[2017] Videoportrait Vol. English Version

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Ayoung Kim

Haejin Pahng

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Byounglae Park

Un-Seong Yoo

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Ellie Kyungran Heo

Gareth Evans

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Haemin Kim

Hijung Min

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Jungju An

Heykyung Ki

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Moojin Brothers

Soohyun Lee

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Okin Collective

Nathalie Boseul Shin 088

Sejin Kim

Lee-Ji Hong

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Seo Young Chang

Kim Jung Hyun

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siren eun young jung

Sunyoung Lee

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Sojung Jun

Namsee Kim

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Choi Sung Rok

Jay Jungin Hwang

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Sylbee Kim

Han Bum Lee

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Wan Lee

Youngbin Kwak

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Yeondoo Jung

Mizuki Takahashi

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Ju Yeonu

Sang-Yong Kim

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Yoonsuk Choi

Yoonjeong Koh

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Cho Youngjoo

Sera Jung

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Video Portrait

Nathalie Boseul Shin 258

On planning the exhibition

Sera Jung

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AYOUNG KIM

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Thwarted Texts, Floating Stages, Structures of Uncertainty 1

�� Pahng, Haejin

Art Critic

1 This essay is a condensed version of a piece of the same title printed in Vol. 12 (2015) of Visual, a journal published by the Korea National University of Arts Center for Visual Studies.

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1 Introduction The series, Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell 2014--2015 arouses questions.

First, the fascinating title. Where did this strange mixture of nouns come from, and to what does it refer? How are we to connect the individual works in this series -- now up to three parts -- and where it is heading? But those questions are not confined solely to Zepheth series. So instead of looking for cut - and - dried answers to these questions -- which may ultimately connect with the whole of Kim’s work as an artist -- let us examine them in a way that sometimes weaves around and sometimes attempts bold leaps.

Perhaps like imagining a whale’s journey soaring from some ancient abyss into the skies of Babylon, or searching through the lowers of a shell that might break away paleontologically from a major oil company and suddenly assume some seaside lyricism.

2 Reconstructing Time and Space The Zepheth series is rooted in issues of modern Korean history that were first fully addressed in Tales of a City 2010--2012 and PH Express 2011. For Kim, modernity is approached first and foremost from a perspective of non-synchronicity in time and space and forces in imbalance. Kim particularly noted how the restructuring of time and space became expanded and solidified through historic inventions of means of transportation.

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The compression of time and space brought by such modern inventions as the steamship and railroad enabled territorial imperialism and resulted in Korea’s delayed modernization. PH Express addressed the British navy’s occupation of Geomundo Island (which was called Port Hamilton back then) between 1885--1887 as one of the seismic changes brought by the new means of transportation.

Kim, who reportedly researched official and unofficial documents on the subject matter exhaustively for the project, is in a class of her own in her tenacity and meticulousness. But her excellence is not confined to the thoroughness of her research. Her most astonishing achievement with PH Express, for example, is the aesthetic determination through which she turns her exhaustive research of serious subject matter into something along the lines of a Peter Greenaway film. When everything -- from the mixture of British black comedy and mystery thriller in the

PH Express, 2channel Video, 31min, 2011

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plot to the gorgeous mise-en-scène and rhythmic editing surrounding the theatrical dialogue, as well as the deliberate inclusion of Michael Nymanesque background music -- is pointing (blatantly or implicitly) to Peter Greenaway’s style, one may ask a question: why should she adopt a comic mystery format that seems to undermine the very credibility of her intensive research?

These questions require an understanding of Kim’s methods and attitude in “drawing stories” from the history of modernization, and more universally from the past in general. In a word, these are the artist’s “aesthetic ethics,” as differentiated from the medium ethics of a documentary filmmaker or academic ethics of a researcher. The artist is conscious of being an explorer of this world, but also an explorer of aesthetic form who does not become submerged in her theme or subject matter. Her ethics, then, involve boldly and meticulously expunge the “document” she has unearthed and condensed so that it becomes more than simply a “documentary.”

This idea of destroying the information value of the research-texts she put so much effort into preparing ties into ideas of artistic form to correspond to the modern era’s temporality and issues of the medium. It is a correspondence that emerges from her determination that she can only access the world and history through an understanding

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of its inaccessibility. In the case of PH Express, the question becomes how it is possible to re-reproduce a historical record when the fateful Korean modern historical moment of the Geomundo Island occupation is not painstakingly recorded and discussed as part of history today, but is close to forgotten, and many of the few records that could allow us to access the incident are those of the invasion’s perpetrators. In terms of mise-en-scène, one can perceive a sharp difference between the scenes showing the British troops stationed on Geomundo Island and those showing officials in a meeting in Britain.

The latter images are more painterly, with an effect reminiscent of chiaroscuro, while the former are bust shots that emphasize a lack of spatial and temporal correspondence, where the closely shot figures seem to stick out amid the desolate remote shots of the island today. Korea’s modernization was both a form of regulation from an outside perspective and a resulting rearrangement of space and time. In relying on another invention of the modern era -- the video medium -- to address that unbridgeable divide, Kim Ayoung sharpens the limitations of that method to a finely honed point.

Tales of a City, in which the artist began exploring

the modernization issue in earnest around the time of PH Express, has produced the works

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and the two Every North Star Part I & II three-channel video, Please Return to Busan Port summarizes Korea’s modernization -- achieved suddenly and through abnormal means -- in terms of spatial and temporal chaos through a front line and a back line.

A screen showing information from a promotional national sporting event like the Asian Games is run backward, while the right side of the screen shows a young person pedaling at full strength against the backdrop of a port. This ultimately connects with the left side, a video manual of drug smuggling, so that the progression concept loses its purpose and directionality. (The frustrated directionality is addressed by the plaintive refrain “please return” from a familiar popular song.) This is also an obvious repurposing of the educational and promotion audio-visual materials imposed by the South Korean government during the modernization process. The issues that arise in the process Please Return to Busan Port

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2010. Using

Please Return to Busan Port from the Series Tales of a City,(2010~) 3channel Video, 5min, 2012

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concern the interpretation of the historical materials left to posterity, and the veracity of the video medium.

The artist’s continued interest in means of transportation as a modern invention would lead into her integration of space and compression distance through the introduction of the railroad in the later Trans-KMS Railway 2012 and The Railway Traveler’s Handbook 2013. Trains and railways, like steamboats, resulted in space and time throughout the world being placed under the control of major powers; amid this history of colonial development, Korea was intended toserve as a route in an international railway network linking Japan to the mainland. Mixed into this is imagined expansion of space and time through a “Trans-Korean Railway,” which due to the country’s division never came to be.

(Indeed, it may have been attempted because of this imaginary quality.) The sound installation method employed in this work served as a crucial turning point toward the Zepheth series. This being a work in sound, a bolder, more multiplex layering of fragmented texts is attempted: the sound design, in which texts from advertisements, newspapers, and other sources are woven and recorded in a complex mixture would become a crucial part of the later Zepheth series, and its second part in particular.

In terms of subject matter, Zepheth ’s shift toward

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oil after the works in what might be termed the “railroad series” may be seen as highly characteristic of Ayoung Kim (in the exhausting exploration of the area and the continued expansions into neighboring domains). Unlike the obviously modern invention of the steam engine, oil is a natural resource that has been put to many uses throughout the world since antiquity.

In the modern and contemporary eras, the repurposing of this fluid, potential substance into a specific energy source fundamentally changed the global economic landscape. The fact that Zepheth was developed with the most complex content and form among Kim’s works to date may have something to do with the nature of the substance.

Indeed, the inventions of modernity could properly called a new concept of time and space, rather than a few mere items or technologies. With her focus on adjusting the angle and gap between subject and form in addressing the topic of modernization, Kim Ayoung may have explored time-space (and its reordering) within the medium she chose and sought out new possibilities for it.

Adjustments of medium time-space are, moreover, something the artist had been focusing on since before she began addressing the topic of modernization in earnest.

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3 Stage and Text In her early Ephemeral Ephemera series, Kim Ayoung transforms the photomontage methodology to produce time-space that is first peculiarly swollen, then flattened. First, she collects bizarre incidents in daily life recorded in daily newspapers and other media -- most of them having to do with death - and takes pictures near the scene where they occurred.

These photographs are then cut out and propped up to form a stage set; this set is photographed itself in turn. During this process of transposing mediated information into three-dimensional space, then capturing that in two-dimensional space, expanding it back into three dimensions, and compressing it to two dimensions once again, the original titles and texts taken from the media recede from their information value and veracity, and the space-time within the photographic medium becomes crowded with the original space-time and heterogeneous symbols. In “Headless body found in Thames, 21 April, 2007 2007”, for example, the terror of the tragedy is foreclosed by the limberly bent building and the depthlessness of the river water, which exists only as a surface.

The result is a smoothly processed kind of peace.

In “Policeman falls to death trying to save suicidebid youth, 05 Jun, 2008 2009”, there is the emptiness of the explicit stage set and the chilling quality of stopped time; an angle that encourages the suicidal figure to jump and spatial conditions that

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prevent it from happening.

Throughout the arduous, painstaking process of Ephemeral Ephemera runs the central thread of constructing a kind of stage for the sloping of space-time. We realize that our daily life may itself be a virtual stage that might come down at any moment -- so that everything within that ridiculously flimsy stage is fleeting (“ephemeral”), and the information that we can glean from the past is but a collection of junk (“ephemera”), its limited life futilely prolonged.

When we consider this virtual space erected on a shallow surface, this theatrical stage where some empty wind might come blowing from behind the wall, Ayoung Kim’s works can be perceived a new within a kind of continuum, whether the medium is photography or film, sound installation or musical theater. In a word, The design to stage the Zepheth series as a musical theater performance is not some sudden, unexpected departure within Kim’s oeuvre, but the visible manifestation of a consistent thread pursued within large and small intrusions of the theatrical. It might add something interesting to the discussion to consider what Barthes had to say about the theatrical: “What is theatricality?

It is theater-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage….”2 2 Roland Barthes, "Le Théâtre de Baudelaire", Essais critiques, (Paris: Seuil/Points, 1981 (1954)), p. 41.

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To apply this passage to Kim’s work, the “subtraction of text” ironically takes the form of assembling more intense texts and weaving them in such a way of as to make them undecipherable, or to cause failures of reading.

It is a transformation of the text so that it is not intended simply to transmit particular information, but to be experienced, so to speak, at a sensory level. Making this sensory transformation all the more devastating, and the density of signs thicker, requires not a sense for the sensory from an outset, but stages of diligently satisfying the demands of information value and then rearranging it in a way that destroys it. The Zepheth musical theater series marks the zenith of this form of “text subtraction.”

To begin with, consider the layered form: the modern vocal ensemble that increases from one part to seven; the multiplex sound installation that comes and goes around the space as though competing with the ambient sounds; the wall diagrams that appear in Zepheth 1 and Zepheth 3; the highly theatrical recitation that takes their place in Zepheth 2; and, most of all, the text, which constantly competes and clashes with these elements, reconciles with them and falls out, sinks and soars. This complex mixing of layers, especially in combination with the visible protrusions of modern music, naturally calls to mind polyphonic 3 Roland Barthes, "Littérature et signification", Essais critiques, (Paris: Seuil/Points, 1981 (1963)), p. 258.

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music. Interestingly (and perhaps obviously), another text by Barthes likens this theater/theatricality to polyphony.3 The result is a kind of theater where many different sensory layers function at the same time, but in differing rhythms, to create “informational polyphony.”

Here, the text must be an informational/sensory system on par with the other forms: the vocal ensemble, the actor’s recitations, the recorded sound and diagrams. Ayoung Kim’s methodology to achieve this is the use of an algorithmic device.

Fittingly, the artist gave her algorithm program the name “Deus ex Machina,” after the presence invoked in ancient Greek tragedy to bring the play to a swift conclusion regardless of its dramatic consistency. This cheap theatrical trick, considered synonymous with foolishness and illogic, is transformed in Kim hands into a poetic and creative wordsmith.

So the answer to one of the questions raised in the introduction -- the fascinating, enigmatic mixture of words in the title Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens, to You, Shell -- lies in the prowess of Deus ex Machina. There are two aspects here worthy of admiration. First, there is the surrealistic poetic leap and the sensory beauty of the language produced through Deus ex Machina. Second, there is the fact that this is the title of an artistic work on the topic of

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a natural substance, oil. The odd combination of those words -- Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens, to You, Shell -- achieves all the more of a peculiar resonance within the context of the modern and contemporary history that is the focus of Kim’s ongoing interest. In short, one should consider the awesome scope of materials and subject matter that Kim Ayoung combined and explored in addressing the history of the 20th century and the shifting of the oil business.

4. Structural Science of Uncertainty The text in Zepheth is not easily detected.

A number of different threads are juxtaposed here: the public history of international oil business shifts, as seen with the monopoly of oil resources and export restrictions by Middle Eastern countries in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the resulting domestic oil shock and policies for the advancement of South Korean construction companies into the Middle East; the personal history of the artist’s father, who lived abroad in the Middle East as one of these special forces; and an exploration of oil as a fluid substance with roots traceable back to the Bible and other ancient texts.

Making this complex content all the more difficult to grasp is the complexity of the format through which the text is conveyed.

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First, there is the use of modern music, which inevitably appears odd in an artistic context. More important than this, however, is the activity of Deus ex Machina. The use of adjustments to subtly encourage a failure of any complete understanding of the text was a method present consistently in Kim Ayoung’s works before this; what is specific to Zepheth is the fact that this incomprehensibility has been systematically generated by a key tool in the artwork, namely the algorithm program.

A “libretto” of sentences crafted by the artist from her research materials is passed through the device’s analysis of syntax and semantic structure, and the resulting fragments are rearranged into sentences divorced from their previous meaning.

The ambitious structure of Zepheth 1 has two parallel libretti “A” and “B” -- the first a product of the artist’s consciousness, the second the accidental product of a mechanical device -- being juxtaposed and combined with two musical scores A and B, the first by composer Kim Hee-ra and the second also produced by algorithm. While the stringency of Deus ex Machina’s role and the use of juxtaposition may have dissipated further into the Zepheth series as dramatic elements assumed greater importance, the structure and its organization of chaos remains essential.

Some may approach Zepheth chiefly as a “difficult” form of music. Analysis of the method of composing used for Zepheth ’s music is not especially

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important. What should be noted, however, is that the use of an algorithm is not new to music.

Applied to the composition of modern music since the 1950s, this mathematical approach was first used to break free from the artist’s muse and allow an element of chance to operate. Ironically, it had the effect of forcing composers to devise “creative methodologies” of their own. In the case of Xenakis’s Metastasis 1954, for example, the compositional approach of having 61 performers playing different parts becomes a kind of diagramming act.

What Ayoung Kim attempts in Zepheth is not merely invoking the power of modern music to create theater, or using an algorithm device to generate poetic leaps in her voluminous texts.

More essentially, what she is doing is diagramming structures in which carefully woven chaos, methodically plotted happiness can arise.

Indeed, the “diagram” (previously a central element in Every North Star) appears as a visual element explaining the structure of the work in Zepheth 1 and 3. In a sense, the structure summarized in this wall diagram may represent Zepheth ’s core. The innovation achieved in Zepheth, in other words, does not lie in the modern music sound, as is commonly understood, nor in the transposition of text by algorithm, but in the basic structure of juxtaposing and applying the algorithm

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with text and sound alike. (If Zepheth may be called a “non-visible work,” it is not because it centers around sound, but because this non-visible structure forms its center.) In a word, the highly sophisticated approach of accidental construction attempted in modern music composition encounters new possibilities as it is expanded by Kim Ayoung in a complex form incorporating text.

5 Conclusion The work of Ayoung Kim is build from a series of groups, where the sections constituting each group propagate different sub-groups. The relationships formed in her works through these vertical and horizontal axes could be described as linguistic and polyphonic. Having witnesses the digressions and leaps in the process leading up to Zepheth, what we must really appreciate may be the meta-diagram of Kim’s work as a whole.

In other words, we may be able to appreciate her early work as a series of groups and sections, as graphics of modules in layers and combinations.

There are the 10 photographic works in Ephemeral Ephemera; Not in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time 2010, which is a continuation, yet one that indisputably stands alone; Every North Star and Please Return to Busan Port from the Tales of a City series; the videos Every North Star I & II and the diagram series 51 Months and 12 Races; the two-channel video from PH Express, the virtual

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newspaper PH Express: Journal of Maritime Adventure and International Dispute about Port Hamilton, and the poster HMS Line, along with

the spinoff installation piece Lighthouse 1905 2011; the loose railway series with Trans-KMS Railway and The Railway Traveler’s Handbook ; and sections 1, 2, and 3 making up the Zepheth group, along with the text collection Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens, to You, Shell. The moment the splendid arrangement of groups and sections becomes a beautiful geometric diagram in our mind, the focus of our eager attention turns not to Kim’s next work per se, but to what modules will be interlinked in what combinations. It is the emergence of a new collection of polyphonic art.

Pahng, Haejin Critic involved in activities across a wide range of genres. Works planned or staged include the multidisciplinary art project Hypermetamorphosis Theatres (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul), the video/ performance exhibition ¡No Dance!: Between Body and Media (ZeroOne), and the lecture performance Oblique Space (Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, ARKO Arts Theater). Pahng practices various forms of critical engagement in exhibitions and performances and explores the topic of contemporary art as an expanded domain.

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Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens, to You, Shell 3 6channel sound installation, 40min; diagram on wall, digital print, 5mx4m; voice performance, 20min, 2015

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Byounglae Park

Playthings of the Poor: Notes on Byounglae Park’s Video Work

�� Yoo Un-seong

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Art Critic

“Il y a si peu d’amusements qui ne soient pas coupables!”

“There are so few pleasures that are not guilty.”

- Baudelaire, «Le Joujou du Pauvre» (Plaything of the Poor) In a 2011 interview with the media art channel AliceOn, Byounglae Park had the following to say: “In addition to themes like region and history […] I also wanted to talk about our generation.

The generation of people who were children during the 1970s and 1980s. Materially, we were comfortable, but we were also unlike the previous generation in that we were a relatively impoverished generation in spiritual terms -- spiritual imagination, I guess, or ideals….

Something happened, and I wanted to use something else to tell the story of the generations that witnessed it.”

It is the last sentence here -- “Something happened, and I wanted to use something else to tell the story of the generations that witnessed it” -- that particularly draws the attention. As someone who is roughly the same age as Byounglae Park (himself born in 1974 in Yeosu), and who was born and spent my childhood in Jeolla Province, I can readily understand the vague sense of passion and disappointment in these words, which feel

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much like my own. But I do not plan to dwell here on how history is perceived by his and my generation, or how we came to possess the sense that we arrived too late compared to the previous generation and in too much of a hurry compared to later ones. Not only would it be unsuitedto these pages, but it becomes too easily presumptuous to generalize one’s own personal admissions. For now, at least, it will suffice to say this: Byounglae Park’s video work is akin to the gathering of scattered fragments from the desert of youth by a generation that never had the storehouse of private recollection one might see as essential to historically contextualizing that youth, and (de)constructing it into impersonal memory.

While some of it has been shown at film festivals, Byounglae Park’s video work was developed chiefly for exhibitions and, as is so often the case with works shown in art exhibitions today, has been reviewed in ways that tease out its psychological, social, political, and historical meaning or significance. Even the “games” or “play” that may be seen as the most prominent thematic obsession running through his work have been readily discussed in connection with psychological, social, political, and historical motives.

It was an ominous sign when Hwapo 2014, a work of “play” that seemed almost completely unconnected to these motives, was virtually ignored (even by the art community, let alone the

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cinematic one), despite being an important work encompassing aspects of his whole oeuvre to date.

We cannot simply take Park at his word when he claims that he wanted to “tell the story” of those generations without memory. For while there is play in his video work, there is no “story” in the conventional sense. Or rather, play is story for Park. His use of the word “story” in the interview was merely a kind of habitual figure of speech.

We should therefore read his “tell a story” instead as “wanted to play a game.” Indeed, Byounglae Park’s junkman play at (de)construction memory, with his video works from Half-Moon Game 2007 to the recent Jutlandia 2015, arguably have no other purpose than to explore the conditions for this kind of play.

Half-Moon Game begins with an explanatory

subtitle about a game that was popular among South Korean children in the early 1980s. (The game referred to in this work as bandal, or “halfmoon,” is a slightly modified form of the games known as “riding the plow” or “the 38th Parallel game.”) It then segues into a video excerpt from General Ttoli 1978, an anti-Communist animated feature that depicts North Korean troops as wolves and foxes and Kim Il-sung as a pig. This comes across clearly as one of the scattered fragments from the desert of youth for a generation that absorbed a sense of the political

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situation and the antagonisms between South and North indirectly through various media. But Half-Moon Game does not move in one of the directions one might expect -- using these fragments to explore the unconscious of the artist’s generation (critical remembrance), soothingly turning them into objects of false memory (melancholy), or drawing out of them some introspection on the present (allegory). Before one takes a step in those directions, it is crucial to have one’s balance. A figure, played by the artist himself, loiters around a set with various white, tree-shaped structures against a black backdrop.

Within this empty childhood space without memory, he discovers a hole in one of the structures and sticks his finger in it (the familiar childhood imagination of holes in trees as leading into another world). Then a figure turning a steering wheel in a white cubic frame inside of another empty space appears to lose his balance and

Elastic Cord Playing, 1channel, color, 7'45'', 2008

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lurch violently. (The idea of using a steering wheel to steer a boat through the sky or pilot a spaceship may have been based in the cartoons or fairy tales encountered by people who spent their childhoods in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Tampering with something that connects one space to another -- and attempting to restore equilibrium from the upheavals generated by that tampering -- forms a structural principle to the rhythms of play in Half-Moon Game and Elastic Cord Playing 2008. In the case of Elastic Cord Playing, it is another figure loitering around an empty, black space who sets off a repetitious rubber band game by using his foot to tweak a rubber band attached to a mirror. His mirror image begins moving about independent of him, and his repetitive actions in the game as he tries to adjust the line (rubber band) connecting the two spaces become something akin to variations on a musical riff.

In contrast, the play never begins in Jutlandia, where a line of multicolored toy blocks appear on the split screen, but are not tampered with in any way and retain their balance throughout. Instead, we simply witness landscapes like a ski lift passing with no one on board, an empty tennis court, a sea, a desert, and a field. While the tampering does have the effect of suddenly calling together scattered fragments from the wasteland of youth, those fragments are no longer metonyms for anything. The mask covering the face of the

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“Red pig” is no longer a device for recalling the absurdities of anti-Communist education in the ’70s and ’80s. The mask enters Park Byoung-lae’s space as simply a mask, and nothing else. The same is true for the steering wheel, the mirror, and the half-moon and rubber band games. What remains is the test as to whether a game can still be made of these fragments. If the mask in particular seems to occupy some privileged position among the items, it is because it has been changed, like the helmet worn by the protagonist Zebo (played by Park himself) in Zeboriskie Point 2011, into surface as sur-face, where even the face recalls nothing at all. Half-Moon Game and Elastic Cord Playing are attempts to reduce everything in the game -- tools, spaces, and actors -- to a state where no metonymy can function, and then to detect the rhythm of play itself. It goes without saying that guessing the game’s directions in this way are an essential

Zeboriskie Point, 1channel, color, 9'52'', 2011

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process for a generation without memory to fully affirm in their hearts that their childhood truly was transparently impoverished, without disappointment or passion. In that sense, Byounglae Park’s political science could be said to lie not in any implications or symbols in his work, but in the cheery affirmation of the stripped-down games carried out repeatedly through his work.

Byounglae Park does not rush. And as viewers, we should not commit the folly of leaping too hastily from play to history. It was with Zeboriskie Point that actual landscapes began replacing empty black spaces in his work. Detailed information about places in the Gunsan area that serves as a backdrop for the work may be useful in contextualizing the work historically within the exhibition environment, but Zeboriskie Point could pose some obstacles in detecting the taut interplay maintained between play and history.

The work contains desolate landscapes, derelict buildings, and the items seen, touched, and gathered up by Zebo, but we merely see those things, without any information. Zebo recalls the children of the past who would carry around pieces of junk as if they were weapons or tools and hang around desolate spaces (which may well have had some historical meaning of their own), turning them into “secret hideouts.” Zebo’s actions also echo the performance of improvisational musician Choi Jun-yong from

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Hwapo, who walks around the Hwapo mud flats on Suncheon Bay collection various items to produce sound (noise) and gathering them in one place. In his own way, Zebo is doing something similar to what Choi does when he frees objects from metonymy and reveals the materiality of the “impoverished sounds” they produce. Connected to the equipment on Zebo’s back is a tube similar to a probe or a mister, suggesting his acts can be read not just as investigation but also a “disinfection.”

Indeed, Zebo’s new journey only begins once his base camp (wooden stakes arranged in a circle) has been carefully sterilized by liquid sprayed from the tube.

Melancholy is the emotion people are most prone to succumb to when awareness of the past and its value comes only after it has been reduced to ruins. At times, the emotion has been equated to historical consciousness. Other times, what follows it is the collector’s passion. But I mentioned before that the impoverished generation Park addresses has no memory storehouse of its own.

