Lee Sunghui (curator, Hite Collection)

All things that exist have images. As artists, we are forever reaching out to grasp their true nature and their meanings. We define each of the things that our fingertips touch, frustrated at our inadequate vocabulary and style. The relationships and gaps between the essence of these objects and their images, and our ceaseless efforts to capture them: these are the subjects of Chung Heeseung’s photographic inquiry. Going a step further, it can be said her photographs are recognized as complete images in their own right, independent of their subjects. She shows us that photography is not about proving the physical existence of subjects but about granting independence to the properties of images that exist as part them.

Over the past 10 years or so, Chung’s photographs have captured the special feel of various subjects including people, objects and spaces. Beginning with portrait series such as Persona, Reading and Ghost, she has captured historical space in photographs through still life works including Still-Life, Tender Buttons, Rose is Rose is Rose, Disappearance, and Remembrance has rear and fron).

It seems appropriate to label Chung’s first series, comprising portrait works, under the common title Persona. As the artist herself has stated, these works explored the relationship between masks and faces, taking people as their subjects. Chung further divides the processes involved in these series, explaining that Persona uses the performance of actors in a tragedy to address the ambiguous boundaries between reality, the stage, absorption and self-revelation, while Reading focuses on and attempts to capture this process whereby actors reading a script repeatedly read out the language of others until it becomes an act of losing themselves Ghost is a reference to mid-19th-century portrait photographs; it investigates the emotion and untraceable nostalgia (which may, according to Walter Benjamin, become an aura) found in works produced in the period of approximately 15 years between the invention of photography and its commercialization. To create these works, a kind of homage to the emotion of early photographs that has been lost in their counterparts today, Chung used a large camera and sliding plates to produce two stereo images taken at slightly different times and for different durations; this work was done with the production process of 19th-century daguerrotype portraits in mind. The relatively long filming times made the models’ gazes turn further from the camera and towards their inner selves, thereby attempting to get involved with the subject, in contrast to practical and superficial depictions. Referring to these works, Chung has stated that she also depicted surfaces, but that what interested her was those that manifested themselves as symptoms of internally occurring psychological changes.¹

Chung Heeseung’s Still-Life works are photographs taken of various objects around her. Here, she presents and arranges them in ways that differ from their original meanings, showing them as unfamiliar images or a single objet; in the Rose is Rose is Rose series, she uses a repetitive series of rose portraits to show the process of photographs approaching the essence of an object. Tender Buttons, produced at a similar time, borrows the title of a poem by Gertrude Stein and attempts to reveal subjects or bodies in fluid, mutually dependent relationships. The subjects of this work are things in a state of tenderness but with loose relationships to the names attached to them; things that are in states of instability but not aggressive. Tender Buttons is tied together with Rose is Rose is Rose and Disappearance as “three props regarding the impossibility of meaning”; this expression itself is an exploratory work by Chung pertaining to the unreachable meaning of images. These works contain contemplation on the relationships between images and texts found in Chung’s other works, exhibitions and anthologies, and on what lies between the lines therein. Chung has used the act of editing, also an important characteristic of her works, to experiment with the relationship between images and texts. Her arraying and arranging of series of works sometimes displaces single photographs into completely different contexts, and is also an act of creating language-like breaths, akin to a poem. As they walk along the walls of the exhibition space or turn the pages of an anthology, viewers or readers must read the spaces-between-the-lines and breaths that the artist has created.

In an earlier interview, when asked to define the characteristics of photography as a medium, Chung answered, “Photography is hard to define. It has no fixed identity.” The relationship between photographic images and reality was as unstable as a leaky ceiling, she added, and the job of photographs of photographs, ultimately, was to explore these cracks and holes. Her view of the relationship between images and reality seems highly meaningful for us in an age inundated with images, where we have lost all sense of their function, and of that of photographs. Though photography entered the world less than 200 years ago, it has been analyzed by art historians as a medium in confrontation with painting as a means of reproduction, or from various angles and perspectives including image aesthetics and media theory, since the moment it appeared. In the 20 or 30 years since the emergence of digital photography, its qualities as data have become more important than its material foundations. Photography today is now being reduced to images and data, along with painting, graphics and video, proliferating infinitely and at light speed by way of social media. It is on the verge of having to choose one of two fates: ignoring these platforms amid the maelstrom and becoming isolated, or colluding with them and being swept away by their speed. In these circumstances, Chung Heeseung keeps on digging down obstinately into the personae and identities of photographic images, prompting us to question the permanence of photography as art. And surely it is our constant questioning of photography that will let it endure as art.

