<Solo Exhibitions>
2013
Good Labor Bad Art, Plateau, Samsung Museum, Seoul
The Xijing Men, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City
2011
Ordinary Strangers, Artsonje Center, Seoul
Xijing, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice
2010
Antithesis of Boundaries, Tina Kim Gallery, New Work
2008
In through the outdoor, Kukje gallery, Seoul
2005
Neighbor’s wife, CAIS gallery, Seoul
2004
Cosmo Vitale, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles
Antarctica, Artsonje Center, Seoul
2001
Retro Bistro, Space LOOP, Seoul
2000
Heromaniac, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

<Group Exhibitions>
2013
Better Than Universe, Daegu Art Factory, Daegu
All You Need is LOVE, Mori Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Festival Bo:m 2013, Arthouse MOMO, Seoul
New START 2013, Museum of Art Seoul National University MoA, Seoul
Korean Art: Era of Grand Navigation, Busan Museum of Art, Busan
ZIZHIQU-Autonomous Regions, Times Museum, Guangzhou
SITE: Places of Memories, Spaces with Potential, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima
2012
Korea Artist Prize: 2012, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul
ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju
The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
New & Now 2012 SeMA’s New Acquisitions 2012, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Lady Dior As Seen By, Wako Namiki Building, Ginza, Tokyo
Oriental Metaphor – The 6th Move on Asia, Alternative Space Loop, Seoul
2011
Abstract it!, National Museum of Art Deoksugung, Seoul
The Global Contemporary Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe
COUNTDOWN, Former Seoul Station Art Complex Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul
2010
Tricksters Tricked, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Trust: Media City Seoul 2010, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Memories of the Future, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul
Oblique Strategies, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Aichi Triennale 2010: Arts and Cities, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya
Asian Arts Collection, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto CAMK, Kumamoto, Japan
Media Art from NMCA Collection , National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul
Linguistic Morphology: Art in Context, The Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul
Day of Confidence, Alternative Space Pool, Seoul
2009
The 10th Lyon Biennale: The spectacle of the Everyday, The Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon
The 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale: Live and Let Live-Creators of Tomorrow, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka
Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, MFAH(Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Houston
A New Common Sense of Space, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milano
Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, LACMA(Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Los Angeles
The First Stop on the Super Highway, Nam June Paik Art Center, Ansan, Korea
2008
Laughing in a Foreign Languages, Hayward Gallery, London
Too Early For Vacation, The Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland
Brave New Worlds, Fundacion/Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City
Peppermint Candy, Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
The 3rd Guangzhou Triennial: Farewell to Post-Colonialism, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
The 3rd Nanjing Triennial: Reflective Asia, RCM The Museum of Modern Art, Nanjing
Fiction and Non Fiction, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Platform 2008: I have nothing to say and I am saying it, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
The Fifth Floor, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
2007
VIDEO in SEOUL, MIROSPACE, Seoul
Elastic Taboos, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
All about Laughter : Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Somewhere in Time, Artsonje Center, Seoul
ART 38 Basel / Art Film, Stadtkino Basel, Basel
Charge Your Imagination, Gyunggido Museum of Art, Ansan
Soft Power, Hoam Art Gallery, Seoul
The 10th International Istanbul Biennial-Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary, Istanbul
Peppermint Candy, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago
Beautiful New World: Contemporary Culture from Japan, Long March Space, Beijing
Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Tomorrow, Artsonje Center, Seoul
Activating Korea: Tides of Collective Action, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand
The 2nd APAP: Anyang Public Art Project 2007, Anyang
Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture of Japan, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou
2005
Tirana Biennale: Sweet Taboos, National Gallery of Arts Tirana, Albania
The 3rd Valencia Biennale: Thoughts of a fish in deep sea, Convento di Carmen, Valencia
The 51st Venice Biennale, The Korean Pavilion, Venice
Seoul: Until Now!, Charlottenborg Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen

<Collections>
Le Consortium, France
Posco Museum, Seoul, Korea
Artsonje Center, Seoul, Korea
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA
Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea
National Gallery of Canada, Canada
Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum, Korea
Queensland Art Gallery, Austrailia
Seoul Museum of Art, Korea

THE FAKE AS MORE

Kim Sung Won
Curator, Prof. at Seoul National University of Science and Technology

“This twenty-first-century modernity, born of global and decentralized negotiations, of multiple discussions among participants from different cultures, of the confrontation of heterogeneous discourses, can only be polyglot. Alter-modernity promises to be ‘a translation-oriented modernity,’ unlike the modern story of the twentieth century, whose progressivism spoke the abstract language of the colonial West.”¹ Translation, appropriation and replication inevitably serve as central tools for artistic practice for artists today who function as translators of the age. Gimhongsok’s art practice consists of translating between difference and diversity and rejecting any hints of exoticism that emphasize difference or pluralism. What he seeks instead is to discover an ever-different yet increasingly similar appearance, that is, an ‘assimilated difference,’ and to shed light on its tenuous identity. This essay is about the artistic world of Gimhongsok, an artist whose distinct language creates adaptions of the diversity and differences, as well as truth and falsity in the world. Its purpose is to demonstrate the major concepts that drive his sphere of creation — including the bountiful variations of translation and appropriation, originals and copies, forgeries and imitations — and come to understand the meaning behind these concepts.

Translate differences!

Drawn from the bounty of humorous and nonsensical notions that fill the mind of the artist Gimhongsok, Thump! (1999), Magic Sword of MMCCXCVII (1999) and Shake Sphere (2000) are deliberately ambiguous and moderately absurd yarns falling somewhere between the surrealist and fantasy genres. Their unclear spatiotemporal settings, hyper-textual compositions and illogical developments amplify the bewildering confusion in the storylines. If you were to search for a specific plot or message within these fundamentally meaningless, humorous and ludicrous tales, you would be engaging in a loser’s game. However, this does not indicate that his stories are devoid of intention. The accompanying text for a Gimhongsok exhibition is a sort of ‘device’ that activates and completes the work of art. The text that serves as such ‘a device’ generally operates together with a translation. One of his earlier texts, Thump! (1999), was translated from Korean to English, then to Japanese and French, and finally back to Korean. Because this text was originally authored in Korean, translation was inevitably necessary in order to communicate with the audiences in the regions where the exhibitions were held, but the artist deliberately attempted a series of successive translations, rendering each text, not from the original Korean text, but from the previous translation. Through this ‘serial translation,’ one is able to experience variations that are profoundly divergent from the original.

It would not be an overstatement to assume understanding of contemporary art today involves examining the meaning of the artwork’s ‘impact’ or ‘resonance.’ This is why artists have come to concentrate less on creating an earthquake, so to say, and more on designing various ‘devices’ intended to produce aftershocks. When Jonathan Monk (1969-) showed a documented series of successive translations of a description of Robert Barry (1936-)’s Telepathic Piece (1969) in his Translation Piece (2002), Monk’s primary attempt was to first translate the “aesthetic soul” which is impossible to visualize or verbalize, and then to test its impact. The effect of the story of the main character Steve in Gimhongsok’s Thump! — which is a nonlinear series of events about love, semen, toothpaste and slipping — is revealed not so much through the delivery of the story’s content, but more through a realm which is considered impossible to translate. Gimhongsok’s stories include titles that drift over the course of serial translations, plots that become distorted, and an author who grows increasingly vague. The translations are commissioned in order to convey the original text, but they also result in giving birth to distinctly modified versions which include numerous errors. Gimhongsok’s ‘serial translations’ are about errors and modifications, and the discrepancies produced through such reiteration become an act of ‘creation’ themselves whereby novel meaning is produced, rather than a hindrance to communication. Translation invariably exposes itself to such reiteration on the premise of transfiguration. According to Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), variations of the Bible were created through being translated into different languages, and these differences give the Bible a sense of abundance that is delivered to its readers. Gimhongsok’s serial translations are less about exploring what was lost in its translation from the original text or discovering the truth, and more about enjoying their differences from the original. In The Human Abstract (2004), Gimhongsok translated a work by the English Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) into Korean, and then had the resulting translation consecutively rendered into a handful of languages. While the ultimate objective in this process was to arrive at the original English language, the result was an ambiguous poem which did resemble the original at all but could never be referred to as a poem by Blake. Through Gimhongsok’s serial translations producing ‘things that seem different but are similar, and things that seem similar but are different,’ we absorb the minute reverberations of meaning thus produced. The production of the ambiguous identity as the original is diluted into subtle nuances signifies the ‘assimilated difference’ which Gimhongsok considers to be one of the most important elements of his oeuvre. Serial translation allows one to appreciate these differences in a much more abundant way instead of merely presenting the differences.