(Their spaces are ones when no settlement is possible, like dark and empty temporary studios, deserts, wastelands, and seas.) Zebo does not collect anything; he is one who pokes, examines, disinfects, and moves on. Choi Jun-yong in Hwapo does not collect either. Although he does assemble bits of junk, they are gathered at the center of the mud flats to be swept away when

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the tide comes in. Choi is one who listens to the sounds of objects and moves on. His actions -- in the middle of nowhere, performing actions that belong unambiguously to the “now/here” before moving on -- overlap with the kind of figures that have appeared in variations in Park Byoung-lae’s video work. (Among the experimental improvisational musical performances Choi Joonyong has “composed,” it may be interesting to combine Park’s video work to Bounce. Fall 2011, in which hundreds of ping pong ball are dropped in a regular cycle.) The paradox of video work is that it takes a time-limited performance and makes it infinitely repeatable. It is this tension that cuts across Park’s video works, the archiving of present-tense games to (de)construct memories of a generation without memory. Zeboriskie Point reaches the height of its tension when Zebo, having finished preparations for his new journey, suddenly begins playing jachigi (a stick-tossing game) in the middle of his base camp. While conveying a refreshing sense to the viewer, it also aspires to an opening-up that would invalidate the circle of repetition (given shape by the base camp).

Is it possible for play and a historical sense to come together -- not through looking back on the naive play of the past, or retrospectively examining the backgrounds surrounding those games, but by performing games purely as games? With Jutlandia,

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Byounglae Park addressed historical facts in an unusually direct way for his work. (Song lyrics by Danish musician tell of the Jutlandia, a Danish hospital ship dispatched during the Korean War.) Landscapes recorded by Park over time are positioned throughout Jutlandia, but no game is triggered from these fragments. There is merely the sense that a moment of play will come, conveyed through the periodic appearance of rotating blocks in a row. The person who will be playing has not yet arrived, however. Perhaps eventually we will see the curious spectacle of Zebo wearing neither mask nor helmet, the vagabond of that impoverished generation confronting history bare-faced, as he plays his game in a way truly befitting a game.

Yoo Un-seong Yoo Un-seong graduated in physical science education from Seoul National University and studies film history and theory in the Korean National University of Arts (K-Arts) video theory department (specialist degree). In 2001, he was awarded top honors in Cine 21’s film theory awards. He worked as a programmer for the Jeonju International Film Festival from 2004 to 2012 and as head of the planning department for the Moonji Cultural Institute Saai between 2012 and 2014. In 2016, he and Mediabus’s Im Gyeong-yong launched the quarterly video criticism journal Oculo, where he serves as co-publisher.

Yoo lectures on film at K-Arts, Yonsei University, and Dankook University.

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ELLIE KYUNGRAN HEO

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Notes Towards an Ecology of Empathy in the films of Ellie Kyungran Heo

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Gareth Evans

Film Curator at Whitechapel Gallery

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. - Simone Weil In the world we are making, in the ‘public’ world, it is becoming increasingly hard to be gentle.

Perhaps it always was. There are of course, many acts of gentleness privately and even socially rendered but the concern here is how, without ridicule and in hope of a serious reception, an artist might communicate this quality, might suggest it as a way of being in the world and a means by which one might further engage.

How, in this case, and without it being the declared intention or primary thematic concern of the work, she might craft an ‘image’ of gentleness that avoids kitsch or the quicksand of sentiment and which can communicate itself, with a lyrical lightness of touch and an always keenly felt rigour, as valid both to the experience presented and as a model for future behavioural possibility; for personal and collective action (it is important here to confirm, of course, that gentleness is not only a tactile or textural trait, but a profoundly moral and outward-facing one, and one which we might, from now on, term empathy, and which the maestro of American prose, George Saunders, acclaimed widely for his possession of it, has described as ‘wide-open awareness’).

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For several years now, Ellie Kyungran Heo has been quietly crafting a body of moving image work - produced in South Korea, London and Japan - that, among its many qualities and aims, has repeatedly attempted - never overtly but from deep in the material and philosophical facts of its making - to answer the question raised above.

In films of significant durational variation, but always with a quietly consistent eye, she has tested the ability of the medium (both visually and sonically) to establish, inhabit and then offer such an empathy to the audiences her films find.

Note here that this value, or attribute, reveals itself as both the landscape and the character(s) within the landscape: thus the ecology of this piece’s title; the person in the group, and both in the world; and not only a person, far from it (more on the dogs and insects to come…).

Her own website notes reveal an acute creative self-awareness about the search in, and purpose of her work, and she triangulates herself tellingly, with reference to both William Blake’s epiphanic appreciation of dimensional surprises (‘a world in a grain of sand’) and Emmanuel Levinas’ ‘questioning of being’ (from which his celebrated reading of the face of the ‘other’ must surely also follow - urgent, communicative, expansive as the horizon from where the boats will come...).

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To establish common ground here, the films considered include Did You Eat Rice?, Island, The Planet and Janchi Guksu. The titles alert us, at once, to her fascination with scale, as a register of ethical investigation and a terrain of rewarding attention. Taken together, this quartet of works provides exemplars of her strategies and her hinted solutions, her wish for what film – and life, one can say – might be.

Without hierarchy, we learn that food is a process as much as an arrival at the plate. It is perhaps the great engine of the societal, central to the construction of place and community. In this, for us, film is almost a course at the table. It can extend food’s reach. In encountering food, from the growing to its consumption and even to its disposal, she also asks - and we learn the larger lessons about what place and community mean. Any questions raised are never posed as a threat but always offered as a gift towards mutual appreciation of the perhaps previously unspoken.

Did you eat rice?, Video Installation, Color, Sound, 52’, 2017

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Did You Eat Rice? with its invitation to share the

feast and its alternative enquiry about mood and well-being (or not) catches so much of this: the holistic nature of a sensual, human-scale coming together in an understated honouring of labour for the needed and not for gain; set to and informing the rhythm and flow of the seasonal and the filmic and the actions undertaken within both.

So, what might seem effortless is deeply worked.

The wondrous, casual, everyday aspect of things, people and actions melds imperceptibly with the chance glance and with the staged to remind us that all films – all art – and much of what we take for reality outside of any artefact is a constructed space, not least because of the preconceptions one brings to it, forethoughts waiting to be unravelled by concentrated and extended looking.

This gaze, unfolding in attentive time, offers each site encountered – a rice field and its settlement, an island, a meal and the epic environments of insect navigation – as cosmologies in their own terms, complete with their own rituals and cycles of behaviour (patterns abound throughout her work – the circles within frames, the lines, the echoes and refrains, constellational: the gleam of a galaxy as rice is illuminated within a telling darkness). They are both complete zones, selfsufficient (at least for the time of viewing) and inevitably impressed upon from without.

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In this world-making, effort and endurance, even the unarguable fact of survival, are celebrated.

The Planet demonstrates this most poignantly and democratically. Let us never forget we share the earth. A butterfly rests in the shadow of a human step. A wasp clings to the raft of another. A beetle survives in the waste. Progress should be thought of not as incremental consumption but as the sustainable co-existence of all. This is an increasingly rare state of affairs. As in Janchi Guksu, the fish – and much else - will more often than not scream in silence at their metal end.They are granted their time and presence here as absolutely themselves, but also as metaphors of a larger crisis, looming ever closer just beyond the frame.

This understanding of the shadow reality works strikingly in the sonic palette too. Island, with its canine cries and whimpers, relayed over calm grass and sea, gives us the terrible sound ‘off’, raising the levels of concern before our eyes find the wound in the enigmatic white dog’s fur.

Janchi Guksu (Banquet Noodles), Single Channel, Color, Sound, 4’18'', 2016

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Think more on this outstanding sequence: the pale flank of the breathing as if the screen itself is – film nudging as close to life as it can, and then closer; the wound as a rent, a tear in the fabric of a body and the real; then water in the hollow of a plastic sheet – another recess – but this time a nurturing one. The dog will survive. We know this. The water tells us. They breathe on the same planet.

It continues: rain on the island as we move to the larger picture. And suddenly the camera is handheld, mobile, alive and jittered as it follows the dog back into life and is guided in and out of a bark-dance with the fellow hounds. And yet, and yet... news of a suicide, and the camera leans into the grass circle of the church’s stonewalled shrine.

Ebb and flow, passing and renewal: the island breeds philosophies. And over it all, in its weathered night, the turn of the lighthouse beam, like her camera, offering up a shelter, a sweep of empathy.

This is associative, almost unconscious assembly at its best, passing far beyond the intellectual edit to an embodied knowledge of how we are all a part: editing as a bringing together of difference, a living with the other, convivial; and always, at its heart, a trust that it matters.

So the making of a film reveals itself as a deeply human act, a humane act. It is a patient act,

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regardless of the pace of the production. It follows therefore that it is a precise act. However energetic, unsettled or multiple the subjects, in her films the seen – and heard - thing remains absolutely the engine of the image.

Her filming is a modest act, needing only her presence, the camera and time. It is therefore a democratic act and, in its care for the seasons and their weathers, rarely claims more than that it was a temporary witness to some smaller or larger revelation (what we might claim for it is something else). Thus, at its core it is not – and nor does it seek to stimulate in others – an impulse towards possessiveness. It doesn’t seek ownership of what it wishes to represent.

It is a pleasurable act, for maker and viewer. And, being an act that places us in the world and time, and drawing with grace our consciousness to this fact, it is a resistant act. It resists the overlooked and the under-heard, the marginalisation of places, people, creatures and things that do not demand.

It resists easy co-option. It resists for a little while the ongoing erasures. It says, like all work of worth, ‘this was’, ‘this is’, ‘remember’. Let’s not be timid – she’s asking us how to live; how we are living,

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and how we might dwell in the enduring doubt of being, on the beaten ground of the earth, in honourable co-existence with our fellow species, the fauna and the flora, beneath the turning sky and mindful of the ever restless sea. It is about priority.

And so, she shows what we have always known, but what we almost always forget; the simple truth that could perhaps quite literally save us, could lead us out of this prison of obsession with the ‘other’. As the late John Berger, whose works have in recent years been translated increasingly into Korean, once wrote, ‘never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.’

Gareth Evans is a writer, curator, presenter and producer. He is Film Curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

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Haemin Kim

Meeting Him in the Relational Space

�� Hijung Min

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Art Theorist

1 Kim Hae-min first began drawing attention as a media artist with TV Hammer, a 1992 work with a striking scene in which a hammer adorned with spiky hair smashed at a cathode ray tube as if it might burst out of the TV screen. It was the product of Kim’s mature consideration of media as someone who had explored the video medium since the 1980s - his contemplation of the new role demanded of the artist in contemporary culture, namely that of attuning the currents of cultural energy and generating waves of new energy.

Roy Ascott, one of the early observers of behavioral tendency in modern art, saw artist, artwork, and viewer as forming relationships with a behavioral context. He felt that the boundary between the artwork’s production and the work itself, as well the experience of the work, were no longer clearly defined - a tendency he believed would only intensify. Where past aesthetics had emerged in a deterministic culture in which messages defined and individuated by the artist were transmitted to a passive viewer, art was positioned in a cultural context where artists and viewers participated to incite aesthetic events, expanding it into an open, public discourse. As if to bear out Ascott’s prediction, Kim Hae-min has continued to present boundary-breaking works centering around interaction. In contextual terms, he does not appear to have followed Ascott.

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As an artist produced by his era, he has diligently devoted himself to his convictions, assuming a quite unique place in the historical current of Korean media art in the process. Unlike artists according to the traditional concept - those who began as painters - Kim is the first person to establish himself firmly as an artist using the camera from the outside, without ever picking up a brush.

Kim Hae-min describes the art as “one who relates.”

This reflects a world view that sees the artist as performing the role of mediator or modifier, someone using his or her work to form a cognitive relationship or strike a balance among such issues to enable interaction as a community. He has also followed a path that applies to his strength as an editor, assembling temporal puzzle pieces and linking different spaces so that media art achieves artistic resonance beyond a mere cognitive debate at the level of aesthetic experience or information.

At a time when the media art debate was just beginning in Korea, he broke away from the work at the symbolic level and video as a contemplative object to present a video world where actual experiences take place.

2 Kim Hae-min’s choice of the mediator role starts from a deep understanding of space. He focuses

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on the way in which a single incident can never exist without a relationship to the outside.

To infuse immediacy into two-dimensional media, he did not approach it in terms of painting, which was evolving along with mathematical lines, but noted instead the frame. He was ultimately fascinated by the relational structures that emerged as endlessly woven temporal slices were rearranged spatially through angles.

Adopting this as his aesthetic terrain, he launched an aesthetic exploration of delving in and out of the frame.

Shamanism is the theme through which he has been able to present the artist’s role as gobetween most clearly. Not only does it perform the mediating role of linking different spaces - “then and there” and “here and now” - but it also enables endless questions about one of humankind’s most fundamental desires to know. In his work Sindoan 1994, he transferred a cultural thread that had gone underground as “superstition” into a white cube with an exhibitional function, where the religious rites offered a new consciousness to the audience in the form of an unfamiliar experience.

In addition, he considered the existential problem by dialectically expanding the events from a new position from the A Crescent and a Decrecent 1991, Red and White Man 1994.

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Kim thus does not insist on separating imaginary from existing. When we encounter a video, we already see the space within it as one that encompasses our own lives. Within his terrain, Kim draws on the well of time, linking independent spaces organically and growing them like stem cells in a relationship of vitality. This is not a relationship that goes away once a mechanical medium has been shut off. Our minds can conjure up the images at any time, constantly segmenting and searching and repeating. Kim seeks out different strategies to create real spaces that are living, breathing, constantly in motion.

Representative of this is the way he not only dismantles the interface’s inward and outward aspects, or reality and the virtual, but links virtual worlds together with other virtual worlds to form multidimensional network spaces. As can be seen in works like Emitting Light from Emitting Light 1997, Unreasonable Alibi 1999 and Seeking for Love 2008, he seems to transpose the videos to a theatrical

Unorderable Connections, 1channel, color, 6', 2006

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space, designing spatial systems where two moving images interact and the viewer’s gazes are continuously crossed. As a result, his works have a structure that is capable of consistently generating new outcomes.

Another strategy is to inside one interface into another one, or to partition them to create double or multiplex spaces. The intermediate space in the interface is not simply empty space here, but plays a central role in eliciting new relationships. The variability of these spaces in particular transforms them into experiential environments that provide directionality to the viewer’s consciousness and generate new awareness. In Unorderable Connections, he cleverly positions a television cathode ray tube within the interface confronted by the user, which has the effect of ushering the viewer’s space a step forward and leading him or her into a kind of trance. By showing the familiar outward appearance of a TV that might have existed in someone’s space in the past, along with someone’s hand flipping through channels, he gives viewers a taste of telepresence, where they seem to be the ones changing the channels themselves.

In contrast, TV Hammer disrupts the viewer’s perceptions, superimposing and adhering two glass interfaces to give the illusion that the relation context between image and watcher seems to be situated in the same space.

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In this way, Kim Hae-min positions the video frame in just the right place to generate a vivid interaction even without the power of the New Technology. Even single-channel video is converted to three-dimensional memory through partitioning of the interface to compose spaces. In Once Upon a Time in Panmunjeom, the elderly speaker plays the role of both interface guiding us into a new place and medium replaying his own memories as source record. Here, Kim opens up a new interface so the signified fragments do not simply scatter, expanding them into multilayered space to elicit the viewer’s awareness in response.

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The different spaces that appear in Kim Hae-min’s work only become relational spaces capable of full interaction once the artist’s unique aesthetic coloring has been added in. Kim’s distinctive, painstaking coloration process is a means of evoking characteristically Korean elements. At all times, the artist coordinates these elements to modern jangdan, adding hae-hak as he moves them to the stage.

Once Upon a Time in Panmunjom, 1channel, color, 47', 2013

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The Korean word 장단 jangdan, meaning a kind of “rhythm,” can be written in Chinese with the characters 長短, or literally “long-short.” As a native Korean word, however, it refers to a key aesthetic element in Korean culture and art.

Jangdan is typically understood to refer to a particular beat and tempo in traditional Korean music. But as its use in the idiom jangdan yi matda (“to be attuned”) suggests, it also exists in various derivations outside of musical terminology, suggesting the meaning of harmony. It is a sense that is also deeply imbued in the emotions of the Korean people, where differing elements seek out a harmony together - as can be seen in the cries of “eolssigu, jeolss-gu” or “eya-, diya-” that accompany the jang-dan rhythm. Many examples of Western culture and technology have entered Korea and been adopted since the modern era, but the jang-dan lives on in embodied aspects such as Koreans’ gait and manner of speaking, and in the symbols of their entertainment culture. In addition to his adept command of different rhythms, Kim Hae-min also generates aesthetic resonance by showing the pleasure of things coming together briskly in his work. Jangdan is not a matter of simply dictating harmony, serenity, or perfection between two objects. It is a harmony and resonance achieved amid clashing and conflict, an accidental yet purposeful flow, a contextual element that can only be seen by viewing

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the whole. In adopting jang-dan as its central aesthetic, Kim’s artistic universe assumes a structure where no one is otherized, where things can interact even as the component elements do not dissipate their individuality.

Jangdan has been a sign eliciting Kim’s

characteristic form of dialectical logic from his early work Red and White Nobility 1994 to the pieces shown as his solo exhibition ‹지록위마 Ji-Rok-We-Ma, 指鹿爲馬› (Calling a Deer a Horse) a few years ago, including HE and SHE 2011, Other Portrait 2014, and Man and Woman with a Gat 2014. It functions on one hand to encourage viewers to pose questions to themselves and create logic, as through solving a riddle through their search for the relational space structure, and on the other to drive them into a state of confusion. If jangdan functions as a current of the signified throughout Kim’s work, then 해학Hae-hak is an element generating its signifying aspects. “hae-hak” here means a critical stance that is waggish without sacrificing its dignity.

In generating well-meaning laughter, it presumes sympathy, understanding, a positive view toward humankind. As an artistic approach, it reflects the resistance mentality of the masses seeking to escape oppression and restrictions, capturing the Korean way of living and mindset - one of never losing sight of love or pleasure even amid the ordeals of history. Readily apparently in the

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very titles of Kim’s work, this humorous quality solidifies aspects that are at once playful and defiant, be it through magic effects, literary elements from theatrical mise-en-scène, and forms of play like jokes or games. Pushing and pulling inward and out, the correspondence of two gazes - red, then deep blue - that appears in his work like an obvious virtue serves to generate a three-dimensional density.

Hijung Min Hijung Min is involved in research activity with a focus on modern art and media theory. She was responsible for the research and text of the exhibition The Future Is Now (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2014) and the Art and Science Fusion Project Dynamic Structure & Fluid (Arko Art Center, 2014).

Recently published papers and articles are as follows: “A Study of Media Arts of Park Hyun-Ki with Focus on His Early Works from 1978 to 1982” (Korean Society of Art Theories, 2015), “A Study on Park Hyun-Ki’s Transcendental Technology Art -Focused on His Mirror Works-” (Korean Society of Basic Design & Art, 2016), and “A Study on Initial Discourse in Korean Media Art -Focused on the Change of Terms from the 1960’s to 1990’s-” (Korea Society of Image Arts and Media, 2016).

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JUNG-JU AN

Twisting the Rules, Shifting Paradigms

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Ki Hey-kyung

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Chief curator, Buk Seoul Museum of Art

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An Jung-ju, an artist who chiefly works in video, sound, and installation, worked in the early 2010s to create art with roots in the childhood culture of play, where his own interventions resulted in changes to the rules of the game and the paradigms he created. Works like Sand Castle 2012, Sleep Well, Dear Comrade 2013, All for one, one for all 2013, and Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon 2013 all fall into this category. These works originate from games that any South Korean above a certain age is likely to have played in his or her youth, including “land siege” (ttang ttameokgi), rubber band games, and the tag variant known as “The Rose of Sharon Blossomed.” They are works that follows rules we are well acquainted with; in Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon, the tagger stands blindfolded facing a wall and chants “Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon” over and over, while the other players sneak up and try to tag him or her and run away without being caught. As the still-blindfolded and chanting participant turns around, the tagger engages in a psychological contest with his or her adversaries, adjusting the tempo of the “rose of Sharon” chant while trying to capture the gradually approaching players. According to the encyclopedia of folk games, this game, ostensibly a variant of traditional tag, had the name of Korea’s national flower added to its title to promote a sense of patriotism among children. The structure of the game, where the other players sneak up to the

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tagger while he or she is chanting “Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon” and either score hits or are taken prisoner, is a reflection of Korea’s historical circumstances and the antagonism between South and North. Another example of the inter-Korean standoff being reflected in games can be seen with Sleep Well, Dear Comrade, which originates in a rubber band game that follows the song lyrics, “Forward, forward / Over the bodies of my comrades.”

Interwoven with a game most children would have played without a second thought, the song is not only totally unsuited to the child’s mindset or the playful spirit at the root of childhood games -- it is positively tragic, a fact that offers us insight into the way the childhoods of people in the generation that enjoyed these games were a process of internalizing and embodying state ideologies and anti-Communism.

Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon is one of two works An submitted for Video Portrait, the artist exhibition centering on a video-based exploration of contemporary self-portaits. Rooted in games that take Korea’s national and popular division as their backdrop, this work’s inclusion in the exhibition stems from its being based, as mentioned before, in Cold War ideology, yet at the same time sidestepping and deconstructing it. As a result, it subtly juxtaposes both the division faced by contemporary Korea and a situation in which that division has become entrenched and internalized

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without any perceived sense of tension, as part of everyday life. This shift may be seen as the result of the artist’s slow-motion repetition of a full-screen image showing the tagger looking back after chanting “Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon,” which naturally has the effect of bringing the viewer into the game. But despite the tension generated by the tagger’s slow-motion gaze as it seems to bore into the viewer, the structure of the work is such that the tagger is forever the tagger, and the viewer ultimately leaves the tagger behind when he or she departs. This structure is formed by twisting the relationship of tension and the cyclical structure between the game’s two agents to its breaking point, while the artist shifts the game’s paradigm through deliberately minimal involvement.

The tagger is always the tagger, while the viewer is left a participant who need never fear becoming “it”; the defined cycle between the two actors in the game is broken. A similar paradigm shift is seen in Sleep Well, Dear Comrade. Based on a game played with rubber bands, its lyrics convey a tragic and somber sense, yet the image of adult women enjoying themselves illustrates the broad divide between tragic and somber nationalist, anti-Communist ideology and the playfulness that sustains life, as well as the fact that live goes on in spite of this divide and imbalance. In this, it is a reflection of our own contemporary lives.

Having thus noted the startlingly numerous

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vestiges of the Cold War era looming over the culture of play, the artist uses the symbolic worlds of image and sound in later works such as National ceremony 2012, Rose of Sharon 2012, and The great absolute 2012 to inspire more direct rumination on our internalized nationalism. This is true for National ceremony, a long-take video in which the perspective and lens projection distance never change as children are showing lining up in a large gymnasium and following the sequence of the National ceremony, and for The great absolute, which features a monotonous image of the South Korean flag on a pole, waving in the wind to the words of a song -- the lyrics of which many of us can still recite -- that begins, “The Taegeukgi waves in the wind.� These works use the camera angle, perspective, and the video projection angle to make the viewer a participant in the unfolding ceremony. Once transferred to the gallery context, however, the National ceremony setting triggers an ambiguous sense of unease in the viewer (albeit to differing degrees) with the way it fails to accord with the operation of his or her internalized and embodied symbolic world. At the same time, it causes the viewer to reflect on the way in which systems of national symbols function through image and sound. Understanding An Jung-ju’s work along these lines may lead some to mistakenly view him as an artist who emphasizes narrative or narrative structure.

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As even the aforementioned works show, however, the artist’s approach to his work is one of delving into the inherent power of video images and sounds and the ways in which they work rather than one of narrative or narrative structure. It is an approach that enables us to see the paradigm shift created by the artist’s intervention. Video as a temporal art form allows narratives to be easily constructed from images in sequence.

Yet as an artist working chiefly in video, An has endeavored from his earliest works like the Their War 2005 series and Drill 2005 to use fragmentation of video images and sound, or variation of those video images and sound through re-editing, to reveal the sense of pressure or the everyday indifference toward war that runs through life in a divided region, or to inspire play with national ideology and totalitarian thinking bearing roots in close-order drills. At the same time, expansions in An Jung-ju’s working methods have resulted in a paradigm shift through his variations in image and sound, which culminates in Chain Letter 2015, his work for this exhibition. For this installation, video clips taken during world travels in the early ’00s are broadcast over a nine-channel cathode ray-tube television. For the work, the artist matched each video clip with one arbitrarily decided word, and then used the clips to “write” the kind of chain letter all of us received at some point when we were children. It is an example

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of re-mediation: letters that were once beautifully hand-written changed over time to letters written on the computer, which were copied and pasted online until they reached An Jung-ju, who fashions his chain letter out of video clips. To decipher the video, we need to make use of 76 word cards, which have been joined together by the artist according to the chain letter’s structure and content.

Using video clips to present us with a new linguistic structure, the work cannot be made sense of without the cards, yet the viewers standing in front of it do not sense the same kind of frustration they would when encountering a foreign language for the first time -- a phenomenon we may attribute to the very difference between the functioning of the images and sounds and that of a writing system. If we take into account the fact that re-mediation is the practice of a specific group in a specific historical context, it may be attributed to the way the viewer faced with the artist’s video letter as a representation of the video image era reaches beyond the communication style dictated by writing systems to explore the possibilities of producing different meanings through

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Chain Letter, 6chnnel,color, 5'55'', 2015

sounds and images. In that sense, An Jung-ju’s Chain Letter could be called a way of representing a new video generation and a work that reflects its members’ cultural practices and experiences.

In this way, Chain Letter offers a platform with new rules in place of the previous regulations, inspiring us to reconsider the existing systems and posit alternative paradigms for new systems.