1 Chung, Heeseung. Unphotographable (Seoul Doosan Art Center, 2011). See artist’s interview (no page marked).

Nonchalantly

Jo Eunbi (Curator)

1

Reminiscent of Walter Benjamin, who once attempted to write a text with only quotations, Chung Heesung’s new project is based entirely on the words and works of other artists. Composed of Chung’s images and interviews with twenty-five artists, this work recalls the somewhat familiar method of compiling contemporaneous ideas from an array of astute minds. In response, I’ve also decided to borrow the collage format by writing a few letters to the “artist of today.”

Dear Artist,
This letter might be a bit long, so please be patient. I’m stuck in temporary accommodations. After returning to Korea from the Netherlands, I’m in self- quarantine for two weeks. But I knew about this in advance, and I am certainly no exception. I’m no different from anyone else, and I’ll follow the same guidelines as everyone else. The silence and desolation at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol was a strange sensation, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. After checking in at the ticket counter, where everything was vacuum-sealed in plastic covers, the air inside the plane cabin felt a little suspect. Some people were even wearing protective clothing that they got from who knows where, which made me a little fearful. Returning home with that fear, I immediately became a target to be managed, and made to wait in a long line for so-called “quarantine procedures.” But after all, I was pretty familiar with this identity as a “surplus” person that was awaiting me. Having extra time on my hands always reminds me of the lines drawn by the system. Ironically, I became a surplus being again at the very moment that I seem to have returned myself to the field of art, although I’m still not sure whether I’m standing inside or outside.

You might not be aware, but after giving birth and moving to the Netherlands, I spent almost all of my time on childcare. In the meantime, art simply faded away, having no space inside my manifold identity as a woman, foreigner, mother, and Asian. Art was just something that I occasionally found in life. Of course, you might think that, since leaving the orbit of Korean society, I must have had some new experiences, encountering things I’ve never faced before. But looking back, I don’t really know what I experienced while I was there. All I know for certain is that the capital cities of Western Europe aren’t so different from here. Everywhere I went, I couldn’t escape the realm of homogenized individuals surrounded by global companies, eating the same foods and consuming the same products. At one time, the cities of Europe were the object of such envy and admiration as global tourist attractions and historical sites frozen in time. Witnessing the decline of this “original” makes me feel that everything we’ve eagerly seen and studied is coming to an end. But these days, even that type of experience is hard to come by. My last memories of Europe are of a city on lockdown, empty streets devoid of tourists, given over to the birds.

I’ve felt like I’ve lost the capacity to feel beauty, except perhaps when I see a three-year-old looking in the mirror. Even if I catch a quick glimpse of something beautiful in a museum, it just feels like an anomaly, an exception to the overlying cynicism. Eventually, the only hint of aesthetic freedom that I can find is in de- regulated objects with no intentionality. Let me emphasize that I’m not trying to say something trite about how everything in our lives has aesthetic possibilities. I’m simply reconsidering the essence of “beauty” from the perspective of a surplus person. Ever since art was domesticated by “institutions,” artistic beauty has become the exclusive domain of its administrators. This idea might seem a little vague, but that’s how the landscape looks to me since I took a step back from the art field. So what’s going on here?

I recognize the limitations of subjective narration, but for now I’m going to embrace those limitations in order to express how my views of the art world have changed as I’ve grown. My first impression of you—the Artist— was a certain looseness or clumsiness in your attitude and appearance. Having finished my college entrance exam just after the 1997 financial crisis, I often snuck into the exhibition openings of young artists who had returned after studying abroad, or other events like that. You and I met for the first time by Hongdae, in an alternative art space that is no longer there. You were indignant about the harsh working conditions at the 24- hour gimbap place where we were sitting, an attitude that still resonates in your recent work, for better or worse. But rather than being weighed down by these heavy thoughts, the scenes of that day remain vivid and fresh, when everything felt natural in a friendly place filled with familiar smells. It didn’t have a finished form or a name, and I wasn’t aware of exactly what was happening at the time, but there were certain places where people would gather, drawn by the mere fascination of novelty. It’s such a downer to label something so fun and bold and mischievous with the same old worn-out terms: “alternative,” “underground,” “subculture,” etc. Looking back, when the pulsing drums of indie musicians resonated through the neighborhood, everything seemed glorious. And back then, the artists had this sense of freedom from being outside the system, and the sheer confidence of knowing that they themselves were art. Rather than a profession, being an artist was a matter of attitude, or self-consciousness. But even then, the territory outside the system was already shrinking. By the 2000s, the lives of artists could no longer resist the pull of “labor market flexibility.” The arrival of neoliberalism was followed shortly by the institutionalization of Korean art, and suddenly the profession of curator has emerged in earnest. While a few chose to maintain their amateurish status within this flexible labor market, the wiser ones began using prestigious journals and other venues to represent themselves as experts or global elites. As the prize became clearer, so did the monopoly of winners. The phenomenon of contemporary art as spectacle, which was created at that time by a few successful artists collaborating with economies of scale, can still be seen in installations in museums today.

