The Moving Energies through the Baroque Imagination

Eunhee Kim (Curator, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

When artists collect, analyze and arrange materials for a project, they often capture new possibilities that those materials hold. It can only be described as possibilities since it is similar to discovering a riddle behind an event or an object. I see in Ayoung Kim an image of a curious adventurer who does not stop exploring unknown territories.

Ayoung Kim discloses that Porosity Valley, Portable Holes project (2017) is influenced by Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) speculative fiction by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani. Negarestani, in his piece “Fragments on Cosmological Politics of Many Worlds” for the publication affiliated to Kim’s solo exhibition in 2018, wrote “[y]et holes are not exactly the surface, they are not even regions of space” but “the enigmatic entities.” In the preface of the publication, Kim elucidates that Porosity Valley is a porous space with insufficient probabilities. This description reminded me of a word that came to my mind when I saw the first version of her exhibition in 2018 — which was baroque. “The valley with insufficient probabilities” is reminiscent of the disorderly baroque world where scattered elements are mixed in existence. If one considers Kim’s other works, they all share the baroque traits. They have contained a sense of dispersion where the whole does not rule each part. At the same time, this aura of diffusion, paradoxically, can instigate bizarreness that extra-minor details are connected to the whole. Gilles Deleuze in his work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1992) maintained: “The Baroque world is organized along two vectors, a deepening toward the bottom, and a thrust toward the upper regions.” The endless fold that Deleuze discusses “[...] is the point of inflection itself, where the tangent crosses the curve” and is the line of inflection where “the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside.” The structure of superposition and dispersion that was pursued in Every North Star Part I & II (from Tales of a City, 2010) also reconstructs kinetic energy of the mixed elements. However, this energy does not incite change from within. Since there is no unifying order, it does not objectify the change but the structure itself becomes the symbol of change. Ayoung Kim traces tales hidden in the folds of history by collecting and analyzing official and unofficial materials. These data take the form of film footage, sound installation, voice performance, scripts and diagrams as Kim leaps from work to work. History of bitumen — mineral acquired from petroleum — runs through In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept (2016) and Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell (2014–2015) onto Porosity Valley, Portable Holes. Kim revealed that, while working for Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell found a graph where water artificially substitutes chasm in the ground where petroleum is withdrawn. This discovery would have given her baroque imaginations. Interminable movement of the porous geologic formation is materialistic but at the same time works as a symbol of movement in an immaterial sense. A possibility that an object suggests sometimes can be detached from its substance. Movement of the porosity valley that is recreated with 3-dimensional animation accompanies duplicitous emotion of being chaotic and wild yet serene and delicate. The image of rocks being smashed onto rigid surface, due to the opaqueness, is replaced with an inner immaterial realm sans windows or alleyways. This valley, through the imagination of the artist, transforms into an organism and acquires a certain atypical power.

As bitumen — featured in the Gilgamesh epic, the Quran and the Bible — was linked to Palais Garnier opera house in In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept, I wonder where the invisible spirits of countless stones will travel. As the Yemeni refugee’s migration routes, human being’s future itinerary seems to be menacing. China has launched Chang’e 4 onto the dark side of the moon to explore the surface of the moon. Outer space became the arena for international rivalry. Human beings can become a force that threatens to destroy the order of the universe. Anyhow, Chinese researchers allegedly found, in the deep craters of the moon, traces of olivine which is the constituent of the Earth’s upper mantle. I imagine Ayoung Kim’s portable holes migrating into the dark side of the moon and depicting the ancient scenery predating the formation of the Earth.

1. Reza Negarestani, “Fragments on Cosmological Politics of Many Worlds,” in Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Seoul: Ilmin Museum of Art, 2018), 76–77.

2. Ayoung Kim, “Introduction: On Porosity and Perplexity,” in Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Seoul: Ilmin Museum of Art, 2018), 15.

3. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and trans. Tom Conley (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 29.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Ibid., 35.

Ayoung Kim’s Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot

Myungji Bae (Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

1.