Gimhongsok’s G5 (2004) is a video work in which the national anthems of five Group of Eight countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Japan — are all translated into Korean and then sung by five native Koreans (including pop and opera singers, as well as ordinary people). The five selected Koreans sing the five national anthems wonderfully as if they were singing their favorite songs. A national anthem is a composite symbol which embodies the history and identity of a nation. Singing the national anthem of another country translated into one’s mother tongue signifies the contextual deviation of such symbol. This deviation falsifies the divineness, authority, history and patriotism of a nation in a way that is quite different from the contextual deviation in Flag (1954-1955) by Jasper Johns (b. 1930). The resonance of the singing of the translated national anthems varies according to the nationality of the one singing the national anthem of another country translated into his or her language, the nationality of the listener, and the country in which the national anthems are sung. While diluting the symbolism of a particular nation, Gimhongsok’s G5 asks what ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ and ‘identity’ means in a global era, and how their conflicts, confusions and differences can be redefined. Translation involves the process of such codes traversing time and space, transferring to a different territory and resisting against a culture that belongs to a specific, regulated and identifiable area. Translation is movement, relocation, and a type of circuit. Thus, translation signifies the transferring of one code system to another, like in Topology, and what is transferred is equal to — yet always different from — the original.

Appropriation & Customizing

The process of ‘appropriation’ involves redirecting existing objects to a different form or context, and enjoys an intimate relationship with translation in the way it demonstrates ‘difference’ and experiments with the ‘impact’ of a work. Gimhongsok’s ‘assimilated difference’ is mostly manifested in his art through translation and appropriation. One day, the artist came across a reproduction of Robert Indiana (1928- )’s sculpture LOVE (1970) inside a window display on the streets. Inspired by such bizarre re-contextualization of the work by Robert Indiana, the artist took Indiana’s sculpture, magnified, distorted it and located it in the context of an art gallery. (LOVE (2004)) Obviously, Gimhongsok’s mutilation of a sculpture by Indiana does not symbolize vandalism of art. As a matter of fact, the degradation of the original work to a window display ornament would be more of an act of vandalism. Gimhongsok appropriated this exact situation (as well as Indiana’s sculpture, of course). However, Indiana’s sculpture was not the only thing that Gim appropriated: he also appropriated the tableaux of an artwork being consumed as a shop window ornament, regardless of its original significance or historic value. By appropriating an appropriation, Gim delivers a witty remark to an artwork’s destiny and mode of consumption. In this manner, appropriation reveals the infinite potential of a single work of art to generate novel meaning.