But to what end? Despite this institutional expansion and growth, contemporary art hasn’t formed any clear causal relationships within our society. Art has lost any semblance of authority or public expectations, and the Korean art market, with its bizarre and bewildering structure, has become an embarrassment. Then how do we persuade ourselves to keep going? Since I graduated, over the course of two presidential terms, our generation consented to the claim that art was labor. While some young artists questioned how the act of art could be considered labor, their questions only seemed to confirm that we are all laborers now. As such, their remarks could be read as a demand for an economic safety net and a disclosure of class within the art field. And at the same time, it seemed like a sign that institutional art had crossed the point of no return, enacting a reality in which “society” was impossible. Nevertheless, like the young artist who said “I want to be a star at any cost,” the individualistic will is still prevalent in this scene. And this illusion of meritocracy will persist by periodically incorporating a few artists into its structure of recognition based on effort and ability. But Artist, don’t you know enough by now to see that the reality that awaits us is much different than it was a decade ago? Projecting myself onto my colleagues who declare art as labor, I see today’s secularized and commercialized art. So my familiar sense of being “surplus” beings must be a delusion, because in today’s art field, there is no more space for surplus.

2

Like mixed-up pieces of a puzzle, Chung Heesung’s photography is scattered in space. These fragments that refuse to be easily assembled become a riddle, infusing the exhibition space with a desire and determination to complete a puzzle that has missing pieces. Sometimes a name causes us to misconstrue the true meaning of a thing, rather than the opposite. But Chung affirms and even embraces this state of inscrutability, focusing instead on the ambiguous nuances of what will or will not be completed. By rejecting the conventional symbolic systems for the subject of photography, her images occupy a state in which (in her own words) “the subject has not yet been determined, and the meaning has not yet arrived.”

Dear Artist,
This morning, the government official in charge of my case brought some relief supplies for my self-quarantine, leaving them by my door. Coming from the Netherlands, where even the simplest administrative procedures can take a couple months of more, the rapid response of Korean society has been hard to fathom. Our society is the pinnacle of convenience—as long as I remain on the side of the consumer, averting my eyes from the excessive labor required by faceless individuals. No matter how many times I experience this convenience, it’s still hard to believe at times, but we should remember that it comes at the cost of surveillance and control. To the government official who carried food in both hands to “take care of” me, I’m just a potential hazard who strolled into the neighborhood from parts unknown. It’s not just me. Everywhere we go these days—public transportation, parks, sidewalk—띶we’re bombarded with signs, banners, and infographics reminding us of the rules that we should follow as “citizens of an advanced country.” Throughout the day, the government sends out a massive amount of emergency alerts instructing us what we should or should not do, almost to the point of exhaustion. For critic Kim Kimyoung, this type of government micromanagement is a form of “maternal” care that treats citizens like children.¹ Of course, Kim was well aware of the prejudices embedded in this analogy, given the distorted concept of the word “maternal” within the patriarchal ideology of Korean society. Since protection presupposes a “protected object,” both the protector and protected are locked in an inevitable exchange relationship. In this case, rather than mutual respect and reciprocity, “motherhood” implies a degree of control over a “protected object,” rather than care.

A few years ago, when I attended an event to award funding from a local cultural foundation, a staff member kindly explained the program and administrative system to me. He finished up by saying, with a faint smile on his face, that, “People who don’t have money or power should get together more often through this kind of event.” I’m not sure if he saw the frown on my face. Seemingly unaware of his objectification of others, he was equally blind to his rudeness. It’s not that I’m super- sensitive to the hierarchy between the enforcer of the system and the beneficiary. The federal, regional, and district governments of Korea have established a number of support systems that provide a nonstop flow of funding for various purposes. But when funding is too compartmentalized, it becomes more difficult to comprehend, smaller in quantity, and less effective. As the system becomes more elaborate, we are more susceptible to the illusion of its benevolence. Yet the real problem is that the system is equally elaborate in displacing the trust of the community, until those who are subordinated to the system become as tame as pets on a leash.