The 20th President of South Korea just took office.

My reaction in watching the election and its results -- which took place after an unpredecented presidential impeachment -- was less one of relief in confirming the familiar mainstream beliefs than one of trepidation over the implications of an outcome that showed our failure to break free from the existing paradigm of still-internalized ideology.

Under these circumstances, my encounter with the work of An Jung-ju, which twists existing systems and thereby offers a glimpse at the potential for new paradigms, has been an invaluable experience -- one that awakened me to the possibility of seeing beyond fear.

Ki Hey-kyung Ki Hey-kyung earned master’s and doctoral degrees in modern and contemporary Korea art from the Hongik University Department of Art History. As a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, she planned numerous exhibitions including Masters of the 20th century: Latin American Art (2008), Beginning of a New Era (2009), Made in Popland: The Pop Art of Korea, China, and Japan(2010), and 2012 Korea Artist Prize (2012). She currently works at the Buk Seoul Museum of Art. Her research examines the response of art in the mass media era since the late 1980s and establishes Korean contemporary art within the context of art history, as with her doctoral dissertation “Art in the Age of Mass Media : Korean Contemporary Art from 1980 to 1997.”

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Blossomed, The Rose of Sharon, 2channel installation, color, 8'56'', 2013

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MOOJIN BROTHERS

Pictureless Picturebook: Thinking Which Rejects Thinking, �� Particular Effects from Rejecting the Particular 1

�� Lee Soohyun

freelancer curator

1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Radical Thinkers), (Verso, 2006)

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1 The Moojin Brothers’ videos are characterized by plain narration and a screen composition based on a narrative structure that mixes ideological fiction with mundane reality. They recall the mockumentary approach – perhaps because their works are the result of combining their interpretations of everything they have experienced in society, and also because they reflect the artists’ practical narrative of capturing stories from society.

The combination of ideological fiction and objective reality in the videos embodies a journey of seeking out the key determinants for the conditions of living. The abstractions and riddlelike texts that fill the screen come across like an interesting fable, but they also have a side that illustrates the uniform and categorized nature of society, giving the viewer an unsettling sense of loss. This is because the relationships that should naturally form between people in society become distorted and individualized when combined with an unidentifiable social structure. Acutely perceiving this reality, the Moojin Brothers use realistic stories of fiction and the foreign and familiar elements within them to change our perspective. Adorno stated that “the value of a thought depends on its continued familiarity and how well you can distance yourself from it.”2 2 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)

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The Moojin Brothers record the process of mixing and rebuilding the frames of social conditions in order to carry Adornian thought to its conclusion.

This is the beginning of a process of seeking out diverse discussions on the meaning of life today.

2 Who are you, and how can you be categorized?

With what do your utterances coincide?…

Just as our very right to existence crumbled when you kept making us question our own value, I believe that the best thing people can do is shut their mouths and internalize.3 Mumming Age recalls a workspace where one can

sense a master craftsman’s hands at work.Inside that space, you may meet “Woman #1902,” who is quietly focused on her work. It is unclear exactly what she is. Purely from her handling of machinery and the movements of her hands in making things, she resembles a worker. On the other hand, the way in which the items she makes are connected to surround her body suggests how the irrational structures of reality continue in a cycle. This reflects a reality in which labor, which emerged as a means for living a humane life, is gradually being stripped of humanity. Woman #1902 has fallen into the snare of the capitalistic order without explaining who or what she is.

The Moojin Brothers expand on this social 3 Félix Guattari & Suely Rolnik, Micropolitiques, (EMPECHEURS DE PENSER EN ROND; Sciences humaines edition , 2007)

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structure through the narrative of Landscape.

Scripture of the wind shows creatures trying to preserve something sacred, in a workspace that appears to contain no warmth or exits. The code of behaviour that the two brothers follow as they work with their father seems to be intrinsic to a certain belief, providing a realistic demonstration of how people are unable to hold onto their idealistic and fictional beliefs, ultimately living like convicted criminals who can never be free.

The self does not exist as a human with individual desires, but instead in terms of someone’s role or position.

A “Myrmecoleon,� which has the body of an ant and the head of a lion, appears as a creature that cannot be placed into any hierarchy.

The Myrmecoleon does not belong with the ants or with the lions, and ends up dying without ever determining its identity. What fate would have befallen the Myrmecoleon had it been able to live completely as its own thing without being placed into a role? This represents the fear that in a reality where everything is categorized, a truly unique individual cannot survive.

The creatures that appear in Mumming Age and Scripture of the wind speak to a reality in which we are forced to live standardized lives in accordance with set rules. Their world they inhabit embodies a world of restrictions, where the gaze of others and hegemonic identity become internalized.

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3 The family depicted in Soaring in transition spans several generations, with a daughter-in-law who is suffering because of her mother-in-law, a sick wife, and a husband who is forced to carry all of his family’s baggage. The family, which is supposed as a shield against deprivation, is instead ravaged by violence and poverty. Thus even the family unit begins to lose its humanity due to greed and the standardization of values. In the midst of this process, the serpent-child “Gua” (taking the first syllables from the Korean words gureongi [serpent] and ai [child]) is born. The mythical and personified creatures such as the serpent, the serpent-child, and the “earth bird” are a metaphorical representation of a conflicted reality. They are losers who cannot live up to their real-world identity, as well as a self-portrait of modern people who have been marginalized by capitalism and rationality.

While reflecting on the destruction wrought by humans who have objectified, fragmented, and destroyed nature because of their belief they can dominate everything, this work shows us that all they have attained means nothing at all in the end.

The self, which has already been eroded by customs and homogeneity, becomes even further diminished in an environment of poverty and development.

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The Heap, 1channel,black and white, 8'56'', 2015

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“Grandma Eetto eetto” in The Heap is a hopeful presence fighting against a devastated reality.

Grandma Eetto eetto is represented as a mechanism of communication that governs and connects new life in a world where communities have collapsed. She is like a martial arts expert, who exists apart from the universality of life and gives meaning to that which has been destroyed, while also representing a mother figure who can accept our life for what it truly is. Seeking to find and rebuild things amongst the rubble and share them with others, she shows us the reproductive structure as it has established itself within the framework of capitalism. However, the meaning of these actions does not reflect a realistic mechanism; it simply follows the positive feedback principles of nature. It is representation as resistance to actions that seek to build instead of produce, to construct rather than develop, before a reality that has been laid waste to by capital.

4 Slavoj Žižek has said that our thoughts have been programmed inside a fixed, homogenous system.

For this reason, he recommends breaking the very mold of the world we are given. He believes that the best way to overthrow our current identity is by changing our thoughts and behavior.4 Through a character called M, the Moojin Brothers suggest a practical method of critiquing universal 4 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (Verso, 2006)

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identity. In The Last Sentence, M is the main character, a figure who cleans a dark underground tunnel. He represents the individuals that capitalism has created. M plays his part well, having been led to believe slogans such as “enjoy what you cannot avoid” and “youth is suffering.”

However, he is suddenly transported to a mysterious place after an accident and discovers a new space. At that moment, everything becomes clear to him: that lives exist outside of his own, and that all of his actions to that point were merely following the dictates of capitalism. After learning the truth about reality and examining a mazelike map, he departs down another dark path. This cannot be interpreted as a simple story of discovering society’s contradictions and choosing to leave. Within repeated social conditions, no practical action holds any meaning.

In other words, this means that in a homogenous system, countless differing discourses will be recaptured within that system. In spite of this, M turns towards another realm of darkness, thereby hinting that the current system needs to be overturned. M’s actions and the dark location he finds himself in create an uneasy feeling. However, the Moojin Brothers guide our eyes and thoughts in a way that allows us to find the mechanism that produces this feeling of unease. And on that dark path, we come face to face with Odradek.

The fictional Odradek is like a belief that cannot

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be grasped, an unresolved answer. It is a journey of finding a Platonic ideal of life, depicting our obsession with the thought that we should always be following something. It limns a subconscious world imposed by some thing or another, and reveals that what we view as real life is really just empty fiction. However, alongside the possibility that Odradek cannot be grasped, this can also be interpreted as an invitation to look at a reality that is filled with differences and diversity. M disappearing into the darkness and the presence of Odradek are like hints of a deep yearning to look at reality from a different perspective.

5 The Moojin Brothers take an artistic gaze that originates from within and turn it toward the external to observe communities. The field of M is a work of public art that is designed to examine the identity of communities, encouraging the viewer to find the self that has become lost in social norms. This is not a mechanism to force people to make choices for the purposes of the Moojin Brothers’ artistic practice; it is positioned with the intention of acknowledging and sharing different viewpoints. It aims to use the voices of themselves and others to hear the exploitative and repressive power that capitalism commands, while transporting that intent into public spaces so that it can be carried forward around the

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world. These voices carry important meaning as they represent an act of resistance in the pursuit of a better life. As Slavoj ŽiŞek stated, if we are already part of an ideology, then we need to change ourselves in order to resist it.5 In this context, the role of The field of M is to show that the value of life does not lie in the logic of society or hegemonic identity, but in the acknowledgment of differences and encounters with people who have different experiences. We do not need power or authority to change the uncomfortable aspects of society. The Moojin Brothers remind us that we can create stable social systems through the process of expanding our awareness of both ourselves and others.

6 We currently live in a society where everything is designed to move quickly. This speed ignores the thoughts and observations that lie deep within us, which means there is a desperate need for artists who understand and offer advice on the social context. In this sense, the artistic gaze of the Moojin Brothers, with its perception of irrational social structures, holds great meaning.

The broader context of their videos tacitly reflects the reality we live in, and the characters and objects that appear within are representations of people who do not fit neatly in social categories.

The endless search for fragmented wounds from 5 Ibid.

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a foundation in the universality of life represents the Moojin Brothers’ form of practice and their attempt to take the measure of our social context.

They give names to what cannot exist and impart different meanings, transforming and reconfiguring familiar things. The surreal creations that result from this are transformed into thoughts of resistance. We can relate this back to the “value of thought” that Adorno spoke of. This echoes the role of the artist in shedding light on power structures that undermine our ability to think critically. From this standpoint, it is clear what the Moojin Brothers seek to do through their art. The unrealistic characters and narrative structure that urge us to reject everyday thinking may be taken as an alternative analysis toward a new change in perception, and as a discourse for diagnosing the presentness of the present.

Lee Soo-hyun Lee Soo-hyun has worked as a curator and received her Ph.D. from Dongduk Women's University. She served as curator at the i-Gong Alternative Visual Culture Factory, where she planned a variety of visual exhibitions (2012–2015), and as exhibition curator for the Seoul International New Media Festival.

She currently works as a freelance writer and exhibition planner.

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OKIN COLLECTIVE

�� Low Voices: Positioning Art(ists) through a “Questioning Operation”

�� Nathalie Boseul Shin

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Curator, Total Museum of Contemporary Art

It was a noisy time. Last autumn, the candles began lighting up the square. Flags waved.

Chanting from different voices; speeches and incitement. At first, we had no idea when it would be over. Would it change things? Would there be an end? Even when my acquaintances were putting up tents and battling the winter cold on Gwanghwamun Square, we couldn’t be certain how things would finish. And then – everything suddenly changed. We brought down a president, elected a new president, carefully trod a path of new change. As 2016 passed into 2017, the things we accomplished came as a shock even to us.

We learned how great a change could come from the light of a single candle, and from those candles joining together.

But on that very same day, six workers were holding a high-wire hunger strike on a 40-meter advertising tower at that very intersection by Gwanghwamun. They included Lee In-geun, a worker fired by Cort Guitars, and five other workers who were involved in long-term battles at other workplaces. While other people were dreaming of a new president and a new era that spring days, others in the same place were still forced to battle to stay alive.

Cort Guitars. From its beginnings as an instrument company with a capital sum of 2 million won in 1973, it grew to account for 30% of the world 089

instrument market; CEO Park Young-ho rose to become South Korea’s 120th richest person.

That growth was rooted in workers laboring in harsh environments. Yet Park decided that he wanted to pay even less to make guitars, shuttering his factories in Korea and relocating them to China or Indonesia. In 2008, Lee In-geun climbed atop a transmission tower in Seoul’s Han River Mangwon area for a high-wire protest that lasted close to a month. Nearly ten years have passed since his struggle began. That time period saw the workers’ story related in the documentary Dream Factory. The manager for the band Kingston Rudieska, which gave a celebratory performance at the screening, proposed that the workers form a band as part of their battle. Thus began Corban(Cort Guitar Workers Band), a group made up of dismissed Cort Guitars employees. Over 3,500 days have passed, yet their story continues.

Seoul Decadence-Live_Single channel video, Full HD, Color, Sound_51' 50"_2015 (Live Performance :2014)

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Okin Collective learned about Cor-Ban around 2010 during a protest by the culture and arts community over the demolition of Duriban, a noodle restaurant opposite Hongik University. Their interest continued afterwards, and in late 2013 they staged the play Hamlet for Nine Days at the small Theater Lab Hyehwa-dong No.1 in Seoul. Lasting for nine days, the performance adopted a documentary format in which performers explained to the audience why they had ended up in their long-term battles. The world remained unkind to them: while they were preparing for the performance, terminated workers lost in a remand and reversal of the case they had filed to have their dismissals overturned, and the lead players in Hamlet were unable to take the stage. Learning of this, Okin Collective had the idea that they could somehow carry on their stories like the many musicians and artists who had lent their support to Cor-Ban. The result of this was Seoul Decadence-Live.

Before it was a video work, Seoul Decadence-Live was a semi-improvisational “live�performance for which Okin Collective cast the actors in Hamlet for Nine Days (terminated workers Lee In-geun and Lim Jae-chun) and the play’s co-directors (Kwon Eun-young and Maeun Kong of Vibrate Jelly) to act out a situation similar to a theatrical rehearsal.

As introductory noise reminiscent of the sounds of factory machinery comes to a stop, director

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Maeun Kong appears and draws a chalk rectangle on the roof, showing where the temporary stage will be. Lee In-geun, who played the role of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, begins reciting his dialogue. The actor asks the director for advice to help with his fumbling performance; as time passes, he becomes more absorbed in the role. But over the course of the rehearsal, the characters’ conversation about real life goes awry, and we see artists struggling with the recognition of how tiny they are before the great problems of reality.

At this point, Im Jae-chun (playing Ophelia) and the other director Kwon Eun-young enter and carry on a conversation. As these clearly nonprofessional actors improve their awkward and comical physical movements, the viewers come to understand why they are working so hard to rehearse their performances. At the same time, they bear witnesses to a tragicomic situation in which it is not clear whether the increased flexibility in their acting is a good or bad thing.

As the members of Okin Collective have said, the “live” in the title refers to this being an actual performance, but it is also intended in the sense that their situation is still happening, that it is not their story alone, and that the situation happening here and now could become a future that had already arrived long ago, like an endless nightmare. For this reason, the video record of the actual performance is not an incidental part

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of it; the performance and the video of it are two different works that take on the meaning of a single (ongoing) video work of a complementary and mutually referencing character. The ingenious structure created by the theatrical rehearsal framework, the performance, and the video that addresses the performance through the performance leads the viewer to naturally approach the characters in the work and reflect on his or her own position.

These are people who spent 10 long years trying to protect their livelihoods, yet the characters that meet in the work all come across as artless. They are straightforward in answering the directors’ questions; they smile bashfully. They gently relate their ideas and stories. None of it gives the sense of a “violent struggle.” That may explain it, then.

This was the same attitude seen with the worker who climbed up a 40-meter advertising tower wearing a headband: that feeling of estrangement that does not come through in front-page photographs in the newspaper. This is the question that Okin Collective poses.

A similar “operation” can be seen in Seoul Decadence, which focuses on the story of Park Jung-geun. Park was the sort of 20-something you encounter every day. He worked from time to time in his father’s photography studio, living an

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orderly life making his own indie label. Yet Park’s life changed overnight when he ended up in court, charged with violating the National Security Law for retweeting from the North Korean website Uriminzokkiri. Seoul Decadence shows its character receiving acting lessons for a theater director ahead of final arguments in court. Unlike Seoul Decadence-Live, this was not a live performance, yet it showed its characters in much the same way.

Despite the stigma of his National Security Law violation, the Park Jung-geun seen in the video speaks and acts in a way that is absurd, weird, funny. Seoul Decadence becomes a question about how the kind of enormous situation faced by someone so exceedingly ordinary functions in South Korean society today. It also leads us to understand that his situation may not be so far removed from our own.

This is how Okin Collective operations: gently, seriously, separately or together. Rather than seeking answers, it focuses on asking the right questions. Yet its members do not come across at all as “fighters” or “activists.” They speak in quiet, measured tones, asking us what we think about the situations happening now. Okin Collective’s members are often called activists, part of a team practicing social art, yet their way of connecting with the world through art is neither extreme nor ponderous. (For this very reason, they have

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sometimes been misunderstood, and even criticized.) Because their voices are so low, the audience focuses more in listening to their stories.

This has always been the case with Okin Collective.

It originated out of the demolition of Okin Apartments, yet its members didn’t form their collective to denounce then-former Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon’s Han River Renaissance plan or rally against gentrification. As they have explained, their agitated response to the Okin Apartments situation was “less about the work or the struggle and more closely connected in a primitive way to death and disappearance”; it was both remembrance and record. It was at a farewell meeting with Okin Apartments that Okin Collective began with Okin-dong Vacance.

Faced with the weighty theme of demolition and redevelopment, Okin Collective went about the (rather cheerful) staging of Okin-dong Vacance, inviting people and traveling around the area recording what they saw. The fireworks set off on the apartment roof before the farewell may seem like a childish prank. The members have said that while the origins of the situation were certainly political, their response to it was “poetic.”

They believe that as artists, the best thing they can do for the world is to use their art.

Operation-For Something White and Cold, held at Loop in 2011, saw Okin Collective “planning” a performance. To orchestrate an unexpected

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performance, the members prepared a list of viewers before to create an emergency contact network, then sent out text messages directing them on what to do. The picket-like objects used for the operation were actually tools to sweep away snow, and the operation itself happened on a snowy day. As Lee Gwang-seok explains so well in The Rooftop Aesthetic, Operation-For Something Black and Hot 2012 goes a step beyond a poetic response to the politic, achieving something that subtly straddles the gap between the poetic and political.

At the time of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster, the members of Okin Collective were skeptical when they heard there was little members of the public could do to survive something like a nuclear disaster. The alternative response they hit upon was bizarrely enough, was Chi(氣, energy) gymnastics. In live and video performances, Okin has nonchalant-seeming, unacquainted neighbors (or audience members) join hands for a demonstration of Chi gymnastics as a way of surviving a disaster – all with the utmost seriousness.

As mentioned before, the members of Okin Collective have sometimes been mistaken for activists or anarchists or criticized as naïve. But a closer look at their work shows them to be neither activists nor anarchists – and certainly not naïve. Instead, they are artists who are always thinking about how the artist should be positioned

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within the world. Seeing Okin Apartments facing demolition, they sensed their own anxiety as people surviving as artists. Diligently confronting their own lives as artists, they question themselves on their roles as artists working together, using their work to explore these questions. While art is not obliged to solely talk about the world, can (modern) art ever fully let go of its connection to the world? This is the question they are constantly posing to themselves.

An example of this is Art Spectral, shown as Art Spectrum 2016. The name Art Spectral is a slight twist on the exhibition title. Starting from Art Spectrum – an exhibition created to “show different scenes from contemporary art and support creative activities by young artists” – Okin Collective interrogated the meaning of making art in Korea and the role and position of the artist. As always, they approached the work in their own unique style. When they heard they had been selected from Art Spectrum, they had the idea of making a performance and video that were somehow different. What they imagined was a form of metacriticism directed at Samsung – a massive conglomerate that is an essential part of any conversation about Korean society – and its patronage of the arts. But what Okin Collective ended up making was neither a new performance nor a new video. The result did not even mention

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Samsung by name. Instead, the members worked to build the biggest floor they could. It’s fascinating just to imagine it: artists assembling in an illustrious setting made by a world-famous architect and laboring to make a floor. It was in itself an act of rebellion, and it may also have been a challenge toward the system created by the artistic community.

The museum preferred to explain that it was intended as a rest area for viewers tired of walking around the exhibition venue. In fact, it was intended – as the word “spectral” in the title indicates – as a scathing self-indictment of the position of art and artists, their relationship with Samsung and its museum of art, and their paralytic status in a business-centered society. (Particulars can be found in the book of the same name published by Okin Collective, which was a central component of the work.)

Of course, visitors who are tired of looking at the art can visit this “venue” and lie down. They can also choose to read or not to read the book Okin compiled. If their eyes are tired from reading, they can do eye exercises along to a painstakingly produced eye exercise video. In a space so thoroughly crafted in line with the service spirit, the viewers are forced to ask themselves the same questions as the artists: What is the work of art here? Is it the floor? The book or the video?

It could be everything or nothing.

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If that is the case, then what is art and who is the artist? What is that art(ist) capable of doing? Are art and artists still valid in this day and age? What societal role can they play? Much of the art and many of the artists today no longer ask such tired questions. Some tackle matters on the ground as activists; other live conflict-free as artists in the art community. The three artists in Okin Collective also live through art and as artists, each with their own artistic work. Yet in the context of a collective, their ideas are somewhat different. Perhaps art(ists) cannot change the world. But art(ists) can help people change, and through art(ists) we can see things that we had forgotten or tried not to notice. Viewers may find their own answers to the questions about the world raised by art(ists).

In this way, they seem to be finding their own justification for existing as artists in the world: asking and answering questions. As a result, their questioning “operation” still applies – and we listen once again for their low voices.

Nathalie Boseul Shin Nathalie Boseul SHIN is chief curator of Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul.

She studied philosophy at Ewha Woman’s University and aesthetics at Hongik University(M.A). Currently, she is a Ph.D candidate in Hongik University. Since 1997, she started her curatorial career in Korea, engaging various exhibition planning and art projects. In 2000, she began as a curator with an expertise of media art after working for art center nabi. Further, she developed her experience at Seoul International Media Art Biennale 2004, leading exhibition team as manager. She has been working at Total Museum of Contemporary Art since 2007. She curated Muntadas: Asian Protocols, News after the News (Dan Perjovschi), Postcapical Archive: 1989-2001 (Daniel G. Andujar), Danish Video Art Exhibition Subtle Whispering, etc. Since 2010, she has been organizing various annual international projects such as Roadshow, Playground in island (Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia), the show must go on.

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SE-JIN KIM

Eye of the beholder

�� Hong Lee-ji

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Curator, Buk Seoul Museum of Art

Appreciating a video work or video installation in a museum is a process of forming a relationship to the work through the viewer’s visual recognition.

It is a process that starts from remembering, feeling, and perceiving spaces, times, and experiences. As an artist, Kim Se-jin is constantly experimenting in various ways to achieve spatial expansions in genres ranging from animation to sculpture, documentary, single-channel video, and video installations. She presents the viewer with an expansion of the sense of vision from the work concluded on the screen. Understanding and appreciating Kim’s work requires that we consider the interaction of mise-en-scène and space in the 11 videos she has designed, while focusing our attention on her gaze.

Kim Se-jin’s videos do not include much dialogue or explanation. Her camera exists within a hugely constructed, unseen system, calmly taking in the repeated movements of frail individuals offering proof of their own existential value. The figures that appear in her work reveal their positions and the essential frailty of their selves within various networks of relationship, producing images of adaptation to or defiance against a repetitious daily routine as social selves. “The moment I felt even my hands and feet existed for the sake of the convenience store, the me in the window became regarded as an organism with meaning,”

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says Furukura, the protagonist of Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store People. This book uses its protagonist Furukura and the convenience store where she works to limn the story of “optimized human beings” in an environment where one must follow society’s standardized rules and tacit hierarchy in order to be recognized as “normal.”

The focus is less on the day-to-day narrative of Furukura’s life, and more on allowing the reader to imagine her in all her complexity and specificity through the situations and spaces that she faces.

The same exploration of individuals and the collective is lifelessly depicted not only through the insularity of figures and the way they move like responding machine parts in a “manualized” system, but also through her video works. First through About YS, Chae 2005–2006, in which a character is related through the adapted memories of others (based on an incident that occurred in an insular workplace), and later through the Urban Hermit 2016 doing some unseen business in an empty building and the Night Worker awaiting

Proximity of Longing, 1channel, color, 16'50'', 2016

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morning in city where most of the people have fallen asleep, Kim has depicted individuals existing within groups that are not visually rendered. In addition to her individual narratives in which a group (the viewers looking at the work) observe through the lens of the camera, Kim Se-jin has also attempted a subversive framework in her Victoria Park 2008 and Their Sheraton 2006 in which the collective is viewed through the eyes of the “other.” Rather than giving her characters dialogue, situations, or stories, she uses the “mood” and thread of emotion to melancholically depict the multi-layered situations that they face.

Over the year,s Kim Se-jin has shown a beautiful command of cinematic form and technology, while steadily conveying a visual language all her own. She has also experimented constantly with the staging methods and composition outside the loosely yet sensually constructed screen. With the 2005 Ideal Society exhibition at Insa Art Space, Kim decided to forgo cinematic form and staging in favor of using concrete reality to expand her means of expression beyond the limits of film.