Today, appropriation is considered a method of art. Artists delve deep into the full repertoire of form, image and action that has appeared across the history of art, and use the forms that they desire as they please. And why limit this to the history of art? Every genre, environment, object, and situation that surrounds us, that is, the sum of ‘reality’ itself, has become an ideally generous creative repertoire for the artists of today. Of course, appropriation art does not advocate a simple variety of repertoires and randomness of choice. Appropriation is a method of creating art; thus while selecting precisely what to appropriate is important, the transfiguration resulting from that appropriation plays a decisive role in the eventual work of art. Such examples include Bertrand Lavier (1949-)’s IFAFA IV (2004), which is a fluorescent lamp version of a Frank Stella(1936-) painting, Martin Boyce (1969-)’s Suspended Fall (2005), which re-created Alexander Calder(1898-1976) mobile using the dissembled parts of a Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971) chair, and Sylvie Fleury (1961-)’s Skin Crime 3 (Givenchy 318) (1997), which is a crushed automobile spray-painted in a cosmetics hue, etc. One interesting method of such appropriation is customizing.² Originally a term common among motorcycle or automobile enthusiasts, customizing refers to making a vehicle one’s own by altering the main body or its components, or by appending unique decoration. This process of customization is highly useful in explaining the appropriation methods of today’s artists and their subtle distinctions. Both Gimhongsok’s LOVE (2004) and Sylvie Fleury’s Skin Crime 3 (Givenchy 318) are appropriations of a work by a world-renowned artist — Robert Indiana and César Baldaccini (1921-1998), respectively — but Gimhongsok’s disfigured LOVE, which criticizes the fate and consumption methods of artworks, points in a direction distinctly away from the context of Fleury’s pink crushed car, crafted by consuming art history as though shopping for makeup. In contemporary art, it is becoming increasingly important to grasp the significance of something that initially appears to be similar but is in fact unique.

Every repertoire that can possibly exist in this world is available for anyone to select and use. Today, that which is ‘new are not the factors, but the arrangement.’ The aspects of appropriation on which we are to focus are how and where the (identical) elements have been arranged, and how we are to experience such arrangements. Things like plastic garbage bags littering the streets, discarded cardboard boxes, abandoned chunks of wood, and the homeless are not unfamiliar elements that are discovered in most cities. To Gimhongsok, a disorderly view of streets strewn with items that need to be thrown away or tidied up appears as ‘a beautiful momentary structure.’ If Jeff Koons (1955- ) was fanatical about supermarket aisle displays, Gimhongsok combs through every lousy and obscure nook and cranny of the streets. In this manner, Gimhongsok collects neglected plastic garbage bags and casts them in bronze in the form of Koons’ dog and rabbit, which are both universally praised by art collectors. (Canine Construction (2009) and Rabbit Construction (2009) Imagine Koons’ glamorous rabbits enshrined in the living rooms of world-famous collectors and Koon’s sculptures cast into Gim’s plastic bags tossed in the streets. It is a delightful deviation for the plastic garbage bags from their everyday context. Through appropriation, discarded garbage bags and a cheap plastic rabbit doll from an amusement park can come together and simultaneously create different stories from their own contexts.

OriginalCopy

Gimhongsok presented his READ series in a 2006 solo exhibition. One might question what this title instructs us to read. The series consisted of facsimiles of exhibition catalogs originally related to the artist himself, contemporary artists and other well-known artists considered as trendsetters in contemporary art. They were generally reproduced by either photographing or commissioning skilled painters to create hand-written copies of the originals. Copying is known as a time-honored method of study. We are familiar with constantly memorizing, transcribing and repeating as a form of acquiring knowledge. However, such a familiar commonplace form of learning converts, in the context of the creative world, into an inconvenience or at times even into a crime. Technically speaking, Gimhongsok’s painting produced by copying Maurizio Cattelan (1960- )’s sculpture is not a question of originals and copies, since what he copied was the image of Cattelan’s work. By very kindly specifying the original source as part of the titles of his art, Gimhongsok legitimately lends a new life to images of paintings by Luc Tuymans (1958-)’s and sculptures by Cattelan. (READ-Luc Tuymans, PHAIDON, p. 226 (2005); READ-Maurizio Cattelan, Electa, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2006, p. 55 (2008)) Could this perhaps be but a shallow trick to produce works while avoiding the taint of copying? Did he not merely photograph images from other catalogs simply because he was out of original ideas? Ironically, his READ series is of much greater use to those who are ignorant of such parochial suspicions (?) and contemporary art. This stems from the fact that the series itself raises the question of ‘suspicions of copying,’ and because such suspicions not only demolish the simple-minded measures regarding whether or not the works are copied, but also expose questions on a level of even more profound complexity and conflict. The entire point of the READ series is to discuss if and how copies pose a threat to the original, what the relationship is between copies and copyrights of images, and if copying is an unavoidable manner of communication for our times.