I don’t want this to sound like another banal complaint about the evils of the system or the disadvantages of being an artist. In fact, contemporary art has a symbiotic relationship with this system, such that every artist must pass through it. The big award that made you who you are today is also sponsored by a major corporation, and I’ve been getting paid by a corporate institution for many years. Of course, I once felt ashamed of myself for relying on the object of my criticism. To be honest, after I left the blurry circle of the art field, even this system stuck in neutral and riddled with weak connections started to look somewhat reliable. How naive does that ethical purity seem now? But there’s no other way. Now no one is afraid of art, but instead, artists are afraid of “them.” In Korea, which doesn’t have a single independent, private art museum of any real significance, art’s dependence on public subsidies and corporate sponsorship seems inevitable. To compensate for the indifference of the private sector, the government treats art like a welfare recipient. Of course, the system has not grown stronger on its own. I’m very aware that some people have closed ranks by drawing a circle to create a boundary that is actually just a line. And how well do the experts who are standing on that line really know art? Today, the social reputation of experts has collapsed. The recent #MeToo movement in the art scene revealed how sexual predators disguised as artists committed their crimes with the acquiescence or even assistance of those around them, and it has also revealed the absurd power of those who monopolize institutional resources. Within this closed system that continuously awards corporate contracts and government projects to the same select few, what is art and what is fraud? The myth of the supposed autonomy of artists has long since expired.

Since I’ve already come this far, I’ll go a little further with my pessimism. Maybe there’s no more place in our world for art. In today’s society, art seems completely impossible. When an artist can never hope to top the performance of a politician, the only thing left is parody, or self-parody. The former function of art, to present a world that has not yet arrived, has been paralyzed. In the surplus, aesthetic experiences had the power to change a person’s life or attitude, and thus to help them break free from their point of origin. That power lay in the reckless imprudence that coaxed or coerced a person to violate the symbolic system of society, to break through the procedures recommended by the system, and ultimately to return to living as an individual. But what about art now? It’s either a repetitive specious statement aimed at acquiring compartmentalized funding or an expensive trinket that mixes taste with marketability. Rather than taking the risk of trying to change us, art just brings us into a place of supposed safety and comfort. By binding itself in such ways, art has been reduced to a sleek accessory to the system.

3

The artists who Chung Heesung met are different in age, gender, class, career, and location. Thus, as a biased story, based solely on “people she knows,” the work is less generalizable. Indeed, even in revealing the “artist of today,” the work suggests the impossibility of generalizing any art, which is inherently arbitrary. Representing the other side of art creation, Chung’s scenes capture slices of private life, in the form of portraits of artists or pieces of works in progress. Reminding us that art is made in an ambiguous realm between life and work, her photos embody both the specific lives of the artists and the very site of art creation, raising the inevitable question: can a photo of an artwork being created be an artwork, in and of itself? As both an observer and an artist, Chung seeks to identify, and perhaps even to occupy the inexplicable point at which a certain act becomes “art” within the existing system. In this exhibition, for example, Chung’s work is interrupted by the images or works of other artists, which are seemingly irrelevant to the institutional approval of the Korea Artist Prize. Yet this very irrelevance paradoxically proves Chung’s value as an artist. So what makes them art? What makes an artist? Of course, these questions are unanswerable. The images of other artists’ works appear naturally in the exhibition space, nonchalantly hung there by Chung herself. By provoking our curiosity about the original work, which they can never show us, these images compel us to ponder the hidden side of artworks, while also pulling back the curtain to reveal the secrets of how art is produced and approved by the system. What is the meaning of this mysterious state of affairs? In today’s world, where art is impossible, must we continue in this way? In the end, the question that Chung repeatedly asked her fellow artists —“Why do you do this?”— returns to her as “Why do I do this?” Likewise, this question ultimately summons the reason for making art.

Dear Artist,
I think I was a bit cynical in the last letter. I have to admit that this long isolation from Europe is wearing me down. Because of the sudden lockdown, my family and I had to hurry back to Korea. But at least I have a place to come back to, unlike some people. This sense of loss has revealed the fragility of everyday life, which we worked so hard to maintain. When the pandemic first started, while I was in Europe, I was confused when anonymous people on the street would cover their nose and mouth when they saw me. The virus had paved the way for the discrimination and hatred that was now polluting the air that I was breathing. Instead of getting angry, I wanted to fully inhabit the experience of being the Other. If I said that, “I felt some relief, since the only ethical subject in the neoliberal era is a victim,”² would I be deceiving myself? Of course, everyone’s status continually changes, and no one is always the minority. I can’t deny the well-managed, moderate life that I enjoy in my home country. But it’s clear to me that human life today is perpetually exposed to various degrees of violence, and even worse, we’ve become accustomed to it.

All of a sudden, I find myself thinking about the tunnels connecting Seoul to Gangwon Province. Even though the landscape is filled with curves and mountains, the cars run through it in a straight line. How many mountains had to be dug to build those tunnels, and how many people had to be evicted? And even after all that, how are people treated? Alarms to keep drivers from dozing off at the wheel, and artificial noises and visual stimulation bombarding people from all sides, eventually triggering mechanical responses, turning humans into materials and objects. If Simone Weil was right when she wrote that “violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing,”3 then surely these straight tunnels are violence. In this fast-paced battle to prop up the platform economy, humans are no different from delivery goods in the back of a truck. Can the life of an artist be an exception to this rule? I’ve finally gotten around to asking how you’re doing.

How have you been?

I know, it took me a long time to get to this question. So I’ll ask you again. What possibilities remain for artists today? Some have said that the job of an artist is too human to ever be replaced by technology, but that doesn’t bring me any comfort. And by the way, do you really think that’s true? This ultimate “human” act could probably already be replaced by state-of-the-art technology. Not long ago, I read a novel written by an A.I. program, and the language was just as good, if not better, than most novelists. And now A.I.—edited videos, A.I.—designed installations, and extraordinary paintings by A.I. are providing an alibi for abandoning human authorship or art production. Furthermore, in an age when criticism has lost its authority and influence, the public response to art that ignores critical values seems to reveal people’s true desires or expectations for art. At the very least, those who want to stay in a familiar fantasy will not welcome art that can “really” threaten their life phases. The biggest crisis facing art is that it can no longer create aesthetic issues. We’re helpless not because we don’t know anything, but rather because we know everything.

For this reason, Artist, I hope that you’ll stop being an artist. Now that everyone can become or has become an artist, do we really need professional artists to increase the volume and thickness of institutional art? After all, making things is just the ingrained habit of people caught up in the inertia of perpetual development. Maybe the harder we strive to do our best, the quicker we destroy the world. If we can’t even justify why we’re maintaining the system of the past, can’t we get away from the indolence that we’ve reluctantly accepted? Now is the time.

I sometimes imagine a world where no one makes art. What would the world look like without art? I wonder what’s beneath the skin. I still believe in you, dear Artist, but you’re not here right now. You could be the entire field of art, but at the same time, you’re no one. You look like everyone and you don’t look like anyone. The reason I’m writing to you is because of your absence. What’s really been going on in the meantime? Who made you disappear? I don’t think we did that. Actually, the most painful part is that we cannot blame any of us. Seriously, where are you?

Meanwhile, Benjamin’s project to write entirely with quotes remains unfinished.

At the request of Chung Heesung, this essay looks at the reality faced by the “artist of today.”

1 Kim Kimyoung, “What Europe Cannot Learn from Korea,” Firenze’s Dining Table (April 2020), https://firenzedt.com/?p=5909.

2 Jeong Heejin, “Unfamiliar Relationship: Quarantine Dictator Dreaming of Martyr,” Kyunghyang Shinmun, September 16, 2020.

3 Simone Weil, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2005).

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily

Kim Hyunho (Photo critic)

1

After entering the museum, crossing several staircases and hallways, you step into the gallery, where you are greeted by the sound of someone softly humming. After rustling across the ceiling, the song sinks gently to the floor with a muffled, murmuring sound, as if the speaker is turned against the wall.

Unlike movie theaters, where people are generally forced to sit in a chair and stare at the screen for a set amount of time, most art galleries and museums have little nooks or byways where visitors can hide and avoid others. Although artists will often try to gently grab people, pulling them into the dark crevices of the works, many visitors simply brush away the artist’s grasp and stroll indifferently through the space. Standing before an artist’s proudest creation, people are still free to check their phone, step back to look for tiny flaws that the artist hoped to hide, or continue in the flow of the exhibition. All of these dizzy and discordant movements among the distracted viewers interfere with the artist’s intentions.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

But no one can avoid the sound, which rolls like waves to flood the space. The repeating voice of sunwoojunga instantly arouses a peculiar sensation of simultaneously rising and falling, like riding a roller coaster in slow motion. No matter where you turn or look, you are entwined with the voice. Looking at the photos and listening to the music, our two senses alternate between joyful symbiosis and anxious disagreement with every step.