The exhibition marked the creation of new visual narrative both in terms of her video’s content and in their method of transmission and composition of the space. The 2014 solo exhibition Proximity of Longing at Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO marked the beginning of Kim’s attempts to use the entire space beyond the screen to form an 105

active relationship with the viewer. She presented an expanded environmental context in which the screen would not appear as an isolated entity; the exhibition environment and staging were treated as equal in importance to the content shared in the video. This may explain why the exploration of light and the unique mise-en-scène in Kim Sejin’s video works seem naturally to connect to the exhibition space. With the OHP drawing series in the Proximity of Longing exhibition and the work Motion Head, which presents fragmented images from a praxinoscope (an animation device invented in 1876) in a single movement, she physically reveals her contemplation not just of narrative, but of the basic principles of light, movement, and moving images. Sleeping Sun and Night Worker erase temporality through the use of black-and-white images and surrealistic backdrops, turning the conventional notions of night and day on their heads and visualizing the multiple layers of time we perceive and the presence of light within video.

Proximity of Longing, 1channel, color, 16'50'', 2016

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The artist’s contemporary sense is conveyed through the formal cinematic aspects she sought to reveal in 2005’s Ideal Society, and through the incisive senses and experiences she has steadily observed and experimented with over the years.

Her interest in and exploration of repeated labor in the context of groups and systems has been addressed from a number of perspectives.

Hana-Set 2011 is an animated work focusing on the production process at a Japanese-style fast food restaurant based on the artist’s experiences studying abroad in the United Kingdom, while Temporary Visitor 2015 is based on an unpleasant experience she had at an airport. Some of her works expand on a spontaneous perspective stemming from personal experience. The aforementioned About YS, Chae 2005–2006 is a documentary-style work recording the collective behavior at a film shooting location, as well as explorations of consciousness and the artist’s own gaze. The shifting and the sympathy of Kim’s gaze toward the issues and people encountered around

Proximity of Longing, 1channel, color, 16'50'', 2016

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her in her experience, and in the society in which we live, are both one of the main reasons her work take on a contemporary quality, and an important reference in understanding them and tying them together.

As noted before, Kim Se-jin focuses her attention on relationships of individuals and vast systems, and on the simple, repetitive labor that people engage in amid the everyday shackles of an absurd, perverse reality within those systems. Yet she uses her artist’s gaze to render the greater thread and phenomena in a visual narrative form.

In approaching the relationships of individuals and society from different angles, Kim has focused on stories of subversion of perspectives, of groups and individuals, of everyday movements and labor. Proximity of Longing 2016, which was recently shown at the Song Eun Art Awards, offers a glimpse of the start of something new in her experimentation. In this work, her gaze has been expanded into a global perspective that is direct yet even vaster. Using three episodes (“Twelve Chairs,” “Angel Island,” and “Tortilla Chinantla”) to tell a story about migration phenomena and collective utopias, it differs from its predecessors in formal terms and composition. In addition to its active use of dialogue, exposition, and music, it also presents subtitles on a screen to share the digital images and information amassed through Kim’s OHP drawing series and various explorations 108

of light, thus furnishing a starting point for viewers to understand her work in a new light.

Since she began her video work in the early ’00s, Kim’s filming technology and communicative approach has undergone tremendous changes. As a filmmaker, Kim has produced a fairly large body of work, and the visual language and personal narratives that emerged thinly in the early ’00s have converged to generate a substantial current.

So let us return to the beginning and the question of appreciating a video work. What should the viewer’s mindset be as he or she looks upon moments encountered on a screen? How should we view those moments when tiny, slender, personal thoughts expand and combine to form layers that meet at some point? To find an answer, we will need to think a bit more often.

Hong Lee-ji Hong Lee-ji graduated from Hongik University and earned a master’s degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. She participated as an exhibition assistant for Liverpool Biennial City States: Terra Galaxia (2012, Liverpool), attended the 4th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, and was a research assistant for the 1st Asia Biennial ASIA TIME (2015, Guangzhou). From 2016 to 2017, she was a member of the Naver Cultural Foundation’s “Hello! Artist” artist selection committee. She currently works as curating team director for the curatorial research platform meetingroom and a curator at the Buk Seoul Museum of Art.

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SEO YOUNG CHANG

Touching the Skin of Light

�� Kim Jung Hyun

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Art Critic

Visceral Fiction What is the “physicality” of a work of art? Box 2011 and In the Box 2011, two works by Seo Young Chang, may provide an answer as to what the body of a video looks like. The ways in which Chang has developed through the production of these two works demonstrates her continued interest in the intangible, or that which has no presence. The immaterial nature of video, the medium chosen for these works, also fits well with the theme.

Chang’s interest in index and things that are only visible through traces left behind manifests in several of her works. The video works Box and In the Box form a pair, telling the story of a homeless person who passed away inside a box in an orchard in a remote part of Jeju Island, a place where he had hidden to escape from the cold. Excluded and erased from normal society, the life of this homeless man draws attention only in his death. His existence, made known to people through news reports, is conveyed only through an image of the “box” in which his corpse was placed. This narrative structure, where a life draws attention only in death, is repeated in By the Time you Hear This, I Will Be No Longer There 2014. There, a performer walks through the corridors and stairways of a dark building, dropping pieces of bread while repeating the words “by the time you hear this, I won’t be here,” illuminated only by the dim light of a 113

torch. The words are taken from the phrase most often used by teenagers in suicide notes. A life that has already ended achieved the freshest of resonance through “traces” in the form of that person’s final words.

A Monument for the Very Important Internal Organs 2014, which begins out of the relationship

between disease (object) and pain (index), is an attempt to invert the internal organs with the exterior. A doctor tells a patient suffering from pain that she is not sick, and in response the patient decides to switch the internal with the external, as though turning her socks inside out: internal organs on the outside, hair and skin on the inside. In this black-and-white video, where the inside-out socks spin in circles in the air, the narrator’s words are soon turned on their head. On the outside, we have nothing but hair and skin, while on the inside, we have entire internal worlds in addition to our organs.

More interesting than examining whether a slip of the tongue (or a sudden change in the reference point) is deliberate is witnessing the state that arises because of this reversal. What has been “reversed” is not hair and skin, but all of those internal worlds. What if we view the agent of the reversed body as the medium of video itself rather than as a human? Any routine thoughts we might have about video as a means of showing the world in a new light 114

will change when we watch A Globe in a Flat World 2016. Showing a roadview of the restricted access area of Deoksu Palace, the video offers a first impression rather than a new perspective.

When we can never see the real thing and have to make do with virtual reality, everything in the world is already inside the video.

The index sign presumes some contact with the object. The objects and indexes – homeless person and box, young suicide victim and final words, disease and pain - are pairs mediated by contact with the object. While this differs from the “restricted access area and roadview” piece that uses video or photography as recording mechanisms, the former works have also been re-mediated through video in Chang’s work, and in this sense all four pieces can be seen in the same light. In particular, A Globe in a Flat World 2016 allows virtual exploration of the interior, while also positing the virtual as the only

In the Box, Single channel, color, 1'26'', 2011

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original that exists in the world. Perhaps we can use the term “visceral fiction” to describe Chang’s work and the way she approaches video as an index of the world.

The Talking Box In the Box series, the story of the homeless man’s death is relayed through the flat box that we call “video.” Box is a video with a script and subtitles, set against classical music with a rhythmic melody as the text is repeatedly typed out on screen and disappears. (Dark and Hollow 2014 and Keep Calm and Wait 2017 differ in context and technique, but are also examples of Chang’s text video work.) Meanwhile, In the Box features an odd narration style, while the unusual ordering of words renders the meaning unclear, with jumbled or fragmentary words and phrases read mechanically by a performer, allowing no room for empathy. After filming, the pieces are put back together like a puzzle during editing to form complete sentences.

The two videos in the Box series showcase two different styles of narration. Chang demonstrates her prowess as a screenwriter in several of her works, including Box. News reports about the death of the homeless man have been adapted into microfiction or monologue screenplays.

As is the fate of all screenplays, they are self-

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sufficient while also calling out to be screened or acted on stage. In this regard, the text video Box emphasizes the self-containment of the screenplay more than the narrated video In the Box. Even without the presence of actors or a physical stage, a screenplay can be brought to life through several devices. In Box, the fast-paced, cheerful music clashes with the tragic quality of the story, producing a strong sense of tension.

Chang has said that having the text write itself on screen and then disappear was an attempt to show that events and people can be easily forgotten, but the ebb and flow of the text seems to combine with the music to contribute to the performance of a silent narrated play. The theme of being easily forgotten is actually more evident in In the Box. The performer’s reading of the tightly segmented script not only renders the content indecipherable, but forecloses the possibility of involvement, taking away even the opportunity to remember the event. Perhaps the forgetfulness of modern times is not due to the passing of time, but our lack of awareness and reflection.

Most of the speech in Chang’s works is conveyed through narration or subtitles, but A Full Person 2014 is a notable exception in using role-play instead.

The performer takes on the dual role of artist (Chang) and actor. What is notable is that the introduction of the concept of “acting” is

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connected to the division of the self. This division occurs first between the artist herself and the artist’s persona as played by the performer, and second as the replicated performer acts both roles across two channels. This split performance evokes the idea of the division that takes place through self-examination during the process of acting, rather than the creation of a complete virtual person. The subject’s self-image as mediated by the video is like looking in a mirror separated by time; the time difference will only grow.

The exploration of identity confusion (as opposed to chaos) reaches its zenith with Who Is Lea? (2015). This work features photos, text and videos that allude to a woman called Lea, adopting the same strategy used in Joseph Kosuth’s seminal 1965 piece Three Chairs. Kosuth has now become notorious in the field of concept art. However, the real object is replaced with a video performance, and because watching the video alone is enough to create an ideological split or mismatch between the object and the language, the photos and text seem to serve only a decorative purpose. Yet these “decorative” features appear not superfluous, but closely related to the theme. In the video, which adopts a frame story format, the main character is an exhibition docent who describes how the video is

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set up and the other characters that appear. With the use of a docent, the riddle surrounding Lea’s identity overlaps with the riddle of art appreciation.

As the descriptive language becomes more complex – as the linguistic embellishment grows, in other words – the riddle too increases in complexity. Though presented as a drama tracing the identity of one woman, the work ultimately becomes an allegory for art exhibitions.

Moving Sculptures It comes as a surprise that an artist who mainly uses video media (tentatively) removed from actuality to create and play with a labyrinth game between the real and virtual has said that her aim was to create “moving sculptures.” Without a real existence, how can the virtual regress to having presence?

In fact, awareness of the paradoxical coexistence between the immaterial medium of video and sculptural manifestations is not at all rare. Many artists have pursued this paradox, identifying their spatial origins at the cinema and seeking methods for temporal and spatial experience within the art gallery. There are two main forces behind the emergence of this video/sculpture combination: the first relates to ideas about the architectural installation of video works, and the second is a response to the distracted viewing

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approach of exhibition visitors. The first led to an expansion into installation art, using diverse forms of screen architecture tempered with decorative features, while the second led to an approach of using series of nearly identical, repeated images to create monotonous shorts or sequences.

How and why did Chang add sculptural qualities to her videos? In the Box, which features fast shots of the performer throughout the running time, and A Monument for the Very Important Internal Organs, which presents the rapid, repeated movements of single objects, are both textbook examples of the latter.

A more unique approaches can be found in Forget Me Not 2013 and A Globe in a Flat World 2016 – namely, exposure once again to the light of video.

In Don’t Forget Me, a series of slides featuring photos from news reports is illuminated from above by flashlight, so that the faces of the people in the photos are slowly erased. Heads are similarly erased in A Globe in a Flat World, but in this case flat images are clipped into white circles. This suggests a “punctured” space inside the video, which makes the images inside the video perceived as three-dimensional even though they have no physical substance. A Globe in a Flat World also features an installation of white balloons alongside the video, generating an effect where the empty 2D space inside the video appears to be three-dimensional. Perhaps we 120

can say that the 2D images have bored their way through three-dimensional space. Black Hole Body 2016, which also features white balloons, speaks more directly to the transposition of the real and the virtual: “That is why I have to get out of my body.”

Instead of emulating and replicating reality, the video mixes the internal with the external and turns things on their head, so that reality appears to be emulating and replicating video.

In this situation, Chang complains of a kind of pain throughout her working process that cannot be defined by other people. All the analysis of video media in this essay could be overturned and reduced to an autobiographical story. Even then, however, the melancholy of touching the skin of light will not dissipate.

Kim Jung Hyun, Art Critic KIM JUNG HYUN is an art critic and an independent curator. Kim is interested in the performative aspect of contemporary art, writes essays about performance and choreography, curates exhibitions and engages in some works as a dramaturgie or a performer as well. She was awarded 2015 SeMA–HANA Art Criticism Award and selected as a curator for AYAF(Arko Young Artists Frontier) by the Arts Council Korea. She Curated Pirate Edition (2017), Change Nothing (2016) and YEON MAL YEON SI (2015).

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��

SIREN EUN YOUNG JUNG

Metamorphosis: A Stage for Fatal Attraction

�� Sunyoung Lee

Art Critic

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The subject matter of Jung Eun-young(A.K.A siren eun young jung)’s work Act of Affect 2013 is Yeoseong Gukgeuk (hereafter “Gukgeuk”) a form of theater that enjoyed a roughly decade-long heyday in the liberated spaces of modern Korea but is now barely sustained through the efforts of preservation societies. Gukgeuk, which introduced (Western) theatrical elements into the traditional Pansori style (Gukgeuk singing has also been referred to as yeongeuk-sori, or “theater singing”), was an important part of modern popular culture for a brief period from around 1940 to the 1950s, where there was relatively less to watch in Korea than there is today. It was powerful enough a force in its time for performances to be staged even at wartime refugee shelters. Simply put, Gukgeuk raked in the cash, playing four times a day at its peak. It existed at a transitional moment when the listening culture represented by Pansori was giving way to visual culture in the forms of theater and film. As Vanessa Schwartz listed in her examples with the earliest forms of film in Spectacular

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Realities, members of the public were voracious in

consuming the sensational spectacles of daily life.

The position of Spectacular Realities is that visual culture including an aspect of collective voyeurism was viewed not simply in terms of oppression or control by a ruling class, but as an issue of popular desires. Oppressive or liberating, the modern day is dominated by a culture of the visual, in contrast with a tradition dominated by sounds.

Yet mutational, “neither fish nor fowl” changes were both the reason for Gukgeuk’s revival and the reason for its disappearance. They are also the reason such mixed approaches are drawing renewed interest today. The fact that Gukgeuk involved communities of female performances was both a strength and a weakness. The performers emphasized blind passion over any kind of careful strategy. As modern patriarchal authority began undergoing changes amid war and liberation, the male-dominated cultural community disparaged Yeoseong Gukgeuk as “lacking authenticity.” In addition to this disregard from the dominant authorities, the genre was also displaced in popular culture terms by more powerful spectacles such as cinema. Gukgeuk was invoked as a tradition at a moment when tradition was losing importance. Jung Eun-young has delved deeply into this fascinating history, publishing a doctoral dissertation and a book on

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artwork incorporating it. Yet the aim of her 15-minute single-channel video work is not to recreate the culture of a particular era, something that seeks striking and even bizarre to us. To begin with, it does not include any actual performance, or any stories that might satisfy the viewer’s curiosity. The narrative unfolds in a metaphorical way, leaving blanks to be filled in entirely by the imagination. To be sure, Jung has presented other works that expand more and more into the realm of performance, reflecting the fruits of her participatory observation and research into what remains of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk culture and its practitioners. Act of Affect does more than just consume curious subject matter, commanding an indirectly vocabulary rich with allusiveness. The reason Jung’s research into these unique characters -- female actors playing male roles -- does more than simply satisfy our curiosity about history is because of the way it immediately foregrounds the issue of gender.

The transformation that allows performers to play male roles is not limited to makeup or other external changes.

One of the performers that Jung met with described feeling “as though my bosoms are shrinking when I play a male part.” According to the artists, female viewers at the time were so captivated by the gentle depiction of males that a

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“fandom” phenomenon emerged. Performing was one of the few artistic areas where female agents could do something, female university students, “foreigner whores” (yanggongju in Korean), and other members of social minority classes created safe female communities that offered a close-knit, same-sex environment against the patriarchy.

Gukgeuk performers were fascinated by these mysterious beings who were neither female nor male. In her book Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff cites experimental findings showing that neither women nor men find an excessively masculine face attractive. The popularity of these mysterious types -- masculine women, feminine men -- is not limited to the stage. What kind of role does real gender play here? In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes that “‘beauty’ and ‘attraction’ are originally attributes of the sexual object,” before adding that “the genitals themselves….are nevertheless hardly even judged to be beautiful; the quality of beauty seems, instead, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters.”

Viewed in this context, what actors rely on when portraying a different gender is not the actual gender, but secondary signs. Here, we may consider a serial network of makeup, disguise, rules, rituals, and seduction. For an actor who has to play a different genre, the stage is the stage and reality reality, but there may be also be points

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at which the two intersect. The performance of Gukgeuk actors is an instantiation of the feminist thesis that gender is not something fixed, but something with performativity. We also find an interesting historical element here in this being Korea’s first example of a female artistic community.

Actions are created by female actors who must play the role of dapper men; gender here is performative. What we find is gender as performed by the Gukgeuk actors -- the kind of “gender performativity” theorized by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. The odd signs discovered in the actors’ makeup are interpreted in connection with taboos regarding gender. Without a theoretical interest based on her feminist studies in Great Britain, the nearly ten years that the artist spent researching Yeoseong Gukgeuk might never have progressed beyond a passing interest.

This is because Jung Eun-young is a contemporary artist, not a historian. She thus faces the question: So what about all the history for history’s sake, all the historical research of merely pedantic interest?

What is its present meaning? (Though languorous academic research is of course spared such central, urgent questions.) The artist’s interest in Yeoseong Gukgeuk encompasses topics related to feminism that she perceived all too acutely as she spent her twenties between a dark 1980s when all things were reduced to ideological divisions

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and a 1990s when hopes for pluralism ran high.

What the artist perceived in Yeoseong Gukgeuk was a non-normativity (post-normativity) of gender.

Some may counter that gender cannot be viewed strictly in terms of norms. The claims of some feminist schools that “femininity” and “masculinity” are culturally performed genres rather than biological essence are questions that remain unanswerable, perhaps forever. But because there is a competition of different schools of thought and behavior on the answer, research/artwork concerning past history may take on a presenttense significance and vitality.

To regard the body and nature, including gender, simply as issues of performance or issues of language is to recreate the opposition between nature and culture. The questions remain: Are suffering and death also linguistic? Is the body just text, like everything else? What we can be certain of at least is the fact that women long found it difficult to participate in the creation of culture and art due to their being bound to the duties of pregnancy and child-raising, and that they were relegated at best to the peripheral role of consumers. Underlying this fact is the difference between the two sexes with regard to the production of species. It was only after the modern era -- when women were able to control and choose when or if to conceive and give birth

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to children -- that women were able to gain relative autonomy from nature. Until we reach the realm of the deities, when the genome have been fully decoded and its functions understood enough for humans to be created artificially, organisms will possess this non-transparent reality. This “essential aspect” may become the focus of oppression, or it may remain a last outlet for liberation that is not controlled by the powers that be. Genes too pass through numerous processes that science has yet to understand before genotype can be converted into phenotype.

In biology, the information latent within DNA must be expressed for an organism to be formed; this is defined as its phenotype. There are processes to be passed through before the latent becomes the real, and the forces of culture may combine here with those of nature. Of course, gender (as opposed to sex) assumes some importance here, since natural differences may be transformed into cultural discrimination. In Gender, Ivan Illich interprets sex (as opposed to gender) as a narrow identity that applies only to the modern era, with its extreme divisions of labor. The peculiar identities of that emerge from the male-dressed actors performing the opposite sex in Jung Eunyoung’s work draw both sexes into a space not of biological debate, but of societal discourse.

As an artwork, Act of Affect may be rooted in

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these thorny questions, but it does not even clearly pose any questions, let alone answer them.

The very “affect” underlying the work is characterized by equanimity or melancholy. Unlike the majority of current performers who are in their eighties today, the performer appearing the work is a “rookie” in her forties, representing the very youngest generation of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actors. An ordinary company employee, she discovered Gukgeuk by chance in her thirties and decided to dedicate herself to an art form where even the opportunity to perform is in doubt.

The performer ultimately decided to quit Gukgeuk, frustrated at how the seedy reality failed to live up to the performances, and ended up a “career dropout” cycling through part-time jobs. It was thanks to the artist’s passion that she was rediscovered. After appearing in the work, the young performer took part from time to time in Gukgeuk performances invoked as a form of “tradition” in modern society, as well as variety performances in conjunction with other minority social groups such as a gay men’s chorus.

A shared theme of gender performativity ran through their performances in countries such as Japan and Taiwan. In the process, Jung Eun-young became playwright, producer, and director, working with the performers to deploy a dialogic imagination.

Dialogic imagination is a form that avoids otherizing minorities, and it is no coincidence that

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works in which it is deployed often assume a festive quality. Given the lack of opportunities for Gukgeuk actors to perform, the complex, contextualized space of contemporary art must have seemed like a new opportunities for performers and artist alike. In her work since Act of Affect (her last single-channel video piece), Jung has expanded gradually into stage performance, and the performers can be seen actively carrying on Gukgeuk culture -- rather than Gukgeuk per se -in their activities in contemporary art.

Act of Affect begins with the image of the performer

in male drag, watching a stage with a red curtain hanging over it. She fixes her shoulders -- an act intended to allow a woman with narrower shoulders than a man’s to play the part of a commanding male. But the empty stage and seats leave her breathing a deep sigh. What follows are scenes of her dressed in ordinary clothes, rehearsing her movements and singing. The scenes are split into various parts, with each individual frame giving no sense of the whole. Strikingly, the parts of the performer’s body have a very delicate quality, even as she plays the role of a man. At times, the gaze even seems fetishistic.

Just as the performer’s attraction to Gukgeuk has left her traveling a difficult path, so the artist herself is on a similar journey. Jung Eun-young may be a noted name in contemporary art, but

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the environment in contemporary art is such that empty stages and seats become all too familiar environments. When it comes to works on the theme of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, those things are not distant objects. The performer and artist share the common trait of being female artists.

The chill of the field she belongs to is a shared destiny among contemporary artists.

With time speeding up further, she is also skeptical as to whether any artistic or cultural “ism” can sustain even the ten years of popularity that Gukgeuk did at its peak. “Feminism,” a term used in name only as opposed to practical content, may well be added to this skeptical list. Inevitably layered into there are circumstances of fascination and disappointment, of intense efforts of selfrenewal to carry on that early fascination, of the suffering the responsibility that come with the choice. The actor’s sigh is the sigh of the artist, as is the steady passion with which she burns as she hopes for an uncertain performance to come to pass. Fragmentary scenes of rehearsal are further

Act of Affect, Single channel, HD, Color, 15' 36'', 2013

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split and reshown. Up to four scenes at a time are shown, and some areas are black, without any scene showing. Viewed as a human story, it is indescribable; viewed in terms of artistic form, it is unreproducible as a whole. These partial repetitions come through as formal decision alluding the way the artist has staked out her position and done what she has to do over countless days and nights. At times, threequarters of the screens are shrouded in darkness; we also see her practicing while lying down, as though in exhaustion.

The multilayered screens are combined with sounds in which singing is mixed in with everyday noises.

The performer’s emotions are expressed in the song lyrics: “Though I am humble My heart is not humble Dirty as my clothes are My Youth is not tainted I cannot live with this sorrow If I cannot make my dreams It might be better dying In front of princess That would be My land of happiness” The beard and the fabric used to tie down the performer’s chest are props for the performance of traditional masculinity, along with the topknot, the horsehair hat, and the layers of noble dress. It is a formalization of the male role that the actor is performing, but a subtle difference remains. Of all the scenes of the process of performing masculinity, those showing her tying down her chest with fabric convey a peculiar “affect.” Freud describes the loss of the nipple as

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the first loss. Psychoanalysis views this loss as essential for men (and women) to leave the breast and achieve adulthood by entering the language of the symbolic word, with its negative character. The loss of the nipple is a model for all less that must be endured for us to achieve our own subjectivity.

In The Symptom of Beauty, Francette Pacteau detects both pleasure and melancholy in Freud’s interpretation. There is pleasure in the act of viewing a woman’s breast so long as it evokes a lost experience of satiation, but in that pleasure of seeing dwell feelings of contradiction, yearning, and melancholy so long as that object is recalled as something lost. We momentarily glimpse a deeply charismatic performer wearing the distinctively exaggerated eye makeup of Gukgeuk, but the heavily falling red curtain swallows her up, raising the question of whether it will open again.

Toward the end of the work, the camera passes over the empty seats before suddenly beginning to shake, taking in the seats, the emptiness, and the curtain on the stage like a whirling phantom.

At the end, just as the curtain rises and it seems as though the work is about to end, the performer dons her rehearsal outfit once against and begins inspecting the stage. Perhaps it is because she will take the stage again tomorrow, perhaps it is because it is the final show, but a certain unfathomable sensation emanates, one that cannot

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be described as either anticipation or disappointment. A stage divides here (the reality) from there (the fiction), yet the work of Jung Eunyoung mixes the two together through its editing.

In this, there is both the moment of immersion and the process toward immersion. Affect is what binds together the scattered gaze. The character, who may be the last of the Gukgeuk performers, is somewhat melancholic, as is the situation in and around the stage that surrounds her. In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva describes melancholy as something that guides us into a mysterious realm of emotions -- of torment and terror, or of joy. Act of Affect contains a record of the actor’s changing energies, from melancholy to passion and skepticism.

Melancholy may be, as Kristeva describes, a “noncommunicable grief that… lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in... life itself,” but the Gukgeuk performer/artist draws that grief back into the realm of the communicable.