In the decade or so since 2007, Ayoung Kim has engaged in persistent archiving and research efforts to explore significant historical factors and issues of reality from a “here and now” standpoint — matters of Korea’s modern and contemporary history, petropolitics, territorial imperialism, and migrations of capital and information. These weighty, sometimes tragicomic historical narratives have been reconfigured into multidimensional, playful narratives that cut across a multidisciplinary range of media (video, sound, performance, dance, musical theater, diagramming, fiction, text, etc.) and follow a dialectical and nonlinear (sometimes fragmentary) storytelling approach deliberately chosen by the artist, with the use of montage, allegory, and algorithms. This open-ended working approach by Kim has ultimately enabled a critique that opens up a new history and perception of the reality.

Ayoung Kim’s strengths as artist lie in her unique approach to her art, which is as dogged as detective work in her exhaustive gathering, reinterpreting, reproducing, and recontextualizing of information. To complete a single work, she willingly takes on an arduous research process lasting several years. Yet her archival research is not intended to reaffirm or reinforce some existing collective memory shared among us. It violates and deconstructs, functioning as material for a trenchant perspective that critically reexamines historical perspectives.

As examples of this, we may consider her Ephemeral Ephemera (2007–2009), a photomontage series that “privately” stages the public context of newspaper and news articles concerning war, murder, accidents, and the like; Every North Star Part I & II (2010) from the series Tales of a City, which uses the life of a female jockey who committed suicide to allude to aspects distorted and lost through the cultural translation process of Europe horse racing being introduced in Korea; PH Express (2011–2012), which recalls fragments of imperial history through its juxtaposition of the invention of the railroad with the 19th century occupation of Geomun Island by the British Navy; Please Return to Busan Port (2012), which presents the spatiality and historical memories of Busan in the late 1980s in the form of a montage with the story of a boy involved in smuggling at the time; Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell (2014–2015), which recontextualizes the implications of Korea’s petroleum resource-centered modernization into a work of narrative-based musical theater mixing text, sound, and performance; and her most recent work Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017), which overlays the geological of Australia with the crucial implications of the internet era and its migrations of information. All of these works are based on lengthy, performative research and archiving by the artists in settings such as France, Australia, and Britain — yet through her intertextual methods of fact montaged with fiction, history clashing with myth, and multiple layers of text, she has sparked flashes of the things that have been omitted without inscription into our memory. With her unique archiving methodology and its tenacious gathering, montaging, and interpreting of history, incidents, and information, she has ultimately sought to present us not with the mere “facts,” but with the “truth.”

2.

The characteristic aspects of Ayoung Kim’s artwork over the decade or so since 2010 have been located somewhere in between a physical interest and global historical implications in the apparatus of modernity, and diachronic and synchronic examination of Korea’s modernization, and the artist’s own multilayered command of language as she translates social and historical texts into artistic

vocabulary. The mechanisms of modernization that she has seized upon include such things as steamships, trains, railroads, petroleum, and information — yet if we stop to consider them, there is some commonality existing among them: they are all characterized by “fluidity” or “liquidity,” with collisions, translations, transplantations, and reproductions that arise as they migrate through different times and spaces toward capital and power. If we follow the artist’s research process as she explores the mechanisms of modernity that enabled the “liquid modern,” we find certain points where global history intersects with Korea’s modernization. In Trans-KMS Railway (2012) and The Railway Traveler’s Handbook (2013), trains and railroads are the inventions of modernity that she focuses upon. In terms of the temporal, these are media that enabled the systems of modernity and its ephemeral or instantaneous aspects. In a spatial sense, however, they are powerful physical means of movement that reduced distances and facilitated imperial expansion. Through her research into the Trans-Siberian Railway (Russia’s invasion of East Asia), African railways (Britain’s colonization of Africa), and Korea’s railway stations (Japan’s policies of Korean colonization), she pinpoints the colonial incursions the logic of power, and the politics of modernization that surround the train. She also fully explores the global historical implications of railroads as mechanisms of imperialism — deeply imbued in the process of colonization — and the colonial modernization that occurred through this in Korea. In a similar context, the artist’s Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell series presents a multilayered analogy concerning global warfare over oil capital, economic crises precipitated by oil fluctuations, and a modernization project by means of Korean construction efforts in the Middle East and oil money, which ties in with the story of the artist’s own father. Kim’s interest in the mechanisms of modernity leads into an intellectual exploration of the areas where Korea’s modernization connects with the larger global historical context of imperialism, decolonization, power, and capital.