Chung Heeseung once said that the biggest attraction of photography is that the scope of one’s creation is limited to sight. Of course, vision goes beyond merely receiving light with the eyes, since seeing something requires a system of perception to understand it.

So, what can we really see? Compared to the infinite complexity and liquidity of the world around us, the amount of information that our vision processes is infinitesimal, even pitiful.

This deficiency is due not only to the limits of the flesh, but also to the limits of interpretation. Humans may be the only species that must create virtual constellations (and their originating legends) in order to process the inscrutable stars in the night sky. To understand the world, we must transform it into signs that we can recognize. Our process of perception inevitably involves refraction, meaning that the vast abundance of information that we cannot understand is left scattered.

Perhaps this is why the expectations for photography were so high in the early twentieth century, when people like Walter Benjamin thought that the new media might have the power to prevent catastrophe. For Benjamin, the increasingly complex processes of capital, goods, production, and consumption made the structure of reality almost impossible to decipher. But somewhat paradoxically, he viewed the innovation of photography as a ray of hope, believing that mechanically produced images indiscriminately captured on a photosensitive plate could reveal details that the human eye could not perceive. Benjamin compared Eugène Atget’s images of the empty streets of Paris to “photos of a crime scene,” feeling that the minute details recorded in the photos would one day revive like embers, serving as clues to disclose the structure and fallacy of society. Benjamin himself read and re-read the data of the previous century in search of a lifeline to rescue tradition from capitalism.

At that time, of course, photography was still quite strange and new. The camera unwittingly transformed everything from the present into the past, showing fragments of bizarre and absurd mechanical imagery, rather than the neat and precise imagery that humans believed that “they were seeing.” Photography demanded a fundamental change in the way people saw, which is why Benjamin felt that it had the potential to break through layers of time and reach those with keen vision.

Again, that was a long time ago. Since then, we have developed powerful tools to help us understand these raw, unrefined images. Today, inserting a photo into one side of a machine assembled with tools such as semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and history will cause a plausible explanation to be printed out on the other side. Photography has now become so familiar that we have no difficulty in dissecting the implied meanings in its details.

But this is where the problem starts. Are these tools adequate? Can the language of discourse provide enough resolution to explain a single photograph? Are there still artists who believe in the wonders and possibilities created by light and lenses? If so, how do they behave? Maybe all they can do is run away. They can set up a few traps to prevent their images from being easily interpreted and then take refuge in a place where they can claim to not know the answer. They can pretend that these images are not just the result of a thought experiment. They can argue that no matter how incisive the discourse, some part of every photo remains beyond comprehension, like a skeleton.

Chung Heeseung’s reasoning for being attracted to photography provides a crucial clue for understanding her works. Significantly, she is not particularly interested in the ways that her photographs connect with our external knowledge system. Instead, she seeks to liberate the possibilities of vision, using photography to see more, and to see more clearly. Concentrating our full perceptive capacity into our eyes and rushing towards an object like a being with no body, we generate intense pressure that causes all of the other senses, as well as the artist’s intentions, to dry up, turn white, and flake away.

This mode of creation recalls “slow reading,” which was promoted at the end of the twentieth century by writers confronting postmodern theory and criticism. Citing the inherently unfathomable elements of writings and sentences, this approach shuns the use of discourse in favor of deliberate focus on the object until something essential rises to the surface. This attitude also restores faith in the visual possibilities of photography, resisting the notion that photography is already outdated and thus subject only to archaeological investigations, like “What was photography?”

So what did this artist hope to gain by having a song float over the photos in the gallery?

2

Inside the long rectangular gallery, two pillars and four freestanding walls stand at oblique angles. If we could peer down from above through the ceiling, the room might resemble a giant pinball machine. Many photo exhibitions incorporate freestanding walls, which typically serve to temporarily divide a large space into smaller viewing areas. While such structures are quite mundane, they at least serve a logical purpose. For example, an exhibition can be divided into four areas, yielding a sequence much like the introduction, development, turn, and conclusion of a novel, or arranged into sections dedicated to specific works or topics.

But rather than delineating the space, the freestanding walls of Chung Heeseung, which jut out from one another at odd angles, only induce visitors to get lost. People who treat this like a conventional photo exhibition and follow along the outside walls will eventually find themselves at an ambiguous crossroads. Moreover, the freestanding walls are painted in bold colors that react with the large, intense photographs, ineluctably drawing people from across the room like some type of signal.