Her (their) words and songs are, as Kristeva says in “The True-Real,” the vréel, or “true-real.” The work becomes a question of, as Kristeva writes, how to turn the obsession with the true-real into something meaningful, how to insert it into society, how it can be controlled.

With the Gukgeuk performer in the work, we hear language that is feminine in a different sense.

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Kristeva describes “feminine language” as something like the language of the mad, a desire that can never be defined as something, a language that subverts to the point of impossibility. It is the language of being on a boundary where reality and fiction are readily confused. It is a language that conveys feeling rather than precise meaning. Jung has described the work as “an effort to respond to a certain non-codifed warm attraction and desire/ affect that emanate as the male drag performer’s concerns and conflicts are embraced.” It is not certain that the performer in the work is playing a male. At no point do we hear any dialogue or singing. Even the stage itself is uncertain. All that is conveyed is a situation or rising and deflating passion. What is revealed there is an action in the process of becoming the fiction of another genre, or becoming the reality. In doing this, the artist finds a key theme of contemporary art in a culture that appears to have vanished.

Sunyoung Lee Sunyoung Lee (b. 1965) began her criticism career in 1994, when she was selected in the art criticism category of a spring literary contest held by the Chosun Ilbo newspaper. She has served on the editing staff for Art and Discourse (1996–2006) and as chief editor for the Korean Journal of Art Criticism. Honors received include the 1st Kim Bok-jin Art Award for theory (2006), the Korean Association of Art Critics Prize for theory (2009), and an AICA Prize for Young Critics (2014).

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Act of Affect, Single channel, HD, Color, 15' 36'', 2013

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Sojung Jun

��

New Familiarity, Old Strangeness: The Video Work of Sojung Jun

�� Kim Nam-See

Ewha Womans Univ., College of Art and Design

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The Habit of Art In some respects, tying together Sojung Jun’s video works – The Old Man and the Sea, Something Red, The King of Mask, Last Pleasure, A Day of a Tailor, Time Regained, My Fair Boy, Treasure Island, Warm Stone, Angel of Death, and The Poem of Fire – into an “Daily Experts” series is merely a matter of convenience. The title could be misunderstood as inferring that the works are documentary-esque pieces of “human theater” that portray various jobs that are in the process of disappearing. But this is not a documentary, nor are the people depicted in it used simply to serve as relics of their era or practitioners of disappearing crafts, evoking nostalgia for jobs of the past that are now in decline.

The non-documentary nature of the work is clear from its form. In video works that aimed to serve as documentaries, there would be a certain harmony sought between showing and telling.

They exist in a relationship between that which is told, such as using words or narration to explain or elaborate on the images, and that which is shown, such as using images to demonstrate or prove what is being said. Through a combination of showing and telling, images and sound, a documentary tries to say, “This is not fiction.

This is real.” Sojung Jun’s works are different.

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Jun intentionally tries to disrupt the harmony between showing and telling.

In these videos, the narration does not match the people depicted onscreen. The word “I” is not mentioned. But this does not mean there is some narrator talking about the action that is taking place in the actions or images unfolding on the screen. The text that appears on screen could be called “free first person indirect speech,” a new style that Jun created based on interviews. It is not reduced completely to the person onscreen or to the artist. Likewise, the narrating voice is neither the artist’s nor that of the person depicted.

The narration feels clumsy and unprofessional, sitting awkwardly with the documentary-esque pictures onscreen.

It is not due to the special nature of their jobs that these people appear: a machine embroidery designer, sign painter, tightrope walker, kimchi factory worker, puppet maker, piano tuner, female diver (haenyeo), fisherman, taxidermist, stone collector, potter and mask changing entertainer. It is because of their distinct physical movements – their “habitus.” In Last Pleasure 2012, the tightrope walker says, “The worst thing to happen is the opening of eyes and ears. On the rope, eyes should be gone and ears should be shut. And thoughts should not remain on the ground. If not the rope will notice immediately and

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scold me severely.” The King of Mask tells the story of a mask changing entertainer “in the darkness and deafness under the masks.”

“Blocked eyes and ears only have to believe myself.” the narrator says. According to fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea 2009, the key to catching fish does not lie in seeing or hearing. Instead, catching fish is about “believing in your luck.

That’s all.” and It’s all about technique, time and belief.” For the film signwriter depicted in Time Regained 2012, “Time piles up on the sign solid and thick. I could see even though not visible.”

Teetering on a tightrope in midair, changing masks in the blink of an eye, “She enters the water deep as can be floundering her way inside.” and “The path to death is right around the corner”(Treasure Island 2014), hitting notes that “The notes inaudible for the eyes.” (The Twelve Rooms 2014) – all of these are feats that cannot be done simply by relying on your eyes and ears. This requires a familiarity with the ability to “Blocked eyes and ears only have to believe myself.” In The Poem of Fire 2015, which tells the story of the potter, this is described as “Mastering with heart, acquiring the skill.”

It appears that Jun believes art should be conducted in the same way – or at least that the foundation of art should be learning to feel with your body and mind instead of relying on your eyes and ears. The Habit of Art 2012 depicts a

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number of scenes where people display skills learned through repetition, such as holding a ball on their fingertips, carefully building a tower of matchsticks, walking a balancing beam without spilling glasses of water, or jumping through rings of fire. As the title suggests, this video relates the concept of art to a “habit” that becomes engrained in your body and mind through repeated practice. This “habit of art” does not produce anything that is of practical use in our lives.

In the video, the scenes of steady, repeated practice attempt to capture the moon’s reflection shimmering in water, or are interspersed with images of water flowing out of a pot with a hole in it. Just as a carefully built matchstick tower can collapse in an instant, so the habit of art is also ultimately “Work in vain, endless steps in vain.

Endless march in place, reaching nowhere.”

(A Day of a Tailor 2012).

This means that the “habit of art” in this context does not refer to the habit of making art; it means “art as habit” or “the habit called art.” If a habit is produced by learning to feel something within one’s body and mind, then it is no different from living itself. Art is not like a helium balloon that is inflated for a single event; it is the process of thinking about and planning for the event, and the habits of body and mind that such a process produces. Three Ways to Elis 2010 instructs us on

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this kind of “Work in vain.” It is the most documentary-esque of Jun’s videos, tracing the life of a former dancer who built a house in the middle of a forest in Finland and lived there alone.

He(the dancer) “installed” a number of dolls and objects in this house, and spent the rest of his life dancing alone in the forest for them. For him, art was the habit called life, no different from “marching in place without ever going anywhere.”

Of course, when it comes to this kind of art, simply showing and telling solves nothing. The perplexing thing is that those who encounter art

Three ways to Elis, single channel video, 2.1 channel sound, color, 22'14'', 2010

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have no choice but to rely on their own eyes and ears. Art must use the seen and heard to open up something beyond what can be seen or heard.

The Medium of Video When I first saw Jun’s video works, I thought that video was simply the medium she had chosen to convey her ideas, and tried to look “within” to find something that might correspond to a message or meaning. Soon I realized that the video itself – the combination of sounds and moving pictures – needed to be experienced as something inseparable from the work’s content. For Jun, video is not simply a frame used to convey her stories. It is the expressive center and core of her works.

As a combination of sound and moving pictures, video is a product of modern technological advancement. According to German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, modern forms of media such as gramophone, photographs, and video are responsible for splitting sensory experiences that were once integrated. Before the advent of the gramophone, our sight of a person or object was always accompanied by sound. Whenever we heard a sound, we knew that the person or object that produced the sound must be within an audible distance, and we could hear the sounds produced by any person or object that we saw moving nearby. The phonograph changed this, as

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it was able to store and replay sounds. Thanks to the phonograph, we were able to hear a person’s voice speaking or singing even when no one was around us. This led to a temporal and spatial disconnect between aural and visual experience.

Similarly, early silent films, in which moving images could be recorded and replayed independently of sound, allowed us to see people or objects moving without hearing the sounds they produced.

The advent of sound movies reunited images and visual experience with sound and aural experience, but this media-based connection did not take us back to the days of experiencing sight and sound together in the real world. Instead, it tied the two together in imaginary terms.

The result of this was video media, which combine images and sound through showing and telling, but in a way that differs from real-life experience.

This has provided us with a new kind of sensory experience. If you wish, you can match the sounds and images so that the image on the screen corresponds with its real sound, but other, completely different combinations are also possible.

Jun opts for the latter, taking full advantage of the fact that video media can be created in a way that arbitrarily combines images and showing with sound and telling. In Jun’s work, what is shown and what is told operate independently from one another, and the diverse combinations that this

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contrast produces create a superb aesthetic effect.

Theater can be defined as unity between the visual and aural; unlike a film, the movements and sounds of actors in a play cannot be separated.

In The Finale of a Story 2008, however, the stage and the movements of the actors are separated from the sound, appearing in the video as purely visual phenomena. The juxtaposition of the fantastic, fairy-tale action on stage with unfamiliar voices and sound effects produces a unique kind of imaginary reality. In Story of Dream:Suni 2009, Jun explores the possibilities of video media to the fullest. This video uses a silent film style, combining camera shots that skim over her drawings with inaudible subtitles. The movements produced are combined with sounds (sound effects) that are slightly out of step with the action onscreen, using the medium to reenact a dreamlike sensory experience.

In The Old Man and the Sea 2009, there is a scene where clouds, seagulls, wind and rain, trees, sailboats, anchored ships, joggers, and waves move onscreen for about 80 seconds without any sound. Created by combining sounds and images in a way that does not reflect real life, these silent “actors” help the audience to feel the patience of the hot-tempered fisherman waiting to catch herring. In the first scene of Treasure Island 2014, images of waves rolling in are combined with the sound of waves receding, evoking thoughts about the irreversible nature of time. In her latest work

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The Ship of Fools 2016, Jun combines images of

skateboarding with the sounds of waves, and vice versa. Associating a skateboarder traversing the streets of Barcelona with boats of refugees floating precariously in the Mediterranean Sea creates a unique sensation in both body and mind.

Jun uses the technological possibilities offered by video media to create arbitrary combinations of showing and telling, allowing the audience to experience things which they cannot see or hear.

This is precisely where the skill of a video artist meets the “art as habit.” The combinations of sounds and images, which appear naturally combined in our reality, can sometimes fool or even endanger us, or prevent us from understanding important things that are happening in the world. By combining sounds and images in unfamiliar ways, art affords us the opportunity to experience things with our body and mind that we cannot see or hear. Art has this power because the ancient human habitus – things we learned with our bodies and minds instead of our eyes and ears – still lies within all of us.

Kim Nam-See is a professor of studies in visual art at Ewha Womans University. He translated <Moscow Diary> of Walter Benjamin, <Memoirs of My Nervous Illness> of Daniel Paul Schreber and is currently translating the book of Friedrich Kittler and Boris Groys. He is also Author of <What is seeing> <Madness, Art, Writing> and writes art critics.

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CHOI SUNG ROK

Panoramic Paradaox

�� Jay Jungin Hwang Curator, Project Space SARUBIA

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A vast, open landscape. Once immersed in it, the eye begins restlessly moving, following a tiny dot that wriggles like an insect at the canvasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dead center. From high-resolution landscape images to works of animation produced through digital painting, the third-party perspectives cut horizontally and vertically at distances that are impossible to pinpoint; they seem at first glance to contemplate all things, yet at the same time do not allow a fair perspective on everything.

Choi Sung Rok uses various digital media to explore his interest the visual culture through we experience images today, embarking on an ongoing exploration of the principles by which it operates -and resulting problems of perception -- within the close-knit relationship of individual microhistory and contemporary society, culture, and history.

Tiny yet vast Tiny presences moving busily at the center of the screen or on its periphery. The vast world in which they exist. A certain distance and unidentifiable perspective that help us gaze up them. Video images and sound that painstakingly convey the dark underside of the world, like a brutal fairy tale that seems pleasant on the surface but is anything but comical. These characteristics have now established themselves as a clear artistic language in Choiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s video work, something made possible through the work he has presented in sculpture, painting, and video form since the early â&#x20AC;&#x2122;00s.

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Some basic clues toward the issues of values and perceptions vis-Ă -vis the objects in Choiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work can be found his floating sculptures (2003-2004) -created by totally disregarding the assembly manual and intended purposes of the parts for a plastic model, and creating imaginary shapes instead -- and in his Microscenic series 2005 of single-channel video works in which a camscope is used to take blown-up pictures of trivial everyday objects that escape our attention, turning them into alien landscapes in which reduced figures are place like tiny moving organisms.

Through his characteristic imagination and an artist sense that takes advantage of digital video technology, he visualizes how the rules and conventional thinking created by humans cannot function as absolute standards, what the limits of anthropocentric thinking are, and how fleeting and limited human beings are next to the grandeur of nature. This was be carried on into his 2015 solo exhibition A Man with a Flying Camera 2015, his

A Man with a Flying Camera, HD Video, 7' 02'', loop, 2015

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and Operation MoleEndgame in the 2016 solo exhibition Saviorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Road.

This world view Choi adopts toward his objects is given concrete form through the media used in his work and the physical and optical distance that emerges naturally from them. His recent use of drones as a chief medium and material for his work has become a way of representing this perspective with even greater sophistication, overlaying another narrative and interpretive perspective onto his work.

I Will Drone You series

2015,

Specific yet universal Choi Sung Rokâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ongoing interest in new media and embracing attitude toward different genres, as well as his time spent exploring identity as an individual, has had a complex influence on the development of narrative and expansion of perceptive domains in his work. For his first solo exhibition in 2006, he presented The Rover Project.

Focusing on the robot used in an NADA probe of Mars, it involved producing, reconfiguring, and visualizing plausible information into a complete story structure. The artist would continue with a project of the same name for the five years through 2010. Offering a complete picture of the formal experiments in painting, sculpture, and video the artist had attempted since the â&#x20AC;&#x2122;00s and his personal interest in science and technology, it was important in marking the emergence of a

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clear narrative structure to his work. Choi would go on to use his study experience in the US to explore the roots of this artistic interest and attempt more active formal experimentation.

Landscape of Chois 2010, which he presented while in graduate school, is a project that shows how the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very personal interests have revealed their meaning within fragmented recollections across generations as they have interacted with trends in macro-level history.

Here, the artist uses video installation pieces combining animation with landscape painting, portrait photography, and infographics (Rainbow Bomb, Vomiting Yellow and M16 ; The Portrait of Chois; and Historiography of Chois, 2010) to show memories and images of the war experienced directly and indirectly across three generations and nearly 100 years from his grandfather to his father and himself. The artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in-depth exploration of his interests becomes an exploration of his own identity as an individual, within which the

I Will Drone You, HD Video, 2'34'', loop, 2015

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microhistory experienced by himself and his family naturally meshes with the macrohistory experienced by those generations in the modern and contemporary eras, creating an even greater sense of solidity in the work’s narrative structure.

This, in turn, is linked and expanded into an interest in the universal societal issues stemming from contemporary perceptions of history, society, and culture and from the media. This is manifested in the later Daedong River Slayers 2010 through the reconstruction of a historical incident; in Call of Duty: Operations 2011 through a mediaadapted lampooning of military culture; in Scroll Down Journey 2015 through a confession about ambiguous identities in a digital generation used to virtual spaces; and in the A Man with a Flying Camera and I Will Drone You series through portraits of modern individuals roaming endlessly on the boundary between virtual and real spaces. More than anything, the thematic consciousness -- variegated through this narrative expansion -- is rendered even more persuasive through elements that have become important formal characteristics of the artist’s work: the painterly animation and video work, and the active use of digital media and video technology.

Painterly yet in motion Choi Sung Rok originally specialized in painting.

While most of the works mentioned above

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ultimately adopt a video format, they are fundamentally produced through digital paint, or deal with issues commonly discussed in the painting tradition: reality and illusion, principles of perspective and optical illusion, two-dimensionality.

Rather than dwelling on perfect realism in his depiction of objects, he maintains the formal quality of the image, yet uses animation effects to experiment in different ways with issues concerning perception of the image in the digital environment, and the methods by which objects are visualized as a result. A case in point in Scroll Down Journey, which indirectly shows a critical consciousness toward the ways in which a generation used to the digital images produced by the navigation devices or games perceives images and movement in real and virtual space.

To achieve this, the artist uses digital painting to reprocess spatial images collected from satellite and drone photos into two-dimensional maps, which are then given motion effects that create an illusion where cars painted on fixed locations on the screen appear to be exploring the space on the map. In so doing, he cautiously touches on the changes in memory and perceptual systems that arise when real-world spaces with various sensory stimuli are perceived as being a flat, two-dimensional world, as well as issues of the degradation and loss of feeling created by an absence of direct experience and memory.

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Horizontally broad, vertically high yet ambiguous One of the chief characteristics of Choi Sung Rokâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s video work is the way he uses multichannel digital projection to present horizontally broad panorama-view images or high-resolution vertical perspectives from drones to propose different ways of seeing. Operation Mole 2012 and Operation Mole-Endgame are both centered on a panoramaview images recalling something out of a video game, yet they adopt an approach in which particular incidents are positioned all around the screen, taking place simultaneously until at some point they come together again within the overall rising action of the image, functioning ultimately as one grand narrative. The use of sprawling panorama views creates situations where the intimate relationship between part and whole is ostensibly fully visible, yet its breadth exceeds what can be perceived in detail all at once by the human eye. The scenes each maintain a fragmentary story structure, scattered shardlike

Scroll Drown Journey, HD Animation, 6'20'', loop, 2015

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in their nonlinear deployment throughout the screen; each possesses an independent symbolic meaning, confounding the relationship between part and whole. Like an electronic display, a screen in the right corner of Operation MoleEndgame provides real-time commentary on the events happening through the video, highlighting this vague connectedness between part and whole. Despite the high resolution of the images, the distance created by the panorama views makes it impossible to perceive the parts precisely, resulting ultimately in a situation where the whole cannot be clearly understood. In this, it echoes the intentions of the work, which alludes metaphorically to a tragic conclusion: despite advancements in their social systems and mechanical civilization, humankind will not be saved, but will face times of catastrophe due to the destruction of nature and loss of humanity.

In contrast, the A Man with a Flying Camera and I Will Drone You series uses drones to maintain a certain height as they take aerial photographs of the artist himself. While the backdrops and figures in the video call to mind the digitally simulated spaces and imaginary characters of a computer game, the space is one that actually exists, and the figure is the artist, a living, breathing human being. The drone itself is never directly shown in the image; with its surveilling perspective from

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a defined location, it is merely posited as an unseen entity, a kind of phantom. In the process the artist repeatedly transposes the position and meaning of the agent at the blurred boundary between virtual and real space, metaphorically capture the human being’s ceaseless pondering.

The artist has said that he is “very interested in structuring illusions together with records of fact and the contemplative recollections surrounding human history, and in blurring polarized forms and states to create new historical, cultural, and philosophical landscapes.” Indeed, the unfocused perspective within the crisp video image and the anonymous situation, in which subject and object have become difficult to discern, lead the viewers’ gaze to rove endlessly over the image’s surface.

Lamentable yet sublime Etymologically, the word “panorama” comes from panhoran, meaning “everything is visible.” As if to underscore this, Choi Sung Rok makes active use of videos and media that are close to reality -- that capture reality itself -- yet constantly questions the issues of experience and perception that arise as a result. In an age when information produced through advanced digital imaging technology is quickly reaching the realm of excess, what does the human being gain and lose, enjoy and dread?

Interestingly, while the artist speaks of a reality in which we repeatedly encounter memories and

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experiences of the real world -- and a loss of subjectivity -- within todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s digital image culture, he never lets go of his playful attitude and perspective toward a technological civilization that never stops racing forward. Even as he revels in hopes for the arrival of a never-before-experienced world of digital images and the sensory joys that it will bring, he also trenchantly analyzes the senses that are lost or degraded within it, and our rapidly changing systems of perception. In a sense, this may be a way in which the sublime and rapturous experiences of the technologically granted playfulness and imagery in his work can coexist with his examination of our ongoing loss of judgment.

Jay Jungin Hwang Jay Jungin Hwang has studied the art studies and the culture industry.

She previously worked at the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art and is currently curator for Project Space Sarubia and director of Meetingroom. She also operates the online curating research platforms Meetingroom(meetingroom.co.kr) and Indexroom(indexroom.co.kr).

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SYLBEE KIM

Ready-Made Allegory

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Han Bum Lee

Associate Editor / Okulo / journal

1 Appropriate images and forms produced within particular social and cultural systems. From there, arbitrary elements can be subtracted, added, shifted, replaced or even superimposed to systems of different categories. In this way, the ideology to which images and forms are related can be dispersed and redefined in another context. In other words, an allegory can be reused – and I perceive this re-use of allegories to be one of the key strategies found in Sylbee Kim’s work. The strategy can be inferred from a strand of experiments in rearranging objects and images, which could be called to have been one of the most radical practices over the past hundred years of art history, starting with Marcel Duchamp and continuing on through pop art, conceptual art and appropriation. It is also a format through which digital and web data-based contemporary media environment structures the world. It is a format that naturally invokes the notion of “readymade,” aiming to expose its own critical standpoint. As an artist, what interests Kim is “observing which digital artifacts become settled in particular places and how they are accumulated, then deciding what to select and how to use it.”1 And it is this questioning that configures the structure of her aesthetic program.

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

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One remarkable point here is the twofold way in which readymade allegory operates in Kim’s work, namely the iconographic allegory and the formalistic allegory. Iconographic allegory concerns the rearrangement of meaning conveyed in a framed image, whereas formalistic allegory displaces it into another formal frame to restructure the layers where the actual meaning is circulated. As a result, Kim’s work is faced with a curious double bind, posing a 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 same manner we consume popular entertainment programs. In this sense, Kim’s work

A Sexagesimal Love Letter and Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe Single channel version, 4K transferred to HD, color, sound, 11'39'', 2016

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is a collection of readymade allegories and thus, approaching it solely through the elements related to its meanings would indicate to discard the functional structure of the rest. The focal question would be then how the work’s generic system structuralizes the actual experience of the work.

Understanding Kim’s form of artistic practice requires us to determine what she chose among the forms that construct the world and how she re-constructs them. We must also look at how ideologies come into visible shapes through this process. These shapes are not subject to be reduced to certain meanings, but instead they are subjects of a new form that actively demands our engagement.

2 Kim’s recent installation consisting of A Sexagesimal Love Letter 2016, A Little Warm Death 2016 and Sisters in the Plutocratic Universe 2016 are examples of dual readymade allegories. A Little Warm Death is a massive and digitally processed print image, an anamorphic installation that crosses through the floor and crawls onto the wall. It reminisces the motif of skull, the memento mori in Hans Holbein’s acclaimed painting The Ambassadors 1533. Within the round frame adapted from the style of Buddhist mandala, religious symbols are replaced by a compositional arrangement of anatomical images showing the internal organs and flesh of

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dead animals. The foreground of A Sexagesimal Love Letter consists of appropriated video images in continuous flow, while in the center of the frame a series of ancient Babylonian 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 found footages flow continuously.

The images are historical material and samples of digital compositing from open web archives 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, 2 “Monthly Review #1: Interview with Sylbee Kim,” http://www.thestream.kr/?p=2744, November 2016.

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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 and criticality as well as engaging 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 and previous works such as Emily D.: The Latent Collaboration 2012 and Lersta or Her Relatives 2017 are good examples of this approach. An exhibition space is a spatialized representation and the experiences structured by those spaces may correspond to a dynamic that Michael Fried once described with the pejorative term of “theatricality,” which fluidly roams over the ruptures between categories. As a result, the formalized exhibition space where Kim’s work intervenes comes to resemble a database – a form of cultural representation in response to a world where nearly infinite amounts of information have been accumulated; a place where it is possible to search through, view, filter, and compose the

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collected entities. Erwin Panofsky saw linear perspective as symbolic form of the modernity, while Lev Manovich emphasized database as “a new symbolic form of a computer age or a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.”3 As noted above, Kim’s intervened exhibition spaces themselves result into a temporary state in which collected entities are overlaid and merged together. In other words, Kim employs the formalistic frameset of the exhibition space to visualize the mechanisms, relying on which databases structuralize our experience and perception. Thus attempting to decipher every single allegory in this space of arranged allegories is in fact impossible and falls in a different vein from the dynamic of her practice. Even through an interpretative analysis, the reading shouldn’t focus on allegory itself, but on the invisibility of where the allegory is situated. As Panofsky wrote, it is essential “to ask of artistic periods and regions not only whether they have perspective, but also which perspective they have.”4 The essential significance of Kim’s work arises, when her exhibition space is transformed into a formalistic framework of its own.

3 The short music videos of previously mentioned Banned Songs: Così Fan Tutte appropriate the form of karaoke background videos. Importing conventional grammar of disparate genres or 3 Lev Manovich, Language of New Media (Korean trans. by Seo Jeong-sin), Communciation Books, 2014, pp. 290--295.

4 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, (Korean trans. Sim Cheol-min), b books, 2014, p. 27.

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systems and applying them to the formalistic framework is an important element in Kim’s work, by means of which she positions it into a state of fluidity. Trespassing different genres, Kim especially favors the narrative strategy. What we notice in Stone and Donkeys 2014, a work in three chapters, are inserts that appear before the second chapter and after the third chapter. There, we see a church, a site of demonstration, a mosque, a playground, a library, a theater, an agora, a pop music television stage and a temple. This loose chain of sites yet swirls toward a curiously singular coordinate.

While this appears as an iconographic allegory suggesting a possible theme, the characters–such as the protagonist whose father has been assassinated and the three prophets (the blind, the deaf and the assassin)–seemingly derive from specific narrative genres and indicate another type of allegory that equally articulates the theme.