The ‘copyrights’ of the photographer who took the pictures of the originals as well as all the ‘copyright holders’ involved in their publication are implicated in the READ series. Through this series, the artist reveals an unofficial route of distributing originals by copying copies, as well as discussing the perilous yet special relationship between copyright and copyleft, along with its ramifications. The Copyleft Movement, a struggle mainly for the abolition of intellectual property, is not simply a tool, but also a model favored by Internet-based culture. Today, however, with the world caught in the throes of post-modernism, such a movement can be applicable across all sectors, and is advancing toward becoming a necessity. “Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) and call it his own. In accordance with the classical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly acceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared.”³ A modern take on this classical learning method of imitation, Copyleft questions how imitation can be applied in our current context and what the positive/negative consequences might be. Elaine Sturtevant (1930- ) carefully scrutinizes works by her favorite artists or those who have exerted a profound influence upon her, and then draws them as they are. For Sturtevant, copying is a mode of learning and acquiring knowledge, as well as her own manner of consuming and disseminating 20^th century art. If so, why then are all of her works, which for the past fifty years have been a continuous stream of facsimiles of artistic masterpieces of the 20^th century, attracting renewed attention and being re-evaluated by prestigious art galleries worldwide in the 21^st century? Gimhongsok’s READ series, consisting of facsimiles of images drawn from the catalogs of contemporary artists that catch his interest, appears to be an extension of this brilliant copy art of Sturtevant. However, his copies elicit a different issue, one of ‘information confusion’ regarding the originals. Viewers who experience his READ-Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, Steidl, Hammer Museum, 2006, p38, p39 (2008) without the knowledge that the original is a performance created by Francis Alÿs (1959-) are led to understand that the original work is a painting. The copies embodied within the READ series are a persuasive reflection of the extraordinary adventures surrounding the numerous bits of distorted information regarding images that drift free, unanchored from their original works and contexts. In addition, his ‘copies’ conjure the entire tradition of reproduction, and raise queries regarding images and their subjects, seeing and understanding, the differences between them, and the act itself of their production and consumption.

‘Copy as more’

