Kim Kyoung-woon (Curator, MMCA)

Jung Yoonsuk was born on July 28, 1981. He entered Korea National University of Arts to study plastic arts in 2004, graduated in 2009, joined the same university’s School of Film, TV & Multimedia in the same year and graduated with a master’s degree in documentary making in 2013. Jung works in a variety of media, transcending the boundaries of film. With his own characteristic sharpness, he uses art and film to inquire into social and political issues via individual lives. Working with a critical awareness of the “publicness” of the state and society, he has used film and art to constantly experiment with ways of presenting similar and different sensory horizons. While using art and film to bring into the public realm private emotions triggered by his characteristic shrewdness and detailed approach to the problematic situations he witnesses, he has adopted various working styles, including documentary, film, video, installation and photography, constantly experimenting with ways in which each of these different media can present different sensory horizons. Jung’s early 24-minute documentary work The White House in My Country (2006) begins with the premise that there are several White Houses in Korea. In fact, most places in Korea with signs labeling themselves “The White House” are motels or adult entertainment venues, but Jung focused on the way the fantasies of most people within them was to emulate the image of the actual White House, thereby attempting to show the twisted fantasies of Korean society hidden behind all the “White House” signs. In September 2009, Jung presented a video installation work at the Platform in Kimusa exhibition at the former Defense Security Command headquarters, now MMCA Seoul. Based on this, he produced the 12-minute, 8-second video work The Home of Stars (2010). Here, Jung reflected upon the historical meaning of the DSC, the background to the original work, while attempting to overcome the visual limitations apparent in the installation format. While searching for 1970s and 80s propaganda films during the planning of this work, Jung was surprised to discover a sense of déjà vu, whereby scenes from Korea today were just the same as those in films made more than 20 years ago. He uncovered a history of labor union oppression and anticommunist ideology recurring in various places, despite the many years that had passed in the mean time, realizing that the wails of phantoms we had consumed were far from a thing of the past. Jung’s first feature, Nonfiction Diary (2013), was about the Jijon Faction, a group of notorious serial killers active in the 1990s. It begins with the shockwaves sent through Korean society by the appearance of the group, whose members were in their early 20s, in 1994. The film follows events as the government of then-president Kim Young-sam, confounded carefree comments from the group’s members, such as “I ate human flesh” and “It’s a shame we couldn’t kill rich people,” sought to reassure the establishment by promising to have the murderers quickly put to death, making an example of them, but then how two other major events, the collapses of Seongsu Bridge and Sampoong Department Store, engulf the situation in chaos. The film, Jung’s first feature-length documentary, went on to win a BIFF Mecenat Award at Busan Film Festival in 2013, a NETPAC Prize at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival, the Best Feature Length Non-Fiction Film Award in the Noves Visions Awards at Sitges Film Festival, and the Jeonbuk Film Critics’ Forum Prize at Muju Film Festival in 2014. Jung released Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno, another feature length documentary with a running time of 120 minutes, in 2017. The film is an observation of young generations Koreans living in the 2000s; it also tackles Korea’s complex about communism. Rock duo Bamseom Pirates make music that boldly and cynically criticizes irrational aspects of society such as the torturing to death of student activist Park Jong-cheol by police, and issues relating to North Korea. The group has also taken a leading role in social movements such as New Town Culture Party 51+, a campaign opposing the forced demolition of Seoul restaurant Dooriban. Meanwhile, the film also reveals a mood where the vulnerable are seen as a social evil due to the way they assume the mainstream view of themselves as useless, stupid losers, actively making caricatures of themselves. In South Korea’s past, the stigmatizing label “red” was always an object of fear rather than an issue of ideology, but Jung wants to assert that North Korea, for South Koreans, has always been an issue of “feeling” rather than an “object” to overcome. He believes the way Bamseom Pirates’ lyrics criticizing South Korean authoritarianism give such prominence to North Korea can also be understood in this context. This film focuses on Bamseom Pirates as musicians and on punk, a symbol of resistance. These musicians perform not at famous clubs but at gatherings of important social movements that influence Korean society as a whole, listening to the stories of the socially excluded. In this process, they consider their identities as musicians, the kind of music they want to make, and how they can carry on making it when it brings them no money. When everyone talks of helplessness with regard to the world, the music of the Bamseom Pirates arms itself with helplessness as it cries out, depicting the universal dilemma faced by young people in today’s age, and the present situation of musicians singing to the socially vulnerable and isolated. By showing their journey as they seek a new kind of music even while acknowledging the limitations of reality, Jung comforts young people today and searches for possibilities for contemporary youth culture to meet with politics. Based on the emotions shared by young people today, who enjoy laughing cynically at a political reality with little possibility of change and do not hope for symbolized success, knowing that good things are just as oppressive as bad, he shows them plotting emotional escape by reorganizing, rather than revolutionizing, their daily lives, instead of longing for social and symbolic value. This work won Jung a special mention in the New Asian Currents category at Yamagata International Film Festival and a New Vision award at Muju Film Festival in 2017. In 2018, the film went on to win the Grand Prize at the Wildflower Film Awards Korea. In 2018, Jung held a solo exhibition titled Lash, a gathering of fragments of work that he had shown in the past, at Ilmin Museum of Art. The exhibition title was a reference to accessories stuck onto human-shaped objects to make them seem more human. But these ornaments meant to make things look more natural turned out to make them look more artificial than anything. The exhibition consisted of photographs and installations anchored in interviews and images gleaned from scenes of human shapes that appeared grotesque and unfamiliar, but were produced and abandoned in our surroundings. The specific places and subjects chosen by the artist for his work, also titled Lash, were mannequin and sex doll factories and the people who worked in them. In this work, Jung focused on the heavy, endless labor and intricate work involved in the making of mannequins and sex dolls that are human in form but impossibly proportioned and passive to the point of being unable to move by themselves—focused, in other words, on scenes of “people making people.” In so doing, he captured the bizarreness of humans producing human-type consumables to sate their own desires, thus prompting us to reconsider the nature of people and humanity. Jung Yoonsuk stands out even among the minority of artists working at the intersection of film and art for his constant achievements. I believe that, as an artist who has brought fresh inspiration and vision to Korean art through his ongoing activity, he has the potential to grow into a leading figure in both Korean and international contemporary art. It is my belief that Jung is compatible with the aims of the Korea Artist Prize: to support and sponsor artists with the capacity to present a vision for Korean contemporary art and lead its tendencies and discourses; and to make their oeuvres more widely known. That is why I recommend him as a candidate to receive the prize.