Stone and Donkeys draws on the narrative style of martial arts movies and the narrative development of a video game. The intrinsic algorithm for the development of different stages in a game are to contextualize the intertwined allegories applied in the work, while the viewers can perceive the algorithm to structuralize the narrative in a nonlinear way. From this non-linear narrative sprouts the singularity of Kim’s work. According to Manovich, a mutual opposition occurs naturally between the narrative form relying on cause and

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effect and the database form consisting of lists that lack of any order.5 In Kimâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, however, narrative is less an interface for creating linear causality but it is rather functional, working as a temporary channel for circulating accumulated allegorical entities or even as distorted fiction. In other words, because the narrative in Kimâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is itself an independent allegory, it is conjunctive to the accumulated allegories and not conflictive or subordinated to it. What makes this strategy so interesting is the way Kim is constantly discovering and retrieving forms that circulate ideology inside the world we dwell. Viewers can use this very method to structuralize their experience, but analogous to the radicalism of readymade, it gets circulated on an entirely different dimension from its initial place. In the end, what matters there is the methodology itself how a work can function, and the new common that arises through this process of reconsideration.

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 5 Manovich 2002.

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

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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 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 recognized forms. The new avant-garde, situated under the influence of contemporary capitalism armed with liquidity as well as 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 her work rightly orient toward diverging dynamics.

Han Bum Lee Han Bum Lee is educated in art theory. Lee’s writing and curatorial practice is rooted in his interest in moving image and performance.

Lee is currently Associate Editor of Okulo journal.

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Installation view at SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016, image courtesy of Seoul Museum of Art

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WAN LEE

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Why Is a Mountain a Mountain? Why Is Water Water?: The Work of Lee Wan

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Kwak Young-bin

Art Critic/PhD (Film Studies)

The most representative work by Lee Wan, one of the two artists - along with Cody Choi - , participating in the 2017 Venice Biennale’s Korea Pavilion, may be his Made In series. His submission for the Video Portrait exhibition, Malaysian Palm Oil, which won the 1st Art Spectrum Award in 2014, is part and parcel of this series. For the past five years, the artist has visited 12 countries in Asia, staying there for three weeks or two months while undergoing an arduous process of farming rice, cutting sugarcane, then boiling and cooling its undiluted juice to extract sugar from it - or making chopsticks from hand-cut wood. Originally born of the will to fix a single breakfast by himself, the project seems deceptively simple. And yet it is also recklessly ambitious, in terms of the scope and magnitude, which cuts across the modern history of Asia in 12 different countries.

To reap rice - which, as the artist admits, could have been bought for a few dollars-, Lee rented fallow land and a tractor to reclaim, then sowing

Made In Malaysia ‘PalmOil’, 1channel, color, 13'20'', 2017

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seeds and waited for two-and-a-half months to harvest the crops. On top of thousands of dollars and three weeks of time he invested, Lee literally crossed mountains and rivers for a gold mine a thousand kilometers away from city areas- only to collect three grams’ worth of gold (valued at a little over 170,000 won, $150 in US dollars).

Despite the agony - which compelled the artist to shed tears in the bus on his way back -, no vestige of such melodramatic sentiment is left in the work. What takes the place of such emotion are rather dry captions, which account for the role and history of a selected item in a given country, based on months of study Lee conducted.

In so doing, we get to learn that the sugar industry whose contribution to Taiwan’s economic development was considerable originated under Japanese colonial rule, and that the rice - now grown into a mainstay product in Cambodia’s rich soil - was farmed by former Khmer Rouge soldiers, who massacred one-third of the country’s population.

With the exception of the Korean episode- which ends with an image of the artist laughing hard at the sight of himself with somewhat ludicrous wig made from his own hair-, however, nearly all pieces end without accompanying any emotional twist or particular affect.

Why does the artist carry out such difficult work - yet in such dry and monotonous manner?

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Why is a mountain a mountain?

Why is water water?

The artist has admitted to often entertaining such simple questions as “Why is this thing here?” or “Why do I like this sort of stuff?” In fact, these are 'enabling questions' that make possible his work in its entirety, going beyond the Made In series which explores the historical lineage or the conditions of (im)possibility of the breakfast table before him in reverse. Questions like “Where did this rice come from?” or “How did these wooden chopsticks end up on my table?” enable a range of options such as: “This sugar could have ended up somewhere else besides here.” If we keep this aspect in mind, Lee's other works- ranging from the early 2008 piece Chicken Baseball to skulls made of butter and mirrors made of beefsolidly emerge as roundabout answers to these questions- rather than to Dada or surrealism. The same 'logic of sensation' carries over into the How to become us 2011, series, where “combinations” or “clusters” of Spam cans, butter knives, detergent, hammer, and glass cups are stuck together, juxtaposed side by side -- or “separate yet together” -- with other objects that have same weight of 5.06kg; and further into The Force Majeure Entropy of The Inherent towards The Absolute Standard 2013, where no less chaotic

collections of objects extend from the gallery’s

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floor all the way up to its ceiling. The Made In series’s artless yet utterly historical answer to deceptively simple questions like “Where did this rice come from?”The Force Majeure Entropyor “How is this gold made?”, as it turns out, forms a pair with the landscape of variations created by the abovementioned odd combinations.

Of course, questions like “Why and how did this rice become rice?” or “Are objects the same when they consist of totally different elements yet have the same weight?” are questions about 'identity', as well as questions about 'community' at their core.

Gabriel Tarde offered a radical proposition that “everything is society.” In this sense, identity to Lee Wan 'already' amounts to society and community.

This “identity as society” is not an 'organic society' in the conventional sense, however. For the centripetal force pulling these things toward the center, or the substantial, least common multiples shoring them up from beneath, are viewed by the artist as a kind of illusion. This dimension has summarily materialized into Proper Time, Lee’s attention-getting main submission for this year's Venice Biennale, which consists of 668 clocks all ticking at different speeds.

Still, Lee’s exploration of identity and community should also be viewed from a slightly different angle. In another interview, the artist summarized

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his work with the term “force majeure”- which is what the Made In series provides as a historical answer to the question, “How did these chopsticks end up on my table?” Closeups of a tiny nugget of gold poised on palm or less than a spoonful of sugar after all the perilous and arduous work to obtain them give the sense that “it could not have been otherwise.” In Mr. K 2017, a pseudo Warburgian assemblage of precious materials from the artist’s longstanding Korean contemporary history collection and a photo album chronicling a man’s entire life Lee purchased for US$45 at Hwanghak flea market in Seoul, the titular “Mr. K” becomes “Mr. K" by means of the centripetal force of identity that turns 'rice into rice' and 'chopsticks into chopsticks.'

At its core, this dimension directly ties in with a Spinozan way of thought. To Spinoza's eyes, there is no such thing as freedom or happenstance for

Lee Wan, Mr. K and the Collection of Korean History, 2010-2017. Photographs and assorted archive objects. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

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human beings. All things are predetermined at a micro-level. Humans, of course, are not aware of the concrete circumstances of this 'force majeure' -- nor could they really be. Paradoxically enough, however, it is only within that ignorance that freedom and free will -- or more precisely 'responsibility', or 'Humanity' as such -- become possible. Consider a situation where a person murders someone and then claims that he bears no responsibility, since everything was predetermined. “Responsibility” here is not something passive; it is active, in the sense of a literal “ability to respond.” Emmanuel Levinas took this idea to the extreme in defining it as the ability to answer calls which one need not respond to in common sense terms, such as coming to rescue someone with whom one has no relationship. In that sense, a paradox emerges: both freedom and responsibility emerge as what one assumes on one's own, i.e. that humans can be free only when they regard themselves as responsible beings/being with the ability to respond. Viewed in these terms, Proper Time and Mr. K are differing agencements, opposed at the levels of centripetal and centrifugal force.

“Surface and Underneath,” or the Possibility of Constellations At this point, it becomes necessary to address the controversy over Korean Female, which

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earned Lee the label of “God-artist” on Ilbe Storehouse (arguably the most controversial online community site in Korea for its misogynist, racist and xenophobic comments) -- cementing his reputation as a misogynist artist with the “Ilbe seal of approval.” As is well known, the work was made at the request of the luxury brand Dior, but ended up being removed from its exhibition after it became better known as the work that resulted in 6,000 “Likes” for a post describing it as “making ‘every Korean female’ into a bar girl.”

Lee had used a photograph taken in an actual commercial district in Gwangju during his visit there for a residency, and even after he explained that it had not been his intention to privilege the “room salon” sign among the 11 signs he had individually assembled on the theme of the young women, the powerful elective affinities created by the sweeping, conclusive title Korean Female, and the specifical visual signs within the frame, made it impossible to separate the work from charges of misogyny. Of course, it would be counter-productive for the cause of feminism -- let alone the artist -- to insist on compressing all of Lee Wan’s work to date into this one piece.

In fact, April 2016 when this work walked into a firestorm was the time in which a song born of an online porn episode by Joongsigi Band- which had signed an agreement on an election theme song with the progressive Justice Party- was

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being accused of “misogyny.” And yet, attempts at underlining these "circumstances" while marginalizing problems inherent to the artwork are a far cry from tackling the situation at its core.

How can we confront the kernel or the limitations of the artist and his work without relegating the controversy to something exceptional?

With the controversy in full swing, the artist gave an April 2016 magazine interview in which he described the woman standing at the center of the piece with a Dior bag as follows: “It is sad, but it seemed like she was using the Dior brand as a tool to enhance her own competitiveness rather than buying it for the value she recognized.”1 It is a judgment Lee can pass only when he pulls himself out of the circuit of objects and worldwhich he encapsulates in the term “force majeure.”

The artist is “looking down” on the woman who has no idea of the "force majeure" process that led to her clutching a Dior bag- from God’s-eye perspective. He dubs the scene “sad” since, unlike the woman who "buy[s] it for the value she recognized," he as an artist (thinks he) knows that she is “using it as a tool to enhance her own competitiveness.” It is this alleged 'difference in altitude' that renders the image in question utterly “sad” for Lee. This also means Korean Female is a work that flips the Made In series -- which put the artist himself at the center of the work -- on 1 Vogue Korea, Apr. 2016.

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its head. Earlier, I described the Made In series as “dry.” Such lack of affect signifies that the artist does not possess the 'difference in altitude' as to the historical standing and trajectory of the object in question. Why should this matter?

Lee’s previously quoted sentence (“It’s sad, but…”) was actually prefaced with the following words: “In Korea, appearance is very important.”

The Cambodia episode in the Made In series, on the other hand, spells out the fact that Lee flew thousands of kilometers to grasp "the structure hidden behind the rice" he could purchase for the equivalent of just a few dollars. Last but not least, for the Korea Pavilion at the latest Venice Biennale, Lee exhibited a pillar that appears to be Italian marble but is actually just wrapped in sheets with a pattern titled “Italian marble,” along with fake roses of Sharon flower which look like real ones. Namely, these avowedly traditional pairings of “surface and interior” or “fake and real” serve as ambivalent keywords running through the core of Lee's works. One could thus hypothesize that, if Korean Female were "sad", it was because this structure of “surface and interior,” or the value structure of fake and real, was obvious to the artist, and that no emotions were attached to the Made In series since the vertical division of these two and the hierarchical value judgments were effectively put in parentheses. This is akin to the

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message expressed ironically by the 2008 work Dei Gratis, in which the body of a decomposing bird, writhing with maggots, is contrasted with various commodities circulating as though eternal, yet at the same time surrounded by cheerful music: these works sustain the affectless recognition that History (merely) goes on, irrespective of “real” or “fake,” “progression” or “regression.” Wooden chopsticks may be substituted with plastic ones, rice can be replaced with edible insects -- and this is not entirely “sad.” To paraphrase Benjamin, however, the real kernel concerns neither “surface and interior,” nor “depth and beyond,” but specific combinations laterally formed by different stars, or “Kon-stellations.”2 If Lee Wan’s work is permeated by the aforementioned Spinozian unconscious, that is, if the artist was motivated by the fundamental exploration of questions like “Why is rice rice?,” “Why are wooden chopsticks wooden chopsticks?,” and “Why has the world remained this way?”, nothing makes one look forward to his future work more than the self-recognition of how unconsciously “masculine” his search has been.

It is our wager -- or perhaps Spinoza’s -- that a different exploration into this uncharted territory will become his fundamental “responsibility” and “freedom.”

2 In the strict sense of this, the controversy over Korean Female could be characterized as a “disaster”: a disruption or disordering (dis-) of stars (aster) as specific combinations created by the visual signs in the work’s title and photograph.

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Lee Wan, Proper Time: Though the Dreams Revolve with the Moon, 2017. 668 clocks. Dimensions variable. Installation view with For a Better Tomorrow at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

Lee Wan, Proper Time: Though the Dreams Revolve with the Moon, 2017. 668 clocks. Dimensions variable. Installation view with For a Better Tomorrow at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kwak Young-bin Art Critic/PhD (Film Studies)

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Lee Wan, Mr. K and the Collection of Korean History, 2010-2017. Photographs and assorted archive objects. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist.

Courtesy of the Artist.

YEONDOO JUNG

Just Like the Road across the Earth

�� Mizuki Takahashi Senior Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito

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��

Representing a dream and memory begins with listening to a story. Jung Yeondoo starts his creative process by listening to people’s stories.

Subjects Jung listens to include a man selling tea in the streets of Istanbul or senior citizens killing time at a park in Seoul. He sometimes asks himself his own past memories. Jung visualizes these stories of memories and dreams through a camera lens.

As a memory is an image of the past recalled by someone into the present, it is abundantly plastic.

The fact that dreams and desires are different to the vision of reality is the very reason for their existence. In other words, a memory, dream, and desire are all fantasy. Yet Jung does not deceive viewers in the same way as Hollywood’s threedimensional films, which treat fantasy as if it were reality. In order to portray fantasy just as it is, his photographs and videos actually reveal in the work itself how the recreated images of memories and dreams are all fabrications. In this sense, his art is very honest.

Ordinary Paradise perfects the idea of an “ideal

paradise” collected on a website. The adapted ideas of paradise chosen from the applicants from Singapore and Korea are “a seashore where my late friend, who was lifeguard, looked after children and me playing together,” and “a warehouse with my

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favorites items and clothes from my childhood, and with my junior high school friend who went back to his home country.” The videos first show the neighborhood street of a Korean applicant and the façade of a Singaporean applicant’s house.

This is their everyday scenery. A man wearing orange-colored work clothes appears, using stage sets and props to transform the environments into their ideal paradise. As viewers follow the gradual transition of ordinary scenery changing into paradise, they are fully aware that the paradise is fabricated even after the “ideal paradise” is completed at the end of the video.

Politicians present ideals and dreams as if they were achievable, and the mass media creates stories by editing documents of disasters, wars, and incidents, pretending the stories are real by concealing the process of how they are created.

Jung, on the other hand, does the same in terms of manipulating an image, yet his work produces the polar opposite result from the images produced by politicians and mass media. To understand Jung’s philosophy, I will describe his roots.

Korea was made a colony of Japan in 1910.

It established an independent state when it was liberated upon Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945. However, in 1950, civil war erupted

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between North Korea, supported by the former Soviet Union and China, and South Korea, supported by the USA. Even after both countries had agreed a truce in 1953, South Korea was governed by a military dictatorship, which employed anti-communist ideology to control the media and restrict freedom of speech for the sake of maintaining the status quo. In 1969, when Jung Yeondoo was born, Park Chung-hee was in power as president of South Korea.

Since the 1970s, Korea continued to make strong economic progress, while the conflict between the government and citizens seeking democracy escalated. When in 1980 there was an uprising in Gwangju by citizens calling for democratic change, the government imposed martial law, violently crushing the movement, with many civilian and student fatalities.

In 1987, one year before Jung entered the College of Art at Seoul National University, public demonstrations demanding a direct presidential election sprung up nationwide. The following year, Roh Tae-woo was elected by direct election in February, and the Seoul Olympic Games were held in September, both of which served as breakthrough for democratization of the society. While Korean society was going through drastic changes, citizens and students were clashing with riot

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police on the streets and university campuses.

At the Seoul National University College of Art, which Jung had by now entered, participating in the political movement and demonstrations was taken for granted among its students, and those who did not get involved were considered cowards.

As the democratization movement heated up in the 1980s, Minjung art emerged as a South Korean populist art movement that criticized the regime and attempted to reform society. The artists involved in the Minjung movement represented the changing society from the perspective of its citizens through depicting the poor struggling to cope with the harsh reality lying behind the economic boom, and the landscapes being lost during urbanization. Their themes gradually became more political, with increasing numbers of artworks aiming to present charges about the labor issues and the political system.

Distinctly different to the conservative art taught at art schools, Minjung was widely popular among art students at that time as an avant-garde art movement.1 Not being able to sympathize with the aims or the real meaning of a “movement” full of tear gas and sometimes violent exchanges with riot police, and becoming disappointed with conventional university art education, Jung joined a mountain climbing club and came to spend a third of a year climbing.

1 Email interview with the artist on December 5th, 2014

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As this episode illustrates, he distanced himself from the contemporary political movements in his own country, nor was he interested in conservative college education or Minjung art.2 In a social climate where many students devoted themselves to political activism as well as the Minjung movement, keeping his distance from both of them in this way could be perceived as indicative of his strong attitude at that time.3 The reason why Jung includes the contradiction of both revealing the fabricated nature of his own work while also staging fantasy through photography and video possibly derives from the fact that he acquired a doubtful perspective of images, as he routinely observed the domestic media conspiring with the militant government and disseminating “truth” through manipulated information and imagery, and the mass population accepting the fabricated news and images even though they perceived them as outright lies.4 That is why Jung’s artworks remind viewers of their passivity toward images.

While Jung is analytic toward existing images, he 2 Ibid.

3 Independent curator Chung Joonmo uses the label “Generation X” for young people in the 1990s, and presents their distinctive characteristic as a tendency to avoid becoming the subject of discussions or embedding themselves in the existing hierarchy, and sharing cultural values more than political values. Chung Joonmo, “Contemporary Korean Art – A New Language and Trend for a New Generation,” in Sphere of Mind (exhibition catalog), Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito (1995), p.35.

4 In the catalog for the exhibition “Double Fantasy: Korean Contemporary Art” the curator Hiromi Kitazawa argues that the feature shared by emerging Korean contemporary artists in the 2000s is the co-existence of conflicted ideas. This is artists’ response so as not to lose the Self in hyper-fictionalized contemporary society where it is hard to feel the boundary between fiction and reality. Hiromi Kitazawa, “Double Fantasy,” in Double Fantasy: Korean Contemporary Art (exhibition catalog), Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), pp.66-71.

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also simultaneously intervenes into the viewers’ passivity that accepts images uncritically.

The B camera series consists of two photographs as a unit—one recreating a famous film scene and another one capturing the film set—and clearly indicates what Jung expects from viewers. Jung’s friends and acquaintances play characters in the film, though it is evident from the photograph of the shoot that the surrounding buildings and props are all images pasted onto a set. Viewers cannot help but compare these two photographs depicting the same scene from different perspectives. That is to say, viewers cannot help but become automatically active toward the images. But given that these photographs showing the well-known film scene are composed of several layers, comparing the two images creates further confusion as to what is the real substance of the photograph.

From the B camera series, Brotherhood of War – B camera recreates a scene from the Korean War film Brotherhood and was shot in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. The photography recreating a scene from the film Tokyo Story, featuring the death of a family member, was shot in the area where a village was washed away by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

This work suggests that the fictional film is contiguous to the experience in reality.

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Jung takes advantage of the fictional nature of an image by adapting its manipulative aspects. On the other hand, he also felt uneasy about the purpose-oriented nature of Minjung art that revealed and criticized deceptive social structures through realism.5 However, Jung’s gaze is focused on people on the peripheries of society and this could be linked to Minjung art. Of course, Jung does not directly accuse or intervene into society as Minjung art does. Nor does he treat Korean social issues as the main subject for his work. Moreover, he does not amplify the memories or dreams he hears from people in his work in order to accuse the system. Jung’s practice is said to instead console the traumas of people who have been hurt in contemporary society and mourn for their unfulfilled desires, those times that cannot be recovered, by carefully giving form to each one of the modest illusions held by people consumed by the grand tides of history. That is why his work has a touch of poignancy despite his work materializing people’s dreams and illusion.

While Jung’s work reconciles history and the anonymous individual who exist within it, on the other hand he also creates work based on the personal accounts and dreams of the artist and subjects, which consequently go beyond the 5 Email interview with the artist on December 5th, 2014

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sphere of personal stories and come to function as documentation of a specific place and time.

Borame Dance Hall transforms a gallery space into

a dance hall, using the portraits of senior dancers who go to dance classes in Seoul as wallpaper patterns. It is an installation reflecting the historical background of Korean society, turning a space into a dance hall by pasting on the walls a wallpaper printed with patterns based on the portraits of middle-aged dancers. Borame Park in Seoul used to accommodate the Air Force Academy and it was renovated during the period of democratization.

“Borame” in Korean means a hawk, a symbol of the Korean Air Force, and a reminder of the past.

What was once an aircraft hanger became a gymnasium where dance classes are held.

The subjects of Borame Dance Hall are those who used to go to the dance classes. Ballroom dancing was banned until Korean society made the transition to democracy, as it was considered corrupting of public morals. When Jung’s middleaged men and women subjects were young, they could not publicly enjoy ballroom dancing. The fact that they openly show their dance now proves that Korean society has been democratized, yet sadly by the time they could perform these dancing poses in front of people, their youth is long gone. What they project while dancing,

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however, is their much younger selves dancing to romantic music. Borame Dance Hall visualizes the inner-vision of these subjects.

Camera lens exists as a border between reality and fiction, mediating between these two sides.

In Jungâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work too, personal memories and desires intersect with reality through a camera lens.

The work Bewitched eloquently expresses the idea that images of memories and dreams are illusions through its exhibition format. Launched in 2001, this ongoing project asks people in Asian and European countries their wishes and then materializes them through photography. Twentyfour people have participated in the project so far.

Jung first photographs a participant in real life and then takes photographs of them transformed after their wishes have been fulfilled. Some of the wishes include a Seoul gas station part-time workerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dreams of becoming a F1 racer, and an elderly Frenchman now living off his meager pension and whose wife has left him, but who dreams of going back to his life in Korea where he worked as a French teacher and had a stable family life.

A slide projector first projects the subjects as they appear in reality. As the images slowly fade out, photographs of the transformed figures

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simultaneously appear. While this work positively utilizes the fictional nature of photography and the projected illusions, it also illustrates the distance between the desires of the subjects and their realities, evoking the harsh reality of contemporary society and the severity of the constant flow of time in which we cannot anchor the happy moments.

At the start of this essay, I described how Jung’s work begins by listening to people’s stories.

6 Points, set against the landscape of New York City where diverse ethnic groups reside together, is no exception. New York is an aggregate, comprised of communities of immigrants coming from different parts of the world, including Little India, Little Italy, and Chinatown. Jung used a massive flash to shoot photographs of the streets and later manipulated the images to create one video work. Monologues by people with the different accents of their mother tongues—Hindi, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Russian— are occasionally inserted. Their stories are very personal—their reasons for migrating to New York, their complicated feelings of love and hate toward the city, or fragments of their everyday lives—

Six Points, Dual channel HD video with sound, 28' 44'', 2010

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which could all be easily lost in the busy urban life.

These monologues contrast with bustling street views of the city, appearing like silhouettes of solitude.

Drive-in Theatre is an instrumentation of Jung’s

listening ability. A 1990s model taxi is placed in the gallery with a large screen in front, like a drive-in movie theater. Once the visitor sits in the driver’s seat, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, performed by Alicia de Larrocha, begins playing inside the car, and a video camera installed outside the driver’s window starts filming the driver’s seat. With a microphone set inside the car, the images captured by the video are projected onto the large screen, while any conversation that takes place inside the car comes out of the speakers next to the screen. Images of streets at night with dim streetlamp move along outside the passenger seat, making the images projected onto the screen look as though the visitor is sitting in a moving car. Although the visitor understands the scenes projected onto the screen are all fabrications, their emotions are drawn back to their past and their memories recalled, accompanied by Ravel’s music and the night scene. Inside the screen, they become the protagonists in their own lives.

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In Drive-in Theatre it is clear that a visitor is automatically given the role of an actor, while the subjects of Bewitched and the voice performers in 6 Points play themselves in their own life theater.

Jung, on the other hand, is always a listener, focusing on individual memories as well as dreams sifted out from the great flow of history. He takes on the role of set-builder to visualize their dreams and memories, and affirm their lives. *** It was on March 7th, 2012 when I contacted Jung about the possibility of holding a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, one year on from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, when memories of the disaster remained still deep within the landscapes and people’s minds.

While TV and street advertising excessively promoted the notion of “Kizuna”(bond), there was no apparent concrete vision for reconstruction of the devastated areas, and the actual conditions as well as the impact from the radiation damage caused by the Fukushima accident were far from clear. Japanese politicians talked about the “hopeful regeneration of Japan,” but evidently it was not that easy.6 For Jung, whose art uses memory and dreams as its main themes, being commissioned for a solo exhibition in Mito, one of the areas hit by the disaster, must have been a heavy burden to bear,

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especially taking into account the fact that he does not live in Japan nor had he experienced the disaster. However, Jung did have a prior relationship with Mito. One of the subjects of Bewitched, photographed twelve years ago in 2002, was a high school student who used to come to workshops at the Art Center. The wish he presented to Jung at that time was to climb a high mountain and see the sunrise. By completing the task of climbing a difficult mountain, he thought he could broaden his future horizons. It is not difficult to imagine how Jung, who was disenchanted during art school and dedicated his time to mountain climbing, could sympathize with him. Jung and this high school student ultimately took nine hours to climb to the summit of Mt. Kitadake, the second highest mountain in Japan, and Jung then took a portrait of the student with the sunrise behind him.