For the artist, modernization coexists less with moments of perfect wholes oriented toward progress and utopia than with moments of fracturing — imperialism and colonization, war and crisis, loss and death. These contradictions and fracturing moments cannot be recorded, signified, or controlled through the language of symbolic systems. Korea’s unique modernization process and the narratives behind it have been common themes in Korean contemporary art since the 2000s, but Ayoung Kim differs from other artists in the way she has translated thing into sound within the strata of art. From her Trans-KMS Railway to the Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell series, In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept (2016), and Fraud Tectonics (2016), she has had a chorus deliver a sound performance (called the “Chanting Ritual”) in which historical information has been filtered through a “deus ex machina” or “algorithm” to become a language/sound beyond linear narrative or logic. With their focus on sound, Ayoung Kim’s choruses evoke incantatory feelings with their mixtures of simple noises, shouts, cries, singing, and murmuring, while also calling to mind the multiple voices and stories that existed in various times and spaces between the early 1900s and the late 1990s. Her polyphonic approach to artwork — which involves gathering texts and information and processing it into a single narrative, while collaborating with composers, choreographers, vocalists, and others to present this as a new context of artistic language — has ultimately served to summon forth the countless voices and stories that have been hidden, suppressed, or otherwise left unspoken in the modernization process. The significance of the artist’s performative efforts lies in the way they render the modernization narrative strange and fragmentary, while at the same time poking holes in the thick carapace of the vast “enlightenment” project that is modernization to reveal the different layers sealed away underneath.

3.
Since Porosity Valley, Portable Holes in 2017, Ayoung Kim’s interest has shifted to the more concrete issue of physical/non-material migrations of data. With the artist having so consistently drawn connections between liquidity/fluidity and the implications of modernization, it would not be overstating matters to say that issues of migration and movement, as well as their psychological and political effects, have been longstanding interests. PH Express concerns imbalances of power and the “political migration” of the British military to Geomun Island with imperialist ambitions; Every North Star Part I & II focuses on the cultural migration and psychological divisions associated with the adoption of European horse racing culture and Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell concerns nothing less than global economic migrations of materials and goods through petroleum-based capital. By the time of Kim’s most recent work Porosity Valley, Portable Holes, the focus had converged upon the issue of the extensive scattering of information in the post-internet era and the physical migrations that can be inferred from it. Omnidirectional movements of information — and of data and digital information in particular — are obviously political not only in terms of their connections with flows of capital and funding in the global market, but also through their relationship with an unseen dynamics of power that censors and decides those flows. In the artwork of Ayoung Kim, these “fluid conditions” that dominated every aspect of our lives — power, capital, knowledge, information, and so forth — are presented as a complex story based on the artist’s uniquely hybrid, nonlinear narrative structures and “speculative fiction” approach.

To return to the work Porosity Valley, Portable Holes, we find that this video includes a mythical life form known as “Petra” which lives in Porosity Valley. Forced to migrate elsewhere after an unidentified explosion, s/he visits a migration counseling center and awaits a decision on his/her migration — actions by a mythical entity that also recall the situation faced by refugees today, who are forced to migrate due to political conflicts.

4.

Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot, which Kim presented for the Korea Artist Prize 2019, is an expanded version of the Porosity Valley, Portable Holes that offers a more dramatic extension of the previous work’s imaginary narrative surrounding “migration” and its implications. Like the earlier work, “Petra Genetrix” from Porosity Valley appears as the main character, and the narrative — a blend of classical fable and futuristic Sci-fi centering on this imaginary “trickster” figure — uses “data migration” as a way of invoking the contentious political issue of refugee migration. In addition to being more driven by imagined narrative than its predecessors, Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot also has a far more complex story. The fiction overwhelms the documentary aspect, with archeology, futurism, and Sci-fi imagination predominant over realism. On one hand, this is a continuation of the same montage techniques, algorithms, and nonlinear narrative used by the artist from her Ephemeral Ephemera series through Tales of the City and PH Express and on to Zepheth. On the other, she also incorporates the tendencies of her documentary/fiction-leaning video works since the 2000s — for which she has used fiction as a basis for reconfiguring social and historical facts into a form of resistance history — as well as speculative fiction and its use of science fiction to imagine alternative realities.