In both Lash and Tomorrow, Jung does not use voiceover or introduce any texts that might infuse the images with alternate meanings, thus avoiding the conceptual overload that so often occurs when humans and objects are made the target of subjective observations. When different aspects of phenomena are documented without overt explanation, the scope of interpretation expands. In some cases, it can expand wide enough to express a phenomenological critique of the “Image,” in and of itself, which is the fundamental basis of the particular image in question. In this way, the continuity of situations that slowly unfold over extended lengths of time can arouse insights about the modalities of being represented in the film, and thus about the invisible world as a whole.

In Federico Fellini’s Casanova (Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, 1976), the title character, having already seduced numerous women, eventually dances and has intercourse with a mechanical “woman” named Rosalba. Indeed, the film ends with Casanova’s dream of reuniting with Rosalba, a doll that emulates a woman. Most readings of the film emphasize that Casanova, to whom real women were merely dolls, ends by wishing for a doll to become a real woman. Likewise, the mannequins in Jung’s works are reborn as new beings when their material properties are transformed via their imagined function for sex. This transformation recalls the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who fell in love with one of his own sculptures, which he had been motivated to produce by his antipathy towards the promiscuous women of Cyprus. In Jung’s videos, of course, the role of Pygmalion is played not by the producer(s), but rather by the consumers of the mannequins, who seek something that they have not been able to get from real humans.