Now I look back, I might have resembled this high-school student when I commissioned him to do the solo show. Thinking about the roles of art and art museums in the aftermath of the disaster, I thought that I could open up my ideas by climbing a mountain, in this case about an exhibition in the disaster-stricken areas in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. As Jung had previously climbed a mountain with the high school student, he also decided to attempt this 6 General policy speech by then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda on September 13th, 2011. http:// www.dpj.or.jp/article/100309

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other difficult mountain. Coincidently, it was March 11th when his reply arrived in my inbox.

10 months have passed since then. Jung stayed in Mito with his assistant, Lee Jongchul for a month from January 2013 to conduct research for the upcoming solo show. He visited one of the disaster areas and hung out with Mito-based artists, and one day met Kenji Shiratori, a blind masseur working near the Art Gallery.

In his daily routine Shiratori takes pictures of the path between his home to his workspace with a digital camera. Despite not being able to decide on the composition by looking through the finder or see the pictures he photographs, he still takes pictures every single day, with the exception of rainy days. (He doesn’t take photograph if it’s raining because both his hands are occupied with a stick and umbrella so he cannot press the shutter button.) Jung became interested in Shiratori’s photography and he gave him a new camera as a present. Since then Shiratori had been showing Jung the pictures he photographed—about 80,000 images in total. Most of the pictures capture ordinary scenes of the commute between Shiratori’s home and his workplace. Jung continued to view the vast photographic data given him by Shiratori over a long process and consequently created three works inspired by the images.

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The photographer and critic Chihiro Minato refers to the blind photographer Evgen Bavcar in his book Image Theory. Instead of relying on his sense of sight, Bavcar experiences a space through sound, smell, and his other senses.

Yet the fact that a photograph capturing the space has only a one-dimensional surface means that Bavcar cannot recognize the space from the pictures he takes.7 The same thing can be said about Shiratori’s photographs. What is recorded in Shiratori’s photographs is the space in between his home and his workplace, which implies that the time he lived is also recorded, including the traces of his actions such as walking and pressing the shutter. But once they become digital data, these pictures become unrecognizable for the very person who captures the images.

Minato asserts that photographs taken by the blind can relive scenes from the past through the language of the viewer.8 Following his idea, Wild Goose Chase, which shows Shiratori’s pictures as a high-speed slideshow to the rhythm of jazz piano played by Shiratori’s favorite musician, Makoto Ozone, in this sense literally replays scenes from Shiratori’s past and his life that recorded the scenes. In addition, the title Wild Goose Chase comes form Ozone’s piano piece with the same title, and interestingly enough is an English proverb meaning to chase something you can’t acquire.

7 Chihiro Minato, Image Theory, NHK Books, NHK Publishing (1998), pp.244-255

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Image Theory is rich with suggestions derived

from observing an act of “seeing” and Minato’s understanding of the issues more or less overlap with Jung’s ideas. Minato points out that being “exposed to a overwhelming amount of visual information by just sitting, people today are in a state of social blindness, no longer examining the experience of seeing but believing what they see.

They equate seeing with knowing or, even worse, believing.”9 One of Jung’s most recent works, Blind Perspective , an installation work using the Oculus Rift state-of-the-art virtual reality headset, develops Minato’s argument even further.

Sculptures made from industrial waste are placed along both sides of a 40-meter-long, corridorshaped gallery. Clay lines are drawn on the wall at a level higher than human height, evocative of the traces of a tsunami, and braille blocks are pasted on the floor for the visually impaired. Visitors are asked to wear an Oculus Rift headset, but as soon as they put it on, their view of their surroundings is blocked and they are able to see only the 3D video played inside the device. Visitors become blind toward the reality in front of them.

Encouraged to walk forward while wearing the Oculus Rift headset, they see 3D video of flowers blooming in a verdant forest and fluttering butterflies—beautiful Eden-like Japanese nature inside the Oculus Rift.10 And this video footage 8 Ibid.

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responds to the placement and shapes of the sculptures in the gallery made from industrial waste.

Within the overwhelming reality of the 3D video, we almost forget the existence of the industrial waste placed in the actual space, as visitors are fascinated by the beautiful natural scenery. For someone not wearing the Oculus Rift, though, visitors with the headset on look like they are blindly walking among the debris of industrial garbage. And this is the reality.

Shiratori often visits the Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito as he likes to view contemporary art exhibitions. Since he cannot see artwork with his own eyes, either his friends or a member of staff at the Art Center accompanies him around the gallery spaces, explaining the artworks to him. One day, Jung became Shiratori’s guide for an exhibition. Jung later said that by describing artworks with words, Jung himself “came to see the artworks better.” Magician’s wal, a one-hour video work exhibited at the end of the exhibition, is based on this gallery tour experience with Shiratori and is a response to Wild Goose Chase.

While Wild Goose Chase is a photographic slideshow composed of shots of the scenery taken along Shiratori’s commute between his 9 Ibid., p.252 10 This video employs as material the images of places and plants shot one summer in Akita Prefecture.

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home and his workplace, Magician’s walk is a road movie about a magician taking a walk along the same street. The video was shot in the real streets between Shiratori’s home and his workplace. The protagonist is Korea’s top magician, Lee Eun Gyeol.

In the beginning of the movie, the magician invites the cameraman who is filming him as well as viewers who are outside the screen to take a walk with him. While walking the magician explains about the residential area as well as the signs on the street, and occasionally performs magic tricks related to them. Each scene is shot as a long take.

In the quiet, deserted residential area where Shiratori lives, the magician makes a lady in kimono appear who waters flowers, as well as transforming a “security camera in operation” sign into a sunflower, performing magic tricks inspired

by Mark Rothko paintings using the T-shirts of a couple who has just got off a bus, and showing off a performance with delicate finger movements in front of the sign for a day care center for the

Magician's Walk, Single channel HD video with sound, 55' 15'', 2014

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elderly. Referring to the episode of the dandelion enlarged by radiation from a nuclear power plant accident in the late Akira Kurosawa film Dreams, he transforms a bus stop into a giant dandelion and then gets on a local bus.

Inside the bus traveling from the residential area into the center of Mito, as the magician changes 10 yen into Krone coins, the views from the bus windows change from Mitoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residential areas to Norwayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s green forests. And when the magician gets off the bus, viewers see that all the passengers are now Norwegian.

When he gets off from the bus, a festival is happening in the center of the city. This scene was shot during the Mito Street Festival, held by Mito City with the aim of promoting how Mito has recovered after the disaster. A lot of citizens set up stalls and workshops in a street that is normally very quiet. As the magician greets the

Wild Goose Chase, Single channel HD video with sound, 4'49'', 2014

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festivalgoers, he performs magic at a traffic light with a cuckoo noise speaker for the visually impaired, and in front of the stalls. In the center of the street, a group of people wearing whiteT-shirts dance to “99 Luftballons,” a song by German rock band Nena popular in the 1980s. As soon as the magician appears and starts dancing with them, their white T-shirts all instantly turn yellow and black.

After a girl visiting the festival with her parents gives the magician a red balloon, he goes on to Shiratori’s workplace with the balloon.

When he arrives at the front of Shiratori’s workplace, the jazz pianist Makoto Ozone is playing a grand piano there. As soon as the magician stands in front of the piano and starts conducting, young people with white balloons emerge from various directions and tie their balloons to tripods placed near the piano. At the end of his walk, the magician calls the cameraman (who is Shiratori) and he puts Shiratori’s camera on a tripod, letting it fly into the sky with the balloons. Birds-eye-view images taken by Shiratori’s camera flying with the balloons then appear on a screen.

This is the entire sequence of Magician’s walk, yet the video exposes its open “seams.” The video at one point captures a camera assistant in a scene calling “Cut!” and Lee Eun Gyeol then becoming relaxed after all the tension.Additionally, when the

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young people tie the balloons to the tripods, the member of the crew who cues them when to appear in the scene and who are not supposed to appear also comes into the frame. These “seams” in the work remind viewers that the video is in fact fictional.

By inserting shots of the behind-the-scenes and outtakes normally omitted in conventional films, it conversely gives the work credibility as a documentary film about how Magician’s walk was filmed. Much like B camera, Magician’s walk exists as a pellicle of truth and falsehood. In this way, Magician’s walk can be categorized in line with Jung’s past work, though he also attempts something he had never tried with his past work.

While he had previously always stuck to a background role, someone who listens to the stories of subjects and embodies their fantasies, in Magician’s walk he appears for the first time as a storyteller through the magician’s voice.11 What the magician says is based on Jung’s observations of Mito and its residents during his several visits to the city after he stayed for a month in January 2013. These words modestly touch on issues including the anxiety of the people towards invisible radiation caused by the Fukushima Daiichi 11 Ahn Soyeon, “Blind Love: Interview with the Artist Yeondoo Jung,” in Spectacle in Perspective (exhibition catalog), Plateau (2014), pp.122-123. In an interview with the exhibition curator Ahn Soyeon included in the catalog for Jung’s solo exhibition “Spectacle in Perspective” at Seoul’s Plateau gallery, Jung says he considers his persona to be the man who appears in the work wearing orange work clothes and doing things behind the scenes.

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Nuclear Power Plant accident, the surveillance society, political tensions between East Asian countries, and natural conservation. Although the magician presents these serious issues, he continues to perform his showy magic tricks, and viewers, instead of focusing on what is being said, cannot help but pay more attention to the interesting performance happening right before their eyes. When we watch magic tricks, even though we know in our minds that they are just illusions, we are still surprised by the mysterious things happening before our eyes as if it was not a trick at all. That is to say, even with magic tricks, we are tricked by the reality of what we see, and in this sense magic has the same effect on viewers as video.

Magicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s walk has several complicated layers.

By intentionally interrupting the video in the middle, Jung gives viewers the sense that this video is a documentary film and has the magician appear who is someone with a filmic quality. The magician looks like he is talking to the viewer, yet he is in fact talking to Shiratori, the cameraman. Shiratori who is blind, cannot see the magic the viewer can see. This complexity bewilders the viewer: What is real and who is viewing what?

When visually able people use a camera or video, they compose the frame and crop the scene to what

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they want to see. This is an extension of our daily act of “seeing” and even when looking through the naked eye we unintentionally focus on what we want to see. The mechanical lens of a camera and video sometimes betrays our intentionality, capturing and recording more than what we see.

Shiratori’s pictures without intentional framing are the traces of his life, yet they are also landscape pictures with no intentionality.

Since January 2013, Jung has observed the shifting emotions of people toward Mito’s reconstruction process, the disaster, and nuclear accident, while what is captured in Shiratori’s photographs is the unchanging everyday commuting road—unshakable everyday life. Does the appearance of the places and people who seem to enjoy the festival shown in Magician’s walk demonstrate any signs of change compared to the pre-disaster days? Should we be overjoyed by the reality shown by the lens?

Or rather, might it remind us that we don’t even realize we have forgotten something important?12 In Blind Perspective, the video shown through the Oculus Rift transforms a gallery space surrounded 12 In his book Fukkou bunkaron (Reconstruction Culture Theory) the writer Ryota Fukushima analyzes so-called “reconstruction culture” in the wake of wars and natural disasters from the Jinshin War until the end of World War II, with a focus on literature. He writes that “even though in World War II Japan had made enemies of the entire world, lost many citizens in foreign lands, had nuclear power bombs dropped on it, lost conventional cultural authority, and moreover seen its sacred emperor become merely human,” these incidents were represented in works of entertainment such as in Godzilla and Astro Boy. The author says that the disparity between concepts and reality determines the manga-like impression of Japan. Ryota Fukushima, Fukkou bunkaron (Reconstruction Culture Theory), Seidosha (2014), p.351. For this writer, the disparity between the dialogue in Magician’s walk and the images of the city landscape in the background create an impression similar to that of postwar Japan as discussed by Fukushima.

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by industrial waste into paradise. Magician’s walk changes the familiar city of Mito into a heterotopia.

When we experience Blind Perspective, the flowers blown by wind as seen through the Oculus Rift headset look like water plants floating in the ocean, and white balloons that fly up into the sky no matter how much you try to pull them back down look like the souls of the dead.

Jung hauls in our memories while also embracing us with a pellicle of truth or falsehood. In Blind Perspective and Magician’s walk Jung attempts to evoke negative memories of fear, sadness and anger as things people share while reducing their pain. Yet the urge to forget is powerful and that’s probably why Jung used his own voice for the first time in Magician’s walk to resist that force.

Memory is a practical inner vision summoned up in order to live in the present as well as the future.

Facing memories even when we want to forget them, the slow and sublimating process of mourning, no matter how roundabout a method, is essential for living in the present and the future, including the lives not yet to born. This is because we are all damaged. Unless we realize that we are hurt, we will potentially hurt others in the same way without being aware of it. In Magician’s walk, Jung talks about how his friend’s life was changed by a Mark Rothko painting, posing the question if art can possess such a power. Does art not 214

encourage people to share their invisible pain, lead them to healing, and provide the strength to live?

Adolescence, presented at the beginning of the

exhibition, is a personal work that recreates mountain climbing scenes, the only thing that gave Jung happiness during those college years he says he “doesn’t want to go back to.” To recreate the moments in which he shared his worries with friends, had discussions, and engaged in deep reflection, he accompanied college climbing clubs in the USA and Korea, and took the picture when they by chance recreated the scenes in his memory.

Printed on special paper, the contrast between the darkness of the mountain and light coming from the tent where the students are talking creates a dramatic atmosphere, making the photographs look like a personal historical painting. In one of the pictures, a girl with a red jacket stands with her back to the viewer, looking out at the forest in the pale light. Is she looking back at her past or out at the unknown future, or perhaps both? But we know one thing for sure. Soon she must make a step toward the forest, and that’s where the path begins.

Mizuki Takahashi Senior Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito

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JU YEONU

A Chronicle of Burning Media The Work of Ju Yeonu

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Kim Sang-yong

art and technology critic/professor

“The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection.”

Walter Benjamin, <Teses on the Philosophical History>

1 Addressing a Mutable, Uncertain Human Existence of Unpredictable Anxieties The publics that have consumed media since the age of industralization have often ingrained the habit, when something existing hic et nunc becomes interlinked with media, of naive and unquestioning trust that every individual within the special power relation of so-called “new media” and consumer is reflected in the new media. This faith is the product of an ideology of technological dominance over human reason, one that imbues the notion of media being advanced technologyintensive products of scientific development. In this sense, the artist Ju Yeonu’s new work Swarm Circulation 2016 could be described as a polemical work that uses the short experimental format to present the process of audience regeneration through the production and expansion of the media that we trust in, as well as a critical perspective on the media civilization conferred upon it. An example is the way that it wears the cloak of a metaphor on the recycling of media devices as it shows the stark contrast between the historical production process and factory manufacturing line for the TV monitor hardware

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on one hand, and poor residents of an underdeveloped region of Africa picking through that hardware in a mound of burning monitors, in what might be called a metaphor for the “shell of media.”

Yet the idea that the artist actually wishes to convey with this analogy is not that of recycling, but that of circulation. The artist, in other words, is using symbolism to show the circulation of media devices. The key visual running through this video work may be the ironic image of cathode ray types and computer parts produced over history becoming the final destination for impoverished results of a backward community, people who are constantly picking their way through a burning heap of rubbish in search of something. These are the “shells of media” -- a term that does not only refer not to hardware that has outlived its use, but provides an indelible metaphor in which the gazes of all the people who received or consumed the vast amounts of data that passed through the TV tubes and computer parts, all the images that once lit up the monitors, seem now to be burning and discarded.

The countless facts and wondrous scenes with which those devices once bewitched or transfixed their audience (the agents of consumption) in their healthier days have now outlived their use; the circulation process of their discontinuation, as the experiences we once trusted and believed disappear in clouds of smoke at a waste site, is expressed through its likening to the natural 220

phenomenon spanning from a life form’s organic emergence to its death. Would it be reading too much to conclude that while the “trends” that once commanded the media generation’s faith and trust -- directed or contained by the components of that hardware -- have now disappeared in smoke, leaving only their shells (as the “circulation” keyword suggests), the actors who emerge faintly from this phenomena and vanishing are not, ironically, addressing the system of fixed and unchanging truth that we once believed and trusted, but a human existence that has always been mutable, uncertain, and filled with unpredictable anxieties?

2 An Artist’s Hand Shape “Meaning” with Invisible Sculptures Ju Yeonu’s work Swarm Circulation falls in the category of experimental films adopting a found footage format. Found footage is a domain of cinematic practice that involves taking video footage and image by others and repurposing them artistically within a new context. Nicole Brenez, an expert in this field, identifies the genristic characteristics of found footage in terms of three aspects. First, they create a new form of montage through expansion of previously filmed and edited images into new domains. Second, their aesthetic emerges from manipulating archive footage and images per se by hand as a kind of material. In this, they are similar to the 221

conceptual approach that a sculptor adopts before his or her material. Third, found footage presents images in a new montage form to embody some autonomous meaning. The unique quality that Ju Yeonu applies here may be her aesthetic touch in manipulating the images by hand as her material.

The role of the artist as it exists beyond the discourse of high technology demands a process of deep contemplation of works of art in the age of digital reproduction. In terms of the traditional importance of the “hands” once provided by the artistic craftsman, the reproduction age has resulted in the implications of “data” in the artwork, and the derivation and repurposing of that replicated data, becoming far more important aesthetically even than the role of the artist’s hands. When data derived from replication is placed in a different context, its meaning produces another new meaning that arise from the divide with the original material. Yet we can find significance in the way that Ju’s work offers a portrait of the artist in the digital age by once again calling to mind the continued significance of the artist’s hand in this area -- the basic attitude of looking at that artist’s material (i.e., the basic material of artistic pursuit of pursuit, which here must be seen as the image itself). In short, can it really be a coincidence that Ju is showing us an artist attempting to use “data” as a material to show the contours, however faintly, of dawning

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possibilities in artwork for the digital era?

The aforementioned artist’s hand may be a kind of metaphor for the attempt to actively “handle” data-based materials, not simply as something understood by invisible online algorithms, but as material from an aesthetic perspective. In that sense, I wish for the reference to the artist’s role in the digital era artwork to be understood as a kind of evolution that takes place as the overall aspects of attempts to deal aesthetically with materials that once relied on the traditional artist’s hand converge on the digital era. As an artist, Ju Yeonu may therefore be described as having lifted the found footage genre of experimental filmmaking to a different level -- in that her work recalls the artisan in its treatment of digital era data material, yet is an unseen creation consisting of the aesthetic meaning derived from it.

Meaning, in other words, is the nature of the new form it seeks to inscribe.

As an example, the artist’s recent work Swarm Circulation consisted of three subjects. The first is the process of manufacturing electronic products; the second includes televisions, newspapers, advertisements, and illustrations; and the third is the scene of incineration at a disposal site for electronic waste. What is noteworthy here is the intrusion of the first and second thematic elements between the first and the fourth or fifth frames. Happening in a short time, these changes

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in scene create a constant flickering effect on the screen as the work is playing.

The effect may be said to lie in the use of montage to organize the relationship between rapidly segmented shots at the frame unit and the shots as a continuum. This flicker effect, moreover, has the aim of clearly showing one characteristic of the digital era, namely the way it has enabled manipulation of temporality. As mentioned, the images once contained in what might be called the “shells of media” -- the parts that have outlived their usefulness -- were once consumed by countless people, once deeply trusted as a form of consumption. Yet spent media, like so many other products in late capitalism societies, end up abandoned and forgotten. All of the images those parts once accompanied have become spent already them. It is here that Ju Yeonu’s theme comes alive once again. In the smoke smoldering from the heaps of seemingly dead parts, newly inscribed image survive and are reproduced. In other words, the people picking their way through the parts amid the ruins of dead images must be attentive to their status as marginalized people. It is for this reason that the dialectical montage between discarded images and marginalized people generates new and striking images, which both represent the work’s theme and recall an endless cycling and return.

As these truths, poised for a grim burial in history, become synchronized with the peripheral people bearing witness to them, the short experimental film 225

is at that moment elevated into a visual anthropological record bearing a humanistic perspective.

3 Toward an Evolution of a New Depth In Ju Yeonu’s Swarm Circulation, the collective movement of bee swarms serves as a metaphor for the masses as agents of consumptions, skewed as they are to the technology - and hardware - intensive industries of a modern society swarming to the media periphery. Though brief and condensed, the chronicling of the production process and consumption attempts a sophisticated use of the organismic cycle as a symbol, using a powerful sequence of images to accompany the theme. The fast-paced presentation and parallel treatment of themes are excellent ideas to capture in the new formal aesthetic of found footage. The reason that experiments in archival footage seems to have produced excellent examples of research and attempts to identify themes lies in the highly planned use of images.

The juxtaposition of various commercials for electronic products and footage of their disappearance, for example, applies a technique of dialectical montage our blind worship of technological supremacy, the things we were once so skewed toward. The resulting broadening of the theme and denotation to allow us to imagine perspectives critical of technology and civilization is something that would surely be difficult to achieve through anything other than a 226

profound thematic exploration. The artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s profound attitude and research, in philosophical terms and in terms of the history of civilization criticism, is enough to replace anticipation for her next work with a sense of trepidation. As a critic, it may be for me alone to wonder just where Juâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic world will evolve next, and with what kinds of depth.

Swarm Circulation, Single channel, Color& Black and White, 10'18'', 2016

Kim Sang-yong Art&Technology critic/professor, Sogang University School of Integrated Knowledge

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YOONSUK CHOI

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Life Attitude Is Art: On Yoonsuk Choi

�� YoonJeong Koh Editor, Total Museum Press

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“Live in your head.”

This is the subtitle assigned by Harald Szeemann to his 1969 work When Attitudes Become Form.

The exhibition made a highly innovative contribution to the later establishment of conceptual art with its departure from the white cube format to show process-oriented art, the use of materials to show materiality, displays on the floor with no support or with dangling strings visible, and the demonstration of the process why which various documents became artworks in and of themselves.

If When Attitudes Become Form offered an unfiltered glimpse at materials rather than artworks as finished objects, or at the process by which an artist’s work in created, then Yoonsuk Choi’s work focuses on showing the “trivial parts” of life. By turning its attention to the life within the process, it maximizes its presentation from the artist’s self-exploratory perspective.

Chronicle of Mr. Kim(In collaboration with Ingeun Kim), Single channel, Black & White, 9'28'', 2013

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People often harbor misunderstandings about the profession of “artist.” They believe artists to have a rather emotional temperament, or expect them to have outstanding skills at painting. This is partly due to the fact that the artist’s life is not open to them, and to the fact that artists themselves can be difficult to encounter. As a response to this, Choi applies the lens continuously to himself as an artist, questioning what attitude an artist should maintain in his or her life. Because the results of his work constitute a series of fragments, Choi’s products as an artist may at first glance be assigned to a few defined genre frameworks -“oddball collector,” perhaps, or “performance artist.”

But the tenacious self-analysis that he applies to fragments of life force us to consider once again what sort of “eye” the artist must possess.

The Observer’s Attitude Perhaps the most salient characteristic of Yoonsuk Choi’s artistic process is his attitude as an observer.

As an undergraduate, he was told his pictures were too small, and advised to “build a canvas and make a big painting.” The suggestion was that he should try to produce work on a larger scale. But rather than focusing on the size of the canvas or tangible art materials, he began instead to adopt the observer’s attitude itself as his subject.

Choi spent the period between 2009 and 2012

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working on Mass of the Year, a piece composed of numerous receipts weaved together. The receipts went some way in showing how he had lived as an exploration of the artist. For the piece, he cut a year’s worth of receipts into thin, yarn-like pieces and spent approximately a month and a half weaving them into a tapestry as though they were thread. Had the artist continued with work along these lines, his pieces might simply have been seen as the products of a paranoid hoarder.

But Choi would go onto to show different products of self-exploration, including Untitled: 8 Hours of Drawing 2011, the performance Chronicle of Mr. Kim 2013, and video piece Particle Diary 2013.

Like Mass of the Year series, Particle Diary is a video produced by assembling small objects collected or owned by the artist. Candy wrappers, pieces of scrap paper, and the like pass by in such a brief instant that it is difficult to tell what they are. It is an excellent illustration of how tiny the “extremes” are in the process of life that is the focus of the artist’s interest. It may be described as a methodical assemblage of the artist’s tiny actions from day to day as he personally classifies and archives Chinese food delivery stickers and other trivial objects.

Music has been another focus of the artist’s ongoing interest. Signs of a process of

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combination with musical elements are visible everywhere in his work. A case in point is Chronicle of Mr. Kim, in which the artist combines sounds with a generational story one might experience in South Korea as he ponders his family, and his father and grandfather in particular.

The use of sounds and rhythms adds a sense of levity to what might otherwise be a dull exploration of daily life. Some of the parts are rehearsed, others improvised, as the fathers and father’s fathers of today’s generation are brought together with tiny sounds of plodding, brisk strides, and droning. Choi’s shoes, which serve as part of his performance costume for the work, are a prized part of his collection, something he has been unable to let go of for many years. As the father rises in the morning and prepares to go to work, the simple sounds on the video are overlaid with the noise of the morning alarm and whoops of “hurray” as the scene changes to the daily working routine. It’s the sort of everyday language

Chronicle of Mr. Kim(In collaboration with Ingeun Kim), Single channel, Black & White, 9'28'', 2013

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we tend not to notice, yet as they thread through the artist’s sounds, the words transform into rhythmic performance elements rather than tossed-off phrases. The process itself becomes a metaphor for Yoonsuk Choi’s work as an artist, and the way he develops art out of the trivial and extreme everyday elements.

The Artist’s Life and Work More so than in his own work, this observer’s attitude toward daily life, and the artist’s own life in particular, reaches its peak with Choi’s involvement as curator and artist in the exhibition Life and Work, Work and Life 2014. In filming videos for other artists, Choi worked with them to research an exhibition aimed at showing the artist’s everyday existence. Some of the artists in the exhibition ritualistically performed 108 bows before beginning of the work, while others headed out to Bangsan Market(industrial subsidiary market) regularly for their shopping. Or at least he thought they were visiting Bangsan Market: when a camera is attached to their wrists and the movements of their hands are tracked, the same items and gestures are discovered, unbeknownst to their artists themselves. In one case, Choi followed an artist all the way to Daegu to observe the working process and ended up hearing a real estate spiel about the excellent feng shui. Although the format of the exhibition

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could be described as consisting of the research efforts that go into completing art work and an examination of the perspectives of observer and participant, it can also be said to coincide with Choi’s own approach as an artist. In other words, it presents the journey toward the realization of an exhibition through the assemblage of images of Choi working in his daily life to show his characteristics as an artist alongside the various fragments that take place, unconsciously and unbeknownst to him.

Unassailable Assets Conversely, Yoonsuk Choi has also sought out all the pictures he could of himself sleeping after drinking, which he compiled into Sleep Book 2004--2015. It is an archive of himself, produced by gathering individual photographs taken by friends and acquaintances between 2004 and 2015 from Cyworld(South Korean social networking site) pages and flip phones. Passing through these individual moments when the author was sleeping, the view is given a glimpse into the process whereby a person’s recorded habits become a clue toward reading that individual. These aspects -- the habit of recording, the observer’s attitude, and the hoarder’s mindset -- would come together in an exhibition titled Unassailable Assets 2015, which was shown at Space O’NewWall. The things included here

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are trivial moments that hint at the days spent by the artist, ranging from letters written in his childhood to items from his collection, songs crafted from collected voices, memories from abroad, and a wall pasted over with hairs and sloughed skin gathered from his own bed.

The theme of the “everyday” has been a highly provocative resource for all artists ever since Marcel Duchamp called a urinal “art” in the 1910s.

Minimalist artists explored the material properties of steel plates, an industrial material; sculpture was no longer a special work raised on a pedestal, but items laid on the floor. The rectangular frames have been changed to different shapes; the white canvas has been repainted in white so that it is indistinguishable in color from the wall.

Meanwhile, the viewers become participants in a kind of performance, where artist and community collaborate in one boundary-breaking effort. Where the artist’s creative process was once special, the process that stands out these days in one aimed at establishing connections with daily life.

Artists today are no longer trapped inside the studio.

They are engaging in all sorts of experiments beyond simply filling a white canvas with paint, while their process works in various ways to narrow the gap with the viewer. Yoonsuk Choi’s work is more than simply arranging a series of

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random and heterogenous things; it involves rediscovering fragments that have escaped our attention, repositioning the unattended periphery where it can capture our attention. In his attention to exceedingly tiny fragments, he may be seen as reversing the process of land art -- where the works are so large that the viewer expresses confusion at the positioning of the part once inside of it -- and thereby unsettling the prejudices the viewers carry with them toward the “everyday.” Changing the viewers’ long-held prejudices toward the everyday may be one of the tasks every artist is obligated to tackle; in Yoonsuk Choi’s case, it is a matter of constantly observing these new attempts, uncovering them and linking them together. And by presenting new compositions as a video artist with these sounds and scenes, he shows that these processes are more than just a list.

Yoonsuk Choi is not an artist who can be pigeonholed within any one genre. Through his various experiments, he offers a clue as to how he can be defined: as an artist with a unique observer’s perspective.

YoonJeong Koh

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YoonJeong Koh earned a master’s degree from the Ewha Womans University College of Art and Design and completed an interdisciplinary doctoral program in art education at Seoul National University. She worked as a collaborating curator at Gallery Koo and served as chief editor at the art publishing company Graphite on Pink. She published the first three editions of the art mook GRAVITY EFFECT. Her interests include contemporary art environments, public and community art, and performance art. She is current working as visiting chief editor at Total Museum of Art and is involved in planning a number of different efforts.

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Cho Youngjoo

Deprivation is Ultimately Proof of Being

�� Sera Jung

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Director of THE STREAM

“One early spring day in March, a woman suffering from deep sadness and lethargy visited me. She said she had been treated by a doctor for aphasia a few months before. She talked about the happy days she had spent with a man--the dates they had had together and the happiness of their lives as they studied abroad together. …The fear of rejection that she experienced as a child fused with a fear of being dumped by the man she loved, causing her a great deal of anxiety.

The sadness and anger she felt over what she experienced, as a child and as an adult, as she stood and fought, and as she lapsed into obedience, as her mother before her had done, are reflected in her work.

– Excerpt from an introduction to the 2013 solo exhibition Mild Depressive Episode

by Consultant Psychiatrist Kyung Sook The artist Cho Youngjoo once lost her ability to speak as a result of aphasia. Linguistic activity is essential for a human being to recognize himself or herself as an objective entity. The world of universal order created through language and culture is a world, so to speak, of taking interest and forming relationships with the outside world.

The experience of losing the ability to speak could be seen as a way of rejecting or escaping the universal order in this world. It is a matter of

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speech being lost through a psychological state of wishing to escape and negate reality. If one views Cho’s work in terms of these origins and this state of deprivation, its beginnings can be traced to foundations laid during her early experience studying abroad. Works of art are said to emergence from and through the artist’s actions; in the same way, Cho is the origin of her artwork, and her artwork is her own origin.

Cho was forever an outsider during her studies abroad, a minority from the East. Given her life as a woman and outsider, perhaps she had no choice but to devote herself further to herself, proving her own existence through art. The otherized perspective that has appeared in her work to date is also fully present in her early works. This is true of I’m not acceptable 2006-2007, a yearlong photographic series in which she captured and recorded momentary images from her life as someone defined by others, or herself, as an outsider. And it is true of One night with someone’s t-shirt in my bed, 2006-2007, a record taken after borrowing and spending the night in T-shirts borrowed from random men. As she sends them back to their owners, the intentionalized situations – such as attempting to organize additional meetings with them – are an attempt to subvert prejudices people come to develop about Asian women in Western societies.

The artist uses performances employing the

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bodies of otherized women, including her own, as a kind of tool for speech. Following her return to Korea, this perspective was carried over into several works. One of these is Universal Collaborators, Seoul 2014. For this piece, Cho hired European or American white males as performers and attended an exhibition opening with them.

It is a form of performance, exposing herself to and playing with the gossip that follows a Korean female artist in a relationship with a white man.

Cho also includes videos of interviews in which she looks back on the social actions that arise in the process. Rather than trying to interrogate her own femininity, Cho explicitly reveals the contradictions of the social structure, opening new possibilities beyond those of fixed categories.

She could be viewed as a feminist in the way she communicates a personal message from the standpoint of an otherized woman. From a premodern perspective, both “Asia” and “women” are categorized as invisible others, a domain of fantasy that also entails a subversive combination of fascination and threat at the boundary between the real and unreal.

As a researcher, the first video works by Cho Youngjoo that I encountered were her five-part video dance series – Floral Patterned Romance 2014, Grand Cuties 2015, The Divas go out 2015, Watery Madams 2015 and DMG_Demilitarized Goddesses 2015 – and

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Talking in a dress 2015. Cho’s series, organized as a

research program and a video dance project using middle-aged women as models, shows the artist’s interest in the generation of mothers to today’s younger Koreans, or in women in general. Over the course of roughly a year, Cho met with around 70 women in their fifties and sixties and employed them as models, actors, and performers in her work. The characteristic middle-aged performers are ordinary Korean mothers, members of a group popularly known as ajumma, as well as women referred to then and today as geunyeo – “she,” or “that woman.” As the leads in Cho’s work, their movements appear somewhat comical and awkward. The reason our observing gaze feels somewhat uncomfortable is because they are not delicate young women, but women representing how our mothers appear – and who are thus recognized as marginal figures, mere ajummas, rather than being spotlighted as protagonists.

DMG Demilitarized Goddesses, Single channel, Color, Sound, 8'51'', 2015

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These ordinary, familiar women are dressed up by the artist in beautiful wedding dresses and flowered one-pieces. One may sport chic clothing; another may have an apron tied out a girlish skirt, with a flashy hat on her head. Like a child dressing up dolls for a role-playing game, Cho dresses the women up and presents them as girlishly cute or beautiful. The important thing in this work is this “dressing-up” process of applying beautiful wedding dresses, cosmetics, and hairstyles to these women hidden behind the name of ajumma.

Cho Youngjoo plays the role of mediator, guiding these middle-aged women known as ajumma in an attempt at a new image, a new self, a new becoming. And by presenting a set of guidelines for behavior, she uses the women to bring the absurdity women experience in society to the surface as a kind of fantasy, something different from the reality they face. In fact, “becoming” something else exists on the existential horizon as an ethical concept. Becoming is an act of practice, cutting across some form of difference. As we see in the differences between black and white, or between male and female, “becoming” is the very act of resistance and creation that penetrates difference when it remains as difference and the relationship of differences becomes entrenched.

Deleuze and Guattari proposed that “all becomings are minoritarian,” rejecting the rigidified thinking that viewed masculinity, norms, and majority status as 245

subjective concepts. Instead, they proposed “becoming”– such as becoming female or becoming other.

Also very interesting is the observation of the individual actions of the artist’s models once they begin participating in the performance. The women enjoy their new characters, their faces beaming. Despite clearly being connected to the social dimension, the actual society in their performance is erased, enclosed within art, as though being staged in a theater. Only when they appear in special wedding dresses that set them apart from the everyday do these middle-aged women “become” something other than what they are now, reveling in their becoming through differences that separate them from the uniformity of other ajumma. Dressed in their old wedding dressed and flower-print one-pieces, they become beautiful or charming. They may not be in the same shape physically, but for a brief moment they enjoy the situation given to them.

Through their performances, the women are transcending a vicarious process of making up for some kind of deficiency in the reality, a situation that confines them to bonds, and discovering a journey toward proof of their own being. As they leave behind their marginalization and become something disparate, their becoming gives them the strength to engage in fluid and creative

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thinking and action rather than depending on or succumbing to the gazes or perspectives of a controlling majority. The women are said to have wept with disappointment once the project ended.

Perhaps those tears were shed for a special self encountered through their liberation from the confines of a depersonalized word, their fleeting moment of becoming something new.

The process of conceptualization toward overcoming the ethics of difference established between the entrenchment of homogeneity as ajumma and the homogeneities thus entrenched is duly recorded in the video medium. The artist’s endless “becomings” seem all the more fitting when one considers the nature of the video medium. The formal hallmarks of the moving image achieve legitimacy through this process of conceptualization – for the practice of becoming leads into a process of self-proof, and the video camera is capable of quite vividly capturing the very dynamic self-reflection process of having to go from “state” to “being.”Experiences as momentary, unrepeatable situations, the women’s unfixed images are configured intertextually against the backdrop of random neighborhood settings, container factories, or the Demilitarized Zone. Their journey – their moving – is both a passage through spaces and a rediscovery of seemingly trivial places – the same way in which we are viewing the women.

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This conceptualization appears more directly in A beautiful match made in heaven 2013. For this work, the artist personally called up and registered with a marriage broker, keeping visual and audio records of the matchmaking process. It is another attempt a new “becoming” through sharing with others a real situation containing a subtle blend of truth and falsehood, adopting a divorced Korean woman in her late thirties as its protagonist. The artist’s aims in revealing the social standing with which she is positioned in the marriage brokerage, and in sharing a fantasy of true love that is not permitted in that world, come across in the consultant’s questions not as fantasy, but as realworld absurdity. It is a dig at a situation where the only important things are height, weight, profession, and annual income – a society where marriage is a mere institution, rather than the fruition of love.

The reason the artist has constantly used fantasy in attempts at becoming is because of a process, a journey of reflection for a being to be defined as a being. It is in truth a journey for all of us.

We all dream of a different life, a different way of being, the place beyond the fence that defines us now. This shift to a different life outside originates in the desire to be loved by others as a being in the world. The commonality Cho Youngjoo identifies in her ajumma, Eastern women, foreigners, and minorities is that the meaning of

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words themselves carry with them deprivation.

Loss and deprivation lead to fundamental questions about being; their definitions originate in differences from beings. Women, foreigners, and minorities are beings of relative deprivation (difference), yet we forget that this is inevitable.

Through the endless process of “becoming” within this long journey, the artist is interrogating how she is at the same time someone’s mother and father, a woman and a man, part of the majority yet also a minority.

Sera Jung Co-founder and director of the non-profit group Korean Video Art Archive THE STREAM (www.thestream.kr), Sera Jung is also supervising editor for the video art criticism journal of the same name. Jung also writes about all areas of media, culture, and the arts as a member of the editorial committee for the media, culture, and arts journal AliceOn. After completing a graduate degree in fine arts at Hongik University, she received a diploma in arts management from the University of Toronto. Since starting out as curator for a commercial gallery in Seoul’s Sogyeok neighborhood, Jung has focused her activities on art theory, visual arts criticism, and exhibition planning. She served as supervising curator for the 8th Juan Media Festival and a member of the Asian video art and experiment film archive review committee for the Asia Culture Center.

Her planning efforts include the doors art fair in 2011, the special media art exhibition at the Asia Top Gallery Hotel Art Fair in 2012, and the special media art exhibition By(e) Nature for the 2013 Korea Galleries Art Fair. She currently lectures at Hongik University, Konkuk University, the Seoul Institute of the Arts, and the Pusan National University graduate school. Her major interests include research on Korean video art and public archiving of moving images, along with experimenting with critical extensibility. She has co-authored the works The Great Game (2015) and Media Kit for Changing Daily Life (2016).

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Video Portrait

�� Nathalie Boseul Shin Curator, Total Museum of Contemporary Art

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“A contemporary video portrait through single-channel videos by 18 Artists” “The first domestic screening of Made in Malaysia, Palm Oil, a new work by artist Lee Wan that will be shown at the Korea Pavilion of the Venice Biennale” “First domestic exhibition of Jung Yeondoo’s Wild Goose Chase, a piece created from photographs by a blind masseur In October, people holding candles began gathering every Saturday in public squares. As a cold winter passed and spring arrived, their heartfelt feelings came together to bring about the unprecedented impeachment of a sitting President. Before the excitement of ushering in new change had subsided, we were confronted with news that six workers had climbed up to hold a high-wire protest on an advertising tower at the very intersection where the candles had gathered. On the same spring day when people were thinking about a new President, others still had to battle fiercely for their very lives.

This is not unique to South Korean society.

These days, the whole world is the same way.

Each passing day brings stories of terrorism and refugees. Much as we might like to close our eyes and ears, it is not so easy to do in practice. It’s a difficult time to live in – one where it is difficult to conclude that some

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people have done well while others are bad.

In retrospect, this is the kind of world that art has always reacted to. Some works of art have been situated on the ground where change is happening; others have delved into the underside of phenomena. Even those works that seem to shun the world and explore their own interior worlds cannot be free from the world behind them. Among these art forms, photography has always been swift to capture scenes on the ground. This is true for photography both as a medium for recording and as a medium for artistic expression. Video may have the same recording function, but it has been somewhat different. As a medium, it has been capable of being less direct than photography as an artistic medium, while enabling a more diverse range of expression and storytelling. Video takes time, and it edits time. One story might encounter another in the process, or transform into a new story. It also takes time to view a video, time during which the viewer encountering the work projects his or her own story.

Video Portrait 1, a joint effort by Total Museum and The STREAM, is an exhibition of contemporary portraits as captured through video by 18 artists. Beginning with An Jung-juâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Rose of Sharon Blossomed, it contains stories about the state in which national division has left Koreans (Cho Young-jooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s DMG, Kim Hae-

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min’s Once Upon a Time in Panmunjeom) and stories about forgotten people (Jung Eun-young’s Act of Affect. In other cases, the videos capture the faintness of that which has been neither remembered nor experienced (Choi Yoon-suk’s Chronicle of Mr. Kim) or the suffering of others and memories of it (the Moojin Brothers’ The Heap). Park Byoung-lae’s Rubber Band Game may be called a self-portrait of today through video art. Through simple video and the movement of the characters in it, variations of a self and another self pose questions about identity: for Jung Yeon-doo’s Wild Goose Chase, thousands of pictures received from a blind Japanese masseur are edited to titular piece of music, a favorite of the masseur’s. It is a work that focuses us to ponder the “seeing” of visual images produced by someone who cannot see.

In addition to individuals and memory, the exhibition also contains stories about a reality from which we cannot turn away. Lee Wan, one of the artists participating in the Korea Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, worked on a palm oil farm in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, to produce palm oil as part of a Total Museum overseas residency support program. The resulting work, called Made in Malaysia-Palm Oil, relates a story about politics, culture, and changing tradition within global capitalism. Kim Se-jin’s Proximity of Longing focuses on a somewhat grander narrative. The

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artist’s questions concern global migrations and immigration and the ways in which the personal histories and collective utopias behind them function within the grand narratives of the state and society. Yet Kim’s stories are not difficult like those found in a book of philosophy or a research treatise. Instead, familiar subject matter like 12 doctors, the story of Angel Island, and tortillas are used so that even viewers without background knowledge can easily approach the story. Okin Collective’s Seoul Decadence, Live is a mirror-image version of the play Hamlet for Nine Days as staged by Cort Guitar workers; the video work captures an exhibition/performance held in a closed-down factory dating back to the 1940s. It is a work that can still described as “live,” given the changes in the workers’ lives during their more than decade-long structure to win back their jobs and the fact that they are even now staging a high-wire protest on an advertising tower 40 meters from Gwanghwamun Junction.

In addition to these, the exhibition shares 22 stories from the 18 artists. If the audience’s own are factored in, the number of stories may add up to 30, 80, even 100.

- The Exhibition Space “An open space layering display instead of video art, boxes, or monitors” Video art exhibitions rarely deviate from a monitor

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format or a black box format where separate spaces are assigned to each work. Except in the case of special video installations, the resulting exhibitions come across as somewhat twodimensional. In addition to the traditional displays with video projection and flat monitors, Video Portrait Vol. 1 differs from spatially situated video art exhibitions in featuring open stands installed within the venue, allowing for a spatial layering effect among the video images. The sound has also been opened up to a minimum degree, and sound interference with other works has been minimized by allowing the use of headphones.

This was part of an attempt to honor the exhibition’s theme of “contemporary portraits” captured in video art by making the video installations appear as threedimensional as possible. It was used as a mechanism to acknowledge the individual nature of the different works while also allowing them to connect, however loosely, within the context of the exhibition space.

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On Planning the Exhibition

�� Sera Jung

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Director, The Stream / Co-curator, Video Portrait

Visual artists were the first people to turn their attention to the unforeseen potential of video as an artistic medium. The chief strategies of early video art were artistic experimentation through media and the creation of new images out of technical processing. Moving images, and video art that conferred movement to images, came to reveal time and space in visible ways, expanding and becoming transposed to an important place in the visual arts as they assumed grammatical characteristics of their own. One was a matter of using the video camera as a simple tool for recording, while another was experimentation exploration that took advantage of electronic systems and the unique characteristics of the digital. Something new was also ultimately created from the processes of importing cinematic grammar and its creative and theatrical elements into key formal experimentation within the visual arts.

Contemporary art is no longer confined to using video as a mere medium. It functions as a new art form for the era of digital technology, actively drawing on cinematic narrative and techniques of image expression. It also incorporates the conceptual domains of contemporary art and cinema at a far more complex level. Where early video art focused on the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s physicality in creating a distinct visual and conceptual language, one of the characteristics of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s video art is

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the way the artist does not simply create an original sequence of images for his or her work, but continues to create new situations for the viewer.

The Video Portrait exhibition features 21 works by 18 video artists. As “video portraits” from a personal perspective or a position of socio-political leanings, they go beyond an expanded form of the early video portrait’s concept regarding the individual’s body and memory to present stories about the realities that we face. The works in the exhibition recognize video not merely as a performance containing the intimacy of the body (actor/performer or machine), but as a medium capturing a social portrait of the times, rooted in technological and social issues (the concept of spaces and social systems per se). In the traditional arts, the portrait concept functions as an image-symbol compressing the subject and showing one condensed aspect of it. The established rules of the portrait, however, carry the risk of prejudice, as they tend all too easily to present but one aspect of the subject’s essence.

What, then, of the portrait when married to the video medium? The nature of technological devices is such that video portraits can inherently encompass various axes of diversity, without ever converging on a single symbol. This allows for more useful approaches such as the operation of meaning beyond simply confronting our historical

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situation and perceiving time, memory, and contemporaneity on the basis of diversity among individuals and social systems. As a result, we can discover a multilayered form of artistic practice that limns both significant portraits and metonymy for the world at the same time.

Video art is an important current in contemporary art and the subject of various forms of experimentation, but it is also a genre that faces clear limitations due to methods of incorporation that differ from previous art. Video art is an art form that presupposes narrative, which necessitates a long-form viewing approach with sufficient time, as well as a new critical language to suit it. In terms of critical horizons, it requires horizons that allow it to be appreciated and the artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stories to be heard to bring it closer. This situation may be seen as the result of a lack of platforms for sharing video media-based works

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and the absence of different channels for analyzing them in terms of critical language. This is a source of difficulty for artists involved in the ongoing creation of video art-based work, and something that has led to compromises with other art forms.

The idea of showing a movie in art gallery seemed like a last-ditch outlet for experimental film. Difficult, avant-garde films that were tough to show roamed the periphery of art galleries like refugees, until curators in search of new art forms offered them a haven. The approach of going into a white cube to sit in a dark room and watch a film being projected was too monotonous, too similar to an everyday theater. Artists borrowed or parodies cinematic images, broadening the domain of pure art. Some artists actively incorporated cinematic stories, cinematography techniques, film set design, and editing methods.

A few directors came out with works that straddled the line between media art and feature films. In that respect, the current exhibition, which consists solely of single-channel works, suggests experimental possibility for a new exhibition format.

Recognizing the way in which flat exhibition format issues necessitated different formal experiments by artists, and seeking to transcend the past approach of flat single-channel video screenings using block boxes and monitors alone, a variety of screening methods and sizes were used in

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an effort to capture a formal diversity of space.

The collaboration between Total Museum of Contemporary Art and the Korean Video Art Archive The STREAM is a different form of curatorial discourse practice in which archival research into video art content under the white cube system expands its horizons into the language of exhibition and criticism. The future also holds a flexible search for ideas on the circulation and distribution of video art, as well as copyright issues. I would like to express my sincere thanks to curator Nathalie Boseul Shin and the museum officials who shared this vision and these issues, working to research the work of the Korean video artists while planning this exhibition and publication. As a first step in a medium- to long-term exhibition-research project on Korean video art, Video Portrait Vol. 1 will hopefully provide a starting point and foothold in the pleasurable journey toward the next stage.

It remains to be seen what result these small forms of practice will bring, but I look forward to them functioning as a given force tying into the relationship between similarity and a proximity with magical properties â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and to Korean video art/ moving images playing an important role in contemporary art here and overseas, gaining recognition as an influential artistic trend enabling a new way of thinking.

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VIDEO PORTRAIT Director Jooneui Noh Curators Nathalie Boseul Shin, Sera Jung Guest Editor Yoonjeong Koh Coordinators Hyosup Jung, Taeseong Yi, Minseo Park, Eunyoung Park Partner [THE STREAM] Korean Video Art Archive www.thestream.kr Artists Sejin Kim, Sylbee Kim, Ayoung Kim, Hamin Kim, Mujin Brothers, Byounglae Park, An Jungju, Okin Collective, Lee Wan, Seo young Chang, Sojung Jun, Yeondoo Jung, siren eunyoung jung, Ju Yeonu, Cho Youngjoo, Choi Sungrok, Yoonsuk Choi, Ellie Kyungran Heo Writers Yoonjeong Koh, Youngbin Kwak, Hekyung Ki, Namsee Kim, Sangyong Kim, Kim Jung Hyun, Hijung Min, Haejin Phang, Nathalie Boseul Shin, Un-Seong You, Soohyun Lee, Sunyoung Lee, Hanbeom Lee, Sera Jung, Jungin Hwang, Lee-ji Hong, Gareth Evans, Mizuki Takahashi Translators Jinwoo Lee, Colin Mouat

TOTAL MUSEUM PRESS

Sponsors Arts Council Korea, Seoul Metropolitan Government Designer Heiin Sohn Print Jungwon Process Exhibition Design Zerolap Equipment Miji Art Publisher Jooneui Noh (Director of Total Museum) Address Total Museum Press, 32 gil 8 Pyungchang, Jongro-Gu, Seoul (03004) Tel +82-2-379-7037 Fax +82-02-397-0252 Web http://www.totalmuseum.org E-mail total.museum.press@gmail.com Date of Publication August 1, 2017 ISBN 979-11-85518-20-6 This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Video Portrait (April 28-June 18, 2017), Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul.in Total Contemporary Art Museum.

The reproduction of the contents of this book can be used Creative under the Commons License-Non Commercial and No-Derivatives Attribution.

Price 15,000