Jorge Luis Borges(1899-1986) claimed in his short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) that the text of Pierre Menard(1766-1844) is identical with Miguel de Cervantes(1547-1616)’ in every respect, even in its punctuation. However, the difference in the spatiotemporal context sharply separating these authors — 17^th century Spain and 19^th century France—assigns an entirely unique meaning to the identical text. The final destination at which Menard arrives as a result of his aspiration to emulate Cervantes’ masterpiece is a mere replica of the original, but today this copy by Menard has come to reflect the spatiotemporal context and put forward the exquisiteness and abundance of interpretations that arise from such differences. Gimhongsok’s READ-Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (2005) is a photographic reproduction of a photograph from Richard Prince (1949- )’s Untitled (Cowboy) (1989) series. Composed of unmodified photographs of images from Marlboro cigarette advertisements, Untitled (Cowboy) is a work of re-photography that became famous in the early 1980s, stirring up a sensation as it became entangled in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Thanks to Richard Prince, we are now liberated, to a certain degree, from copyright lawsuits and suspicions of counterfeiting in the art world. Clearly aware of all this as demonstrated in his act of re-photography, Gimhongsok questions whether copies can pose a threat to the authors of the originals, namely, to their originality. Copies have long been considered a menace to originals. However, “In a (capitalist) world that is the reflection of an order…artistic creation proposes only to describe…The oeuvre wishes to be the perpetual commentary of a given text, and all the copies that take their inspiration from it are justified as the multiplied reflection of an order whose original is in any case transcendent. In other words, the question of authenticity does not arise, and the work of art is not menaced by its double.”⁴ This assertion by Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) might seem to allow and justify the act of copying, yet it ironically underlines the signature of the original. This inseparable relationship between a masterpiece and its signature has recently embarked on extraordinary adventures. Just because someone copies a ‘ready-made’ by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) does not make this person Duchamp. Amid the heaps of copies and alterations of his ‘ready-mades,’ the reason why the originality of Duchamp can remain sensational or even grow far more striking today than in the early 20^th century is that the act of copying gives ‘rise to the uncopyable.’ Daniel Buren(1938-)’s trademark of vertical stripes can certainly be copied, but any work lacking his signature, that is, any work that is not ‘in situ’ is not his creation. As such, the meaning and scope of signatures have today assumed the place of the status of works (substances), highlighting the identity of originals. This context is what justifies the act of copying. This justification of copies does not necessarily mean that originality itself ceases to exist; rather, it means that the concept of originality has been adjusted. Gimhongsok’s READ series is of great interest and excitement because it invigorates the bounty of Pierre Menard’s ‘copy’ as described by Borges, as well as at times raising controversies surrounding distribution and circulation through copyleft. Furthermore, it questions the very meaning of originality in contemporary art.

RealFake

One wonders about the intention behind Gimhongsok’s fictional stories that intricately weave unfamiliarity with familiarity and attempt to spawn confusion across all dimensions of reality and falsehood. Among his stories, Mao Met Nixon (2004) is set in 1974 and holds evidences of how Mao Zedong(1893-1976) and Deng Xiaoping(1904-1997) held a secret summit with the then American president Richard Nixon(1913-1994) with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn(1918-2008) as a witness. Another story titled Marat’s Red (2004) illustrates how the blood of the French revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat(1743-1793) was collected upon his assassination, which was then stored by Georges Danton(1759-1794) and is presently being kept in the Stirling House Museum. Both stories, of course, are entirely fictional, but they are no cheap believe-it-or-not tales designed simply for passing time. Gimhongsok makes a robust appeal for ‘the assumption’ that the falsehoods and realities of history might be formed as part of the process of misreading history or deliberately obscuring the truth. All of his stories scheme to host an inconvenient rendezvous between truth and falsehood by pushing lies, with greater credibility and intricacy, further down into the truth. Gimhongsok’s falsified works are preposterous yet witty ‘commentaries’ on the history with ‘a capital H’ that we assume to be the truth. Where is truth if what we know to be the truth is not true and if what we hear and see as facts is not factual? Starting from these ‘suppositions,’ Gim’s tales are intriguing in that they make tangible the duality of truth by turning truth into falsity and cleverly manipulating such condition to grow the truth into a lie. His fictional works that appear to be real intensifies the cohabitation between real and fake, challenging our prejudices and stereotypes. How can the fact that truths are constructed be revealed through lies? Gimhongsok answers this question each time by activating logical sophistries and incisive paradoxes.