In Lash, the mannequin factories seem to recall another story of a human being who is made from another human’s rib. Tomorrow documents two Japanese men who are so disenchanted with humanity that they choose to interact with mannequins and robots (respectively). The two men are Matsuda Michihito (age forty-four), who abandoned politics due to his disillusionment with humanity and is now campaigning to become the first “artificial intelligence mayor,” and Senji Nakajima (age sixty-three), a married man who lives with several mannequins rather than his wife, who has a separate residence. Reflecting the divergent personalities of the two men, Jung uses noticeably different strategies to depict them. While the camera actively follows and observes Matsuda as he campaigns for election, Senji’s domestic life with the mannequins is portrayed as empty and stagnant.⁶ Driven by a clear purpose, Matsuda’s movements, activities, and conversations on the campaign trail are linked to various discourses on Japanese politics and society. On the other hand, Senji leads a reclusive life in his apartment, staring blankly at the TV in a living room filled with boxes belonging to the previous tenant, which Nakajima has not yet discarded. After giving one of the mannequins a bath, he falls asleep while embracing “her” in his arms. Together, Michihito Matsuda and Senji Nakajima come to symbolize the pessimism and distrust that seem to be eroding contemporary Japanese society.

Tomorrow also shows a 2018 conference organized by Park Youngsun (then a member of the South Korean National Assembly), entitled “A Conversation with A.I. Robot Sophia on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” In 2017, “Sophia” was granted national citizenship to Saudi Arabia, becoming the first robot ever to receive citizenship in any country. At the conference, Park Youngsun asks Sophia some rather intricate questions, including about the “Robot Basic Legislation” that she helped to establish in 2017. Watching the robot’s face as it responds logically to these difficult queries, we can even discern some faint human expressions. The scene thus suggests that the future in which humans and robots live in symbiosis may already be underway.

Both Lash and Tomorrow deal with the behavioral patterns of people who exist outside the conventional standards of society, which links them to Jung’s previous documentaries Non-fiction Diary (2014) and Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (2017). Such standards not only enable the assumption that the dominant values of a society formulate a collective unconscious, but also serve as a benchmark for evaluating patterns of behavior from the perspective of Others, without the presence of the subject. Both of Jung’s earlier documentaries explore discourses brought on by actions that deviate from customary ethical norms, such as the interpretation of crime based on criminal law (Non-Fiction Diary) and the violation of the National Security Law (Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno).

According to Jacques Rancière, history is composed of “moments and gestures that signal a way of occupying a world” as “examples of fortune and misfortune, of virtue and vice.” In Non-Fiction Diary, Jung Yoonsuk focused on three such “moments” from recent Korean history, all of which took place between 1993 (the first year of civilian government in South Korea after thirty-two years of dictatorship) and 1995: the arrest of Jijon-pa (a gang that committed several brutal murders) and the collapses of both the Seongsu Bridge and Sampoong Department Store. In the film, these events are portrayed as collateral symptoms that were obfuscated by power groups using the media to create delusion and deception. What all of these “moments and gestures” suggest through their own signs is not the meaning of a certain world, but rather a case that should be imitated. Rancière also stressed that the “times of memory-history are not the same as those of truth-history.”⁷ When we forget that moments that are detached from history and imitated through artworks are not “truth-history,” a strange conversion can occur.

Through news footage, Non-fiction Diary reminds us that the murderers of Jijon-pa and those responsible for the collapse of Seongsu Bridge and Sampoong Department Store were judged solely on their criminal actions or intent, which does not begin to cover the actual damage that they inflicted. In court, those in charge of Seongsu Bridge received fines and probation, while Lee Joon (the Chairman of Sampoong Department Store) was sentenced to seven years in prison for professional negligence resulting in death; the six young members of Jijon-pa, meanwhile, were sentenced to death.

All of the members of Jijon-pa (particularly the leader Kim Kihwan) grew up in conditions of poverty and domestic abuse. Although the group tried to justify their horrific murders of innocent people as retribution against class inequality, their ideas were much too scattered and impulsive to constitute an actual belief system. Non-fiction Diary includes interviews with various people (e.g., police officers, pastors, nuns, etc.) who interacted with the Jijon- pa members between their arrest and their execution, who describe the criminals’ supposed fragility and edification, while also discussing the interests of the religious groups involved. In particular, Jung raises pertinent questions about those who administer legal executions, emphasizing that, in the first five years of the civilian government, fifty-seven death row inmates were executed during three mass executions. In the film, courtroom scenes of Jijon-pa are juxtaposed with proceedings against former dictators Chun Doohwan and Roh Taewoo in order to highlight the contradictory standards of legal judgment. Through news footage and interviews, separate incidents are linked to the long history of vacuous ideological disputes that have repeatedly arisen in Korea since modernization. For example, Jijon-pa was based in Yeonggwang County in Jeonnam Province, where more than 30,000 civilians took up bamboo spears and other arms against one another during the Korean War. Further back in the past, it was the area where more than 100 Catholics were drowned during the “enlightenment period” of the Joseon Dynasty. The film includes images of the former hideout of Jijon-pa (which is now a public park in Yeonggwang Village) shot through the window of a moving car, thus linking the incidents to critical issues related to the subjectivity and human rights of those who have been alienated from history. Working beneath the surface of the public narrative (contained in the news footage and interviews), these underlying issues imply the need to rethink ethical issues in the post-capitalist society.