Tricksters’ Plot, Imagined Narrative

Petra Genetrix, the central figure who figures in the beginning and end of the video work, is a kind of data clusters deposited in Crypto Valley after an explosion in Porosity Valley. Cubic in form, Petra is a manifold being that repeatedly divides, (self-)replicates, and combines as s/he follows a dramatic video narrative of swimming through different virtual spaces, traveling from Porosity Valley through a portable hole and on through Crypto Valley, a Smart Grid, and a data center. Upon arriving in Crypto Valley, s/he is classified as an unregistered alien life form and submitted to a rigorous migration review at the Crypto Migration Center; in the process, s/he receives the designation “non-recognized alien migration applicant G-1-6-2564.” The review process ends with Petra being deemed an “abnormal pattern of life” — akin to a virus posing an ongoing threat to the autonomous immunity system and security — and imprisoned in the Smart Grid, a special region of Crypto Valley that serves as an alien life protective custody center with round-the-clock monitoring. Trapped behind the Smart Grid’s bars, Petra escapes by separating into cubes of different sizes and ends up encountering the “Mother Rock,” a collective intelligence and transcendent presence that connects the whole island together. The story ends with Petra becoming a sublime, independent entity and a fully-fledged xenogenesis matrix in her/his own right through biological hybridization with the Mother Rock.

The literal “trickster plot” that Ayoung Kim traverses and redevelops into fiction with Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot is set against a backdrop that is both immemorial past and distant future. The video’s narrative leads us both to infer the ancient past 350 million years ago (Petra’s date of birth) and to envision a futuristic city where a Cloud Passage Integrity Program (CPIP) operates and daily life is governed by the surveillance and controls of a Smart Grid. A peculiar world where ancient past collides with unfamiliar future, it intersects with the Afrofuturist world view merging ancient Africa with outer space imagery. Whereas Afrofuturism has delved into artistic genres such as literature, music, and cinema since the mid-20th century, recontextualizing Africa’s ancient mythology into a futuristic vision while ironically critiquing the ethnicity and gender issues faced by black people, Ayoung Kim’s video work Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot holds up a speculative mirror to our reality today with a Sci-fi imagination that juxtaposes mythology with technology. Kim’s fictional narrative within Crypto Valley is not intended to prophesy or represent the information age of the 21st century, as exemplified by its data flows; rather, it operates on an imaginative level to twist the social divisions and contradictions that surround the migration and refugee issues as a way of critiquing the reality and examining an alternative reality. In that sense, the Sci-fi vision that is presented in Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot should be discussed within a context of “speculative fiction,” rather than in science fiction terms.

Mirroring the Reality

Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot features numerous intricate hidden devices that mirror reality. To begin with, the migration pathway that Petra Genetrix experiences — a perilous process of migration, review, surveillance, incarceration, and escape — mirrors the social issue of refugee migration at a real-world level. In particular, Porosity Valley 2 has its starting point in a heated debate that unfolded over 561 Yemeni refugees who migrated to Jeju Island in 2018 to escape a civil war in their home country. Three Yemeni refugees that the artist met — named Yasmin, Ahmed Aska, and Yusef al-Rami — actually perform in the video, acting as a chorus and embodying entities such as “strata,” “waves,” and “stones” that carry within them the earth’s own memories; alongside Petra, they represent another set of protagonists driving the migration narrative. The designation of “alien migration applicant G-1-5-3407” assigned to Petra by the gatekeeper when s/he arrives in Crypto Valley corresponds straightforwardly with the “refugee applicants G-1-5” classification actually applied to refugee applicants in South Korea. Crypto Valley, the place where Petra undergoes her/his migration review, alludes to Jeju Island as a maritime base region situated in an imaginary archipelago; the Smart Grid where data that fail to receive stay permits are kept in custody until their deportation from Crypto Valley, is modeled on the grid layout of the Hwaseong Immigration Processing Center, where foreign migrants without permission to stay are placed in custody. The cold lines of dialogue spoken by the Crypto Valley gatekeeper to Petra — “If your review is not completed in the next six months, the Crypto Migration Center will temporarily extend your sojourn status. Once your eligibility has been confirmed, you will be implanted with an Alien Registration Chip as part of CPIP — our ‘Cloud Passage Integrity Program’” — call to the mind the rigorous refugee application system in South Korea, where applicants must renew their humanitarian sojourn permit every six months and only a small few end up receiving a visa. Just as Petra has her/his right to freely move about Crypto Valley taken away as an “alien migration applicant” in Porosity Valley 2, so refugee “applicants” who do not receive officially humanitarian sojourn permissions are left as unseen presences, unable to belong to any system or take on any employment.