Being conditioned by previous exhibitions, some people still try to walk in one direction around the outer walls, but they soon reach a fork in the road that demands a decision. From this same spot, people are thrust along different paths depending on their speed and rotation, just like pinballs. Bouncing dizzily around the gallery, they might pass by the same corner over and over, while missing other areas entirely. Within this irregular space created by the freestanding walls, the photographs gaze down silently, watching the audience’s movements.

As a written work, the space is more like a collection of loose cards in a box, rather
than a bound hardcover book. In most photo exhibitions, the individual photos are carefully woven into an aggregation of thought and effort to convey the artist’s intentions. The size and spacing of the photos are elaborately adjusted in accordance with the walls to help the distracted audience concentrate. Also, a certain rhythm is devised, like crouching low before quickly leaping, to provide the audience with the sense of a visual climax.

In contrast, this exhibition generates a new narrative each time the cards are shuffled and re-dealt. Of course, the narratives that arise through the course of getting lost are likely to be confusing and tautological, but isn’t photography itself like that anyway? In fact, isn’t it too contrived to try to suture the traces of accidental intersections in myriad times and spaces into a single story?

The information that Chung provides to help the audience formulate the narrative is very limited. The photos of her fellow artists were taken by Chung herself, in an effort to document their struggles to survive and make a living within the art field. We are all very familiar with such stories of hardship, and might even imagine ourselves in the roles of these characters. After all, don’t most people working a humdrum job in industrial society secretly believe that they have the soul of an artist?

This belief is a type of worldview shared by the artists who have been photographed and hung on the wall for the audience to look at. The world keeps spinning according to its own logic, but we still do not understand its mechanisms. Like characters in a Kafka novel, we are thrown into the center of a labyrinth with a structure that is too huge for us to comprehend. Rather than searching for the exit, many people in this situation punish themselves by continually questioning how they wandered so deep into a realm of vague anxiety.

This exhibition unwittingly reveals that galleries and museums are constructs comprising a seamless mixture of dream and reality—just like society as a whole. Chung’s fellow artists are bound on the wall in the form of photographs, for the audience to casually wander among and observe. Their situation embodies the anxiety and hope that subjugates humans to the system. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915), even after waking to discover that he has been transformed into a bug, Gregor Samsa’s primary concern is not how to change back into a person, but how to go to work with his new insect body. His anxiety over being evicted from the system that suppresses him and his hope that he can remain in the system by enduring some pain are different names for the same emotion. As artists, Chung’s subjects are suspicious and sick of the system, yet they do not want to be thrown out of it. The landscape of this twisted mindset provides the basic structure for this exhibition, getting lost in a narrow maze.

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The displayed photos are diverse in every aspect: some are black and white, some are color, some are taken in sunlight, and some with artificial lighting. The photos show people, animals, fish, insects, flowers, dolls (resembling scarecrows), pills, beads, stairs, paintings, hands, wings, and more. Some of the people look directly at the camera, while others look away; some are looking at their phones, some are wearing or holding masks, and some look like shady businesspeople.

It is difficult to surmise the specific context of the individual photos, since all we know is that the project as a whole focuses on Chung Heeseung’s artist colleagues. Conscientiously adjusted and arranged in terms of size, color, height, spacing, etc., the photos could be materials eliciting vivid stories, or peepholes offering a glimpse into the private spaces of these artists.

What’s clear is that the photos are very different from the traditional “artist portraits.” In addition to taking the photos, Chung also interviewed and spent time with her subjects, but this process by itself does not set them apart from conventional portrait photographs. However, the characters in her photos do not seem to act or look like traditional artists. Browsing the images, we never get a sense of who they are, how grand their artistic ambitions may be, or how deep their internal wounds.

With the invention of photography, people quickly became adept at posing for the camera. From the beginning, photography has been posited as a medium that nullifies time and space, with the capacity to bring images of distant places into our home or to summon moments from the past into the present. Thus, being photographed has always meant becoming an image of yourself that can then be exposed to an unspecified number of people.

Within this overall phenomenon, artists have been tasked with “looking like an artist.” Before photography, no one felt he need to know what William Shakespeare looked like (beyond the few who actually knew him), and Rembrandt could freely shape and modify his appearance through his own choices as an artist. Since the invention of photography, however, most artists have been forced in front of photographers to have their likeness generated in the blink of an eye. While some writers, such as William Faulkner and Vladimir Nabokov (Bладимир Набоков), asserted that they did not want to leave anything behind but their books, few have succeeded in avoiding the camera.

How does an artist attempt to look like herself in front of the camera? After all, what is the self, and can it really be represented in a photograph? Addressing this confusion in Camera Lucida (1980), Roland Barthes wrote, “In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art… Because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture.”¹ As soon as the camera is pointed at us, we must confront our divided self, which ultimately seeks to deceive.