All of Jung Yoonsuk’s works raise ethical questions related to the political “state of exception” that seems inherent to the post-capitalist system of Northeast Asian countries.⁸ From his 2010 video installation Home of Stars (which was shown at the new MMCA Seoul, former site of the Defense Security Command) to Tomorrow, Jung has critically observed the rampant abuse and alienation of the subject caused by political, economic, and cultural subordination related to the state of exception. With Non-fiction Diary, for example, he used concrete research and analysis to objectify images containing discourses that originate from the political state of exception. Taking a different course, Jung’s next project Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno tells the joint stories of the grindcore (i.e., extreme punk rock) band Bamseom Pirates and photographer Park Junggeun, who was arrested for violating the National Security Law after retweeting a post by the North Korean government’s propaganda Twitter account. Reflecting the extemporaneous musical spirit and anarchist lyrics of Bamseom Pirates, the punk duo consisting of Gwon Yongman and Jang Seonggeon, Jung’s work combines the spontaneity of direct cinema with the rhythm and decorative style of music video. Characterized by thundering beats and screamed vocals, grindcore is a raucous blend of heavy metal and punk rock that first came to prominence in the 1980s. Combining concert footage of the band and documentary images of public protests (including protests against the forced demolition of a local restaurant for redevelopment and against the construction of a naval base in Jeju Island), Jung links the harsh dissonance of grindcore with the unexpected and dangerous conditions inherent to political demonstrations. As mentioned, the video also examines the case of Park Junggeun, a photographer and music executive who was arrested and charged with distributing treasonous materials for his social media post. Through his punk record label Bissantrohpy Records, Park produced the albums of the Banseom Pirates, and band member Gwon Yongman testified as a witness at Park’s trial. The linked stories of the band and Park Junggeun reveal the helplessness of individuals and the alienation of subjects dominated by the ideology of maintaining the system. Even though Park was finally acquitted by the Supreme Court, his plight of suffering a lawsuit still forces us to contemplate a number of issues arising from the relationship between the state and individuals.

Presented at the Korea Artist Prize 2020 exhibition, Jung Yoonsuk’s new work Tomorrow implies that sudden traumas and transformations (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) are actually the result of gradual processes occurring under the surface. We seem content to sleep through these developments, only to be shocked and dismayed when we awaken to a changed world. But the most disheartening episode may be yet to come, when we open our eyes to find ourselves alienated within a world that has been “suddenly” taken over by inorganic mediators, such as mannequins or A.I. robots. Jung Yoonsuk’s Tomorrow stimulates our sense of such dangerous transitions, which may already be in progress.

 

 

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1 In this essay, I will refer to these dolls as “mannequins,” since they can be used for a variety of purposes.

2 For Heidegger, “anwesenheit ” was a mode of existence in specific consideration of the temporal present, or a “presence that sustains by illuminating itself.”

3 Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed., trans. Julian Young & Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35.

4 Ibid., 86.

5 Jacques Rancière, Figures of History, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 15.

6 [Editor’s note] Following the practice of the artist and the Japanese media refers to Senji Nakajima by his given name “Senji,” rather than by his family name, as is the usual custom in Japan.

7 Ibid., 31.

8 For Giorgio Agamben, the “state of exception” occurs during instances of martial law, fascism, declarations of emergency, etc., when separate forms of power (e.g., legislation, administration, etc.) are collapsed back into an original state in which they are indistinguishable from one another. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Can We Stand Outside Tomorrow?

Ahn Eunbyul (Media researcher)

 

Introduction

At the Korea Artist Prize 2020 exhibition, Jung Yoonsuk introduces Tