media (Korean trans. by Seo Jeong-sin), Communciation Books, 2014, pp. 290--295.

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form(Korean trans. by Sim Cheul-min), bbooks, 2014, p. 27.

dynamic that Michael Fried once described with the pejorative

a work in three chapters, are inserts that appear before the second

term of “theatricality,” which fluidly roams over the ruptures

chapter and after the third chapter. There, we see a church, a site

between categories. As a result, the formalized exhibition space

of demonstration, a mosque, a playground, a library, a theater, an

where Kim’s work intervenes comes to resemble a database –

agora, a pop music television stage and a temple. This loose chain

a form of cultural representation in response to a world where

of sites yet swirls toward a curiously singular coordinate. While

nearly infinite amounts of information have been accumulated;

this appears as an iconographic allegory suggesting a possible

a place where it is possible to search through, view, filter, and

theme, the characters – such as the protagonist whose father has

compose the collected entities. Erwin Panofsky saw linear

been assassinated and the three prophets (the blind, the deaf and

perspective as symbolic form of the modernity, while Lev Manovich

the assassin) – seemingly derive from specific narrative genres

emphasized database as “a new symbolic form of a computer age

and indicate another type of allegory that equally articulates the

or a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the

theme. Stone and Donkeys draws on the narrative style of martial

world.” 3 As noted above, Kim’s intervened exhibition spaces

arts movies and the narrative development of a video game. The

themselves result into a temporary state in which collected entities

intrinsic algorithm for the development of different stages in a

are overlaid and merged together. In other words, Kim employs the

game are applied to contextualize the intertwined allegories in the

formalistic frameset of the exhibition space to visualise the

work, while the viewers can perceive the algorithm to structuralize

mechanisms, relying on which databases structuralize our

the narrative in a non-linear way. From this non-linear narrative

experience and perception. Thus attempting to decipher every

sprouts the singularity of Kim’s work. According to Manovich, a

single allegory in this space of arranged allegories is in fact

mutual opposition occurs naturally between the narrative form

impossible and falls in a different vein from the dynamic of her

relying on cause and effect and the database form consisting of lists

practice. Even through an interpretative analysis, the reading

that lack of any order.5 In Kim’s work, however, narrative is less

shouldn’t focus on allegory itself, but on the invisibility of where

an interface for creating linear causality, but it is rather functional,

the allegory is situated. As Panofsky wrote, it is essential “to ask of

working as a temporary channel for circulating accumulated

artistic periods and regions not only whether they have perspective,

allegorical entities or even as distorted fiction. In other words,

but also which perspective they have.” 4

because the narrative in Kim’s work is itself an independent

The essential significance

of Kim’s work arises, when her exhibition space is transformed into

allegory, it is conjunctive to the accumulated allegories and not

a formalistic framework of its own.

conflictive or subordinated to it. What makes this strategy so

Manovich, op. cit., p. 304.

interesting is the way Kim is constantly discovering and retrieving 3.

forms that circulate ideology inside the world we dwell. Viewers

The short music videos of previously mentioned Banned Songs:

can use this very method to structuralize their experience, but

Così Fan Tutte appropriate the form of karaoke background videos.

analogous to the radicalism of readymade, it gets circulated on

Importing conventional grammar of disparate genres or systems

an entirely different dimension from its initial place. In the end,

and applying them to the formalistic framework is an important

what matters there is the methodology itself how a work can

element in Kim’s work, by means of which she positions it into a

function, and the new common that arises through this process of

state of fluidity. Trespassing different genres, Kim especially favors

reconsideration.

the narrative strategy. What we notice in Stone and Donkeys (2014), 12

A Little Warm Death, 2016 Digital print, 700 x 260 cm

14Installation view at SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016. Image courtesy of Seoul Museum of Art

4 If the readymade were an effective means of presenting its own system, what could be its principal desire? Readymade is a strategy of creating alternative time and space through employing actual material and states, to involve invisible ideologies. And its core value lies in the failed attempts to clearly indicate the object, while directing the discussion to the actual system surrounding the object. Yet the crucial fact here is that to reveal the shape of the system, we are destined to navigate through the elements that originated from the system. Nicolas Bourriaud once stated that criticism from an outsider’s perspective is closer to interpretation than true criticism, and that if one wishes to indict or criticize the world, one must first inhabit the form of what one wants to 6

Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (Korean trans. Jeong Yeon-sim, Son Bu-gyeong), Graphite on Pink, 2016, p. 107.

criticize.6 This condition also applies to art as a critical form. Moreover, the world never ceases to change and even seemingly the most normative criticism may quickly lose its validity. Classical avant-garde awakened the society through alienating itself from socially recognised forms. The new avant-garde, situated under the influence of contemporary capitalism armed with liquidity as well as of commercial media, disguises itself as part of the system to penetrate and subvert it. Repurposing forms predefined by ideology means to experiment with the rearrangement of ideology at its own cost. Thus the method can secure the channels that lead us to the system’s extensity on the grounds of our presence. In that sense, Kim’s work is less a reflection and expression of an artist’s critical awareness, but it is more approximate to experiments to weave together a new system. In other words, the artist’s desire and that of work rightly orient toward diverging dynamics.

Collection of Seoul Museum of Art. Installation view, Malfunction Library, Seoul Museum of Art, 2014. Photography by Hong Cheolki

Stone and Donkeys, 2014 Video installation, HD, color, sound, 12'06”, mixed media, dimensions variable

Stone and Donkeys, 2014 Video installation, HD, color, sound, 12'06â&#x20AC;?, mixed media, dimensions variable

18 Collection of Seoul Museum of Art. Installation view, Malfunction Library, Seoul Museum of Art, 2014. Photography by Hong Cheolki

Stone and Donkeys, 2014 Video installation, HD, color, sound, 12'06â&#x20AC;?, mixed media, dimensions variable

Collection of Seoul Museum of Art. Installation view, Malfunction Library, Seoul Museum of Art, 2014. Photography by Hong Cheolki

Stone and Donkeys, 2014 Video installation, HD, color, sound, 12'06â&#x20AC;?, mixed media, dimensions variable

22Collection of Seoul Museum of Art. Video still

Lersta and Her Relatives, 2017 Video installation, 4K, 16:9, color, sound, 9â&#x20AC;&#x2122;25â&#x20AC;?; print on fabric; mixed media, dimensions variable Video still

Lersta and Her Relatives, 2017 Video installation, 4K, 16:9, color, sound, 9’25”; print on fabric; mixed media, dimensions variable

Sylbee Kim Sylbee Kim lives and works in Berlin. She acquired B.A. at the Korea National University of Art, Seoul and Meisterschüler at the University of Arts Berlin under Maria Vedder and Hito Steyerl. Kim’s video installations appropriate historical records and iconography to produce a parallel reality that proposes different possibilities of a future audiovisual language. Recent solo exhibitions include Cradle of Regrets, Hapjungjigu, Seoul (2018); Garden of Regrets, Sindoh Art Space, Seoul (2018); The Red Liquid and Narcissus, Nevan Contempo, Prague (2017) and Misread Gods, Insa Art Space, Seoul (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Monstrous Moonshine: Collateral Exhibition–Gwangju Biennale, Naver Square, Gwangju (2018); Neriri Kiruru Harara, SeMA Biennale: Mediacity Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art (2016); and Give Us the Future, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2014). Kim is an awardee of the Sindoh Artist Support Program 2017 and was resident at Gasworks, London (2018).

Hanbum Lee Art critic and co-editor of OKULO, a journal of cinema and the moving image.

Sylbee Kim