In Top of the World (2007), Manila-born Masahiro Takahashi undergoes sex change to become a woman named Yumi Takahashi. However, as a result of a failed gender change surgery, she becomes a transsexual with an amputated leg. Under such circumstances, she pours out her heart, graphically describing all the abuses of her human rights she has been made to suffer. In This is Coyote (2006), a North Korean named Kim Jeon-il who was defected to Japan and applied to the Japanese government for asylum, comes across a notice seeking an actor to perform as someone who is caught in a similar situation, and eventually becomes an illegal worker laboring eight hours a day in return for just five dollars an hour. Why does the artist fabricate these unbelievable stories, or rather, ones that are seemingly too fictitious to believe? The characters in Gimhongsok’s works, such as illegal immigrants, migrant workers, victims of sexual torture, transsexuals, and prostitutes, are each time caricatured in a cruel manner, and the artist does not seem to retain a morsel of care or consideration toward the misfortunes of these individuals. The pain and injustice inflicted upon them and their abject circumstances appear to be degraded into mere accoutrement for a game or a work of art. For one of his works, Gimhongsok employed an East Timorese working in Korea at low wages and interviewed him regarding the uncomfortable truth about foreign workers. (The Talk (2004)) No matter how much effort we invest in understanding the interview with this worker from East Timor, the dialog naturally presents too many difficulties for us to fully understand their situation. However, the moment we abandon the effort and arrive at the point of turning back to leave, a brief explanation pops up to sneer at our foolish behavior, informing us that the foreign worker is not actually a foreigner, the interview is fake, and that we have been taken in by this entire gimmick. We are also completely deceived in another highly unsettling and wicked game in which a reward is offered to anyone who is able to identify a prostitute within a gallery. (Post 1945 (2008)) During the performance in progress, viewers become intent on hunting the prostitute, only to learn that she is an actress hired for the performance. Truly, this rendition might not be extraordinary, but the importance of the work lies in how it sheds light on our completely deceived selves that are unaware of this fact. Gimhongsok is indeed inducing this situation. It is the artist’s cunning attempt to demonstrate to us a diorama in which he intentionally leads us to be held under suspicion of voluntarily committing the unethical act of ridiculing the under privileged.

Social minorities — including foreign workers, illegal immigrants, victims of sexual torture and human rights abuses, and prostitutes — form a neglected class engendered by a system of power in reality. They arrange a symbolic encounter in Gimhongsok’s work, between victim and offenders who are involved in an expanded and more complex dimension of power, hypocrisy, and violence. The victim and offenders are cruelly exposed both ‘within’ and ‘amongst ourselves.’ What the artist intends to communicate is the brutal reality in which the authority of the strong and the pains and sorrows of the weak coexist, as well as the duality in humanity that inevitably triggers such a reality. This double-sided nature of people, who incessantly worry about the ethical and unethical, right and wrong, rational and irrational, is what constitutes the real world. It seems that ‘political correctness’ could solve all problems, but this ‘political correctness’ itself becomes another ‘form of power’. While on the surface it seems that equality is championed so that there can be no demarcation between the powerful and the weak, what lurks behind the surface are all kinds of crimes being committed in the name of equality. Baudrillard’s remark comes to mind: “The perfect crime would be the elimination of the real world. But what concerns me, rather, is the elimination of the original illusion, the fateful illusion of the world.”^5 In fact, Gimhongsok does not dream of ‘the perfect crime’; rather, he pushes to the extreme Baudrillard’s idea of “the real world itself being criminal”. Like the ‘cynique’ in ancient Greece which responded to absurdities with absurdities, Gimhongsok solves unethical questions with the unethical, and attempts at an abundance of paradoxes of sophistry by assaulting himself.

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1. Bourriaud, Nicolas, Radicant pour une esthetique de la globalisation, (Paris: Editions Denoel, 2009), p. 48

2. Bovier, Lionel, Filling those nasty bumper holes! Another conversation, (Baden: Published by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture with Lars Muller Publisher, 1998), p. 63

3. Critical art Ensemble, Utopie du plagiat, hypertextualite et production culturelle electronique, Libres enfants du savoir numerique, (Paris: L’Eclat, 2000), p. 381

4. Baudrillard, Jean, Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe, (Paris: Gallimard, 1972)

5. Baudrillard, Jean, Mots de passe, (Paris: Editions Fayard, 2000), p. 63