What She Saw, What Was (not) Seen ,2016

What She Saw, What Was (not) Seen
Ji- Yeon Hyun

 

 
Translated by Jeong Hye Kim

 

Artists draw following the movement of their eyes. They draw (although drawing may not be exactly the right word) whatever their eyes are drawn to and stop on. This may be one of the common and consistent elements in all artists’ drawings. Even though the artist elaborates and re-presents the object as realistically as possible, the simple lines of the drawing tend to weaken the signifying force of the object—a mere part of the object can hardly present the whole figure of the thing itself. The artist’s eyes and body here are not too far from the object of expression, or the scene. Rather, the eyes and the body often enter into the scene, while turning the represented [visual] vision into a private view, crippling the visual transparency. Viewers, as Cartesian subjects, would expect visual transparency and a geometric perspective in any visual representation. In her artworks, Minhwa Sung’s visual approach hinders such transparency and endangers her own artistic position as a transcendent and abstract visual subject, or observer. As a result, her gaze often focuses on very tiny and detailed parts and, sometimes, remains in a concrete and real time-space, which an abstract observer would have given up or left empty. What is important here is not the eyes frozen on a certain spot, but the movement of the eyes—her gaze does not hesitate to expose itself, interfering in-between the objects and leaving them at some point. Such movement of the eyes may also seize the viewer, the viewing subject, in the drawing’s field of vision.

              We must think about the details of the object she depicts in such a thorough and meticulous way. Art historian Daniel Arasse emphasizes the fact that the detail is a part of the whole and it is a performative trace or a result of the production. He quotes Omar Calebrese: “the detail is premised on the subject who ‘divides’ the thing.” The ‘dividing subject’ could be the subject of representation and/or perception, who breaks up a self-fulfilling homogenous ideal. Or, it could also refer to reflecting or revisiting the subjective visual system—explored most explicitly in the baroque style—while emphasizing the subject’s production of the details.

               The act of dividing is to divide things that are indivisible, or to divide a thing or a subject into something that does not allow further division. The sum of the divided fragments thus cannot constitute a whole. The mismatch between the sum and the whole gives rise to the ‘fear of empty space’ (horror vecui) and one continues trying to fill the emptiness. Yet, the dividing subject remains as a sort of incident, disrupting the process of filling up. Arrasse calls these two conflicting activities the motive of drawing, the motive of creation, and the motive of perception. Details are the “opportunities that create incidents in the work, strongly capturing the viewer’s gaze, thereby agitating the direction of the vision that has already been set up [in the drawing]”(1): observers often become captivated by the awe-inspiring details and voluntarily expose themselves to the danger of losing their visual path. The obsessive depiction of details in Sung’s works also leads the viewers toward a deviated course. The meticulous description of the work Walking MC (2013) instantly captures the eyes of the passers-by. And the elaborate details over the open window in Window on Exhibition (2016) takes over all the images the audience has previously seen in the show—it becomes an instrument that lets the vision simultaneously deviate from and be confined to the field of vision.

               The intricacy in Sung’s work results from highly inhuman mechanical processes. For this very reason, we hesitate to view her work as a simple drawing of an object. Yet at the same time, it is important to remember that her works are not mechanical productions by some form of artificial intelligence. Her works are purely a consequence of physical labor (regardless of the appropriateness of the term ‘labor’ in this context). Many people are curious about how much time she invests in this work and why she employs this technique for the scenes that do not actually look mechanical. The mechanical repetition is, in fact, immensely useful for expressing her intricate lines upon diverse supporting media, and at a certain point the work escapes from being a simple representation. She repeats such intricate processes almost to the point of paranoia—the series of processes include drawing, reproducing on a plain support through digital technology, and visualizing by way of physical/bodily or technological methods. Despite the machine’s infinite potential of reproduction (of the manual drawing), “the mechanical work is never a simple reproduction of the physical/bodily capabilities.”(2) With mechanical technologies, Sung’s works overcome any human traces while still harboring human traces within them. Laser cutting produces an even more intricate drawing than a manual job would. Mechanical production at once holds traces of the drawing of physical/bodily movement and represents elaborate details that are hardly imaginable without a mechanical technique, which consequently transcends human physical/bodily performance. The repetitive mechanical movement is never a simple instrumental process for homogenous production. It is a mechanical gesture that goes beyond mere re-presentation, and a mimetic movement that overcomes imitation. In short, it is a representation that trenscends re-presentation.

 

The exhibition ‘UN_SEEN’ revisits an old question of art: how to make things that are invisible (unseen) visually present (be seen). Art brings up the imagination, perceptive eyes, techniques and skills to visualize the invisible. Kant subordinated the question on the invisible to a matter of reason, or a matter of thinking and reasoning, but ended up revealing the incompleteness and impossibility of thinking and viewing or vision. Art is indeed a brilliant way of visualizing the invisible. Yet still, anything invisible cannot entirely be represented either through imagination or through speculation. With these questions in mind, Sung bewilders us by presenting objects that are too visually clear as missing or unseen. What, then, does the artist intend, though hesitantly, to remark on through the exhibition title—the two syllables bridged by an underbar? We may need to imagine what kind of relationship the artist has with the objects that she presents.

               everybody has_glass (2016) shows objects deviated from their primary purpose—the intended direction. Originally, a glass, cup and can, but they are all transformed into pencil holders. There is no problem at all with pencil holders. They can be changed into anything else, as well. Here, the practical ideology, the object that serves a purpose, is powerless. Imagining the relationship between human beings and things only provokes confusion about our ideas on things. What makes a pair of glasses a pair of glasses is, in fact, the human subject’s relationship with them. A thing becomes an object due to a sort of combining force that places the thing at a certain proper position. However, these things essentially cause confusion in the human relationship with the object. Copjec states “what determines or collapses the objectivity of the reality is not our relationship with the order of things, but our relationship with the thing.”(3) Things are a certain unconquerable dimension within a conquerable object, and they are impossible to completely understand or possess, so they feel “familiar but makes feeling stable impossible.”(4)

               In ‘UN_SEEN,’ Sung seeks a dimension that is “familiar but makes feeling stable impossible.” For example, lost (2016) presents things that constantly disappear yet continue to be rediscovered (always found in another place, either too soon or too late). Although too trivial to have fetishistic value, they are very capable of subordinating us to them. We cannot resist them. They are objects that can make us hysterical by disappearing, but we can never resist against them. Unlike commodities, things can often cause inconvenience to human beings, and sometimes even overcome the human subject. The Ghost (2016) series, drawn on eight sheets of extremely thin Japanese paper, consists of images of the things found in the kitchen, bathroom, and studio. Each line of the drawings shows a different density and their positions are slightly shifted from the real version. As a result, the drawings of eight repetitions fail to present the identity (identical quality) of the object itself. Rather, the work visualizes the impossibility of identical re-presentation. The visual outcome is a delicate yet blurring trembling image. The artist encounters a moment when familiar things in familiar spaces, such as the home or studio, “abruptly” exceed the artist’s cognition, or herself. The experience of simultaneous appearance and disappearance must have been what Freud was referring to as “an encounter with something that is placed within the complete other.”

               Sung might have experienced such an encounter, or a ghost-like conspiratory experience, through the things of artist J. This investigative series of works comes in the form of portraits. Just as she portrayed herself in the work Carousel, Sung attempts to find and understand J through his possessions. J, a typeface enthusiast and avid collector, wraps thousands of books with beautiful Florentine paper. J compares this act of wrapping or packging to meditation. J, a person of subtle and delicate sensibilities, has a dandyish excessive elegance that Baudelaire would have praised.(5) Sung must have thought that those festishistic objects of J could provide clues through which to understand him, but, from the onset, it was a project doomed to fail because those things were not J himself. Yet at the same time, as we are reminded of someone by way of something, those items are also ‘him.’ J is indicated by his things to which he feels an affinity, but those things cannot completely replace or explain him. We can only have a fractional understanding of him through those things. Objects such as books, weights, slippers, or tangled ear phones (which J cannot resist), only refer to J in a fragmented way—there is a constant slippage of meaning. On the other hand, J exists because of those things and cannot be explained without them.

               While concentrating on J’s fetishistic objects, Sung, ironically, doubts whether she really knows J. Drawing J through his possessions is probably not to understand or present J, but to avoid him— a gesture to resist reaching a real understanding of him. Temporary Home and Carousel are in the same vein. The scenes of the artist’s studio over a twelve month period depicted in Carousel are more a performance of concealing than entirely revealing herself, and she takes full ownership of the failure. Such metonymic gestures are always partial and fragmentary, while still opening up the potential to be complete.

               Minhwa Sung allows for the discomfort and unfamiliarity that occur when a constantly escaping material dimension appears in an object, and lets the things that exceed herself take a position (or to take place as an incident) within her scenes. Without diverting from the object’s outward appearance, she mechanically repeats and re-presents them in an extremely meticulous way. Also by selectively taking a part of the object and illustrating the movement of the view/gaze, which cannot be quantified, she discloses the gap in-between (or within) the object. What new dimension will open up? Sung’s stuttering of ‘UN_SEEN’ is rooted in her own experiences of constant partial failures. This is because the dimension of a thing disappears as soon as it appears. And that is because it continues to postpone setting restrictions, and hovers around us before abruptly becoming (UN_)SEEN. In doing so, she appropriates un-reality through things and presents a question for us to ponder.

 

 

 

1.      Daniel Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, tranc. Yoon-young Lee (Seoul: Soop Books, 2007/1992), p. 14

2.      Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans Won-hwa Yoon (Seoul: Hyunshil Books, 2009/2011), p. 184.

3.      Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, trans. So-yeon Kim et al (Seoul: b-book, 2015/2003), p. 319.

4.      Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: la parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale, trans. Byeong-un Yoon (Seoul: Jaeum & Moeum Publishing, 2015/2011), p. 114.

5.        “Dandy, by excessive emphasis on meaningless things, recreates the use value of the eccentric which cannot be understood and determined in a practical dimension” (Ibid., p. 115) A dandy is a person who disturbs the flow of the capital and commodity, and violates the rule of things.

Translated by Jeong Hye Kim