Barthes also believed that the self is light, fragmented, and dispersed, while the image is heavy, immobile, and persistent. Notably, Barthes himself (who addressed the “death of the author” in 1967, long before he wrote Camera Lucida) suffered from some compulsion in front of the camera. In order to get a plausible artist’s portrait, one must round up all of the unruly selves that are running around in anxiety and then cram them in a container called “artist.” How exhausting it is to be ourselves.

One of the few places where such images of an artist still work is the institution of the museum, which by now might seem like a ridiculously old and monstrous body. The gallery where we stand could be the eye of the museum, staring back at us. Or perhaps the mouth, where we step on soft, damp areas while various smells emanate up from the stomach.

To avoid dropping out of the system, one must become a part of it. If you follow the long neck of the museum that is connected to this gallery, moving towards the intestines, about halfway down you will find the old artists who have now become the system. These are the artists who once believed that they could escape the banality of the world through their artistic practices, and those who felt that the world was not a narrow maze, but a wide stage of possibilities where they could display their “self.” If you were to gather all of the portrait photos of artists from the museum’s storage and make them into an exhibition, it would look completely different from Chung Heeseung’s exhibition. To a certain degree, all of the people in those portraits will truly “look like” artists in the way that we envision. For example, Picasso compared himself to the Minotaur when he was photographed, but anyone who saw his photo without knowing who he was would only see an old man with thinning hair and a rather nasty look in his eyes.

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Along the walls of the gallery are long, thin white shelves holding postcard-sized pieces of paper, each printed with one of thirty-three “typography poems” created by designer Park Yeounju. These “poems,” which resemble haikus, are actually short snippets of dialogue from the artists in the photos. Although their content tends to be rather petulant or self- deprecating, they still arouse the visitors’ curiosity because of their elaborate design.

But even the most acquisitive visitors will find it very difficult to read and collect all thirty- three pieces of paper, and even if they do, they will not be able to connect the anonymous words with the artist who said them. By closely studying the photos, one might be able to make a guess about who said, “Lying around all day /That ass / Living life to the fullest” but there is no way to know who said something like, “Pushing and pulling/To see it become minimal /To the extent / It is now disappearing”

Because of their short length, haiku poems elide the boundary between speaker and listener, and thus between self and others. For example, in the famous haiku by Matsuo Basho —“The old pond/a frog jumps in/the sound of water”—where are the speakers and listeners respectively located? The voices are undifferentiated, gently hovering like a mass in the air.

If you were able to find and read every “typography poem” in the exhibition, you would realize that all of the subjects have purposely removed, which is a step beyond even traditional haiku. It is not only impossible to connect the poems to the artists, but also irrelevant. Like clothes for paper dolls, the words can be arranged to fit anyone, even if they usually end up looking awkward.

But this is not to say that the meaning or role of the poems in the exhibition is insignificant. The anonymity of the words simply implies that Chung Heeseung does not trust the inner mind of an artist, which was once a sacred realm of infinite possibilities, whether we like it or not. None of the thirty-three pieces express anger or lament the struggle against fate. When internal motivation loses its force, what is left for an artist in a world that is like a narrow maze? Can they only endure the individual existence of the self, endlessly repeating the rise and fall?

I don’t know the answer. I would also like to note that the words written on the paper look a little like jokes. There are two possible reasons for this. First, comedy is much more hopeless than tragedy. While tragedy shows people overcoming adversity and moving forward, comedy stops at revealing the emptiness of laughter derived from contradiction. Second, these words represent points that are very old, but continue to persist. The moment we accept that the work of an artist today is not to disclose the inner mind, but to endure a world without possibility of escape by persevering through the self, we will finally be able to begin exploration.

As mentioned, Chung Heeseung is an artist who has sought to remove anything obstructing vision from her works, delicately excising them to reach the state where “meaning has not yet arrived.” So again, what did she hope to gain by putting this exhibition to music? Maybe she has changed her mind, and is now hoping that the visual and aural perceptions might mutually stimulate one another, leading to a certain climax, like a Hollywood movie.

Probably not. Filled with compassion, the rustling voice of sunwoojunga constantly whispers in our ears, imploring us to keep rowing. There is another major difference between a movie theater and an art exhibition. At the theater, when the movie is over, the credits roll and the lights come on, letting everyone know that it is time to leave and return to their daily lives. At an art exhibition, on the other hand, we can wander around the gallery for as long as we like, just like the artists who unavoidably walk around the world, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 13.