From nameless symbol to mythical presence

The human dignity that is lost when a being is substituted with a symbol for control and management is akin to an “unfinished task” for Ayoung Kim to restore in the realm of art. When refugees are referred to as numbers, they become like phantom presences in South Korean society whose voices have been stripped away. The long, narrow green path leading into Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot is reconfigured by the artist into a six-channel sound installation space blending the voices of three Yemeni refugees. It is, in effect, a virtual space where the uncounted — people who are denied a part of life — can make their voices heard as political agents. The artist has also conferred a divine dignity to Petra Genetrix, a figure that drifts in the same way as the refugees; indeed, the “Petra Genetrix” concept originates in icons of the god Mithras¹, who was born (genetrix) out of rock (petra)², referring to birth as well as a “matrix” while literally signifying the “Mother Rock” that gave rise to Mithras. “Petra Genetrix” thus carries the sense of a rock that gives birth to a god — a mineral that carries life.³ As both an ancient deity that has successfully migrated and a divine, gender-defying presence that possesses life, wisdom, and transcendence, Petra Genetrix serves in Porosity Valley 2 as a dramatic medium representing the exceeding real and political issues of “refugees” and “migration” in mythical and metonymic terms. This is also the powerful mythical implication proposed by the artist for restoring the identity of refugees who are denied dignity and left to drift as migrants.

Crumbling boundaries

The narrative of Porosity Valley 2 ends with Petra Genetrix achieving hybridization with the Mother Rock — a superintelligence, storehouse of memory, and general data center that remembers and foresees all of Crypto Valley’s past, present, and future information. Its immune system effectively weakened by inbreeding, the Mother Rock has consistently asked for different forms of information for the sake of its system’s stability. Petra Genetrix is like a vaccine that erases this boundary of “inbreeding/hybridism” and strengthens immunity. The mythic ending of Porosity Valley 2 is a critique of South Korean society’s rigid hierarchy and “pure blood” ideology, which shuns heterogeneity and “otherizes” difference, and a reference to the possibility that abstract space dominated by uniformity and heterogeneity might accommodate a “differential space”⁴ that acknowledges discontinuities and fissures. It is an open-ended conclusion, one drawn from the experiences internalized by the artist over the years as an “unstable outsider.” As they leave abstract space and enter differential space, the genealogies of solitary figures⁵ — such as migrants, deportees, and refugees — can become our own stories. As we come to recognize more complex modes of living than the imaginary community of “state/nation” and reject the exclusivity of “pure blood” ideology, these lone figures — like Petra Genetrix in the conclusion — can attain both political legitimacy and divine dignity.

1. “Mithraism, which spread from ancient Presia into the Roman Empire between the first and fourth centuries. Mithra was initially venerated as the god of light in Persia, but once introduced to the Romans gained a long-standing iconic imagery[.]”, Ayoung Kim et al., Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Seoul: Ilmin Museum of Art, 2018), 109.

2. Petra is the Latin proper feminine meaning ‘rock.’

3. Ibid., 109–110.

4. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Yang Yeongran [In Korean] (Seoul: Ecolivres, 2011), 106.

5. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, trans. Na Byeongcheol [In Korean] (Seoul: Somyung Books, 2002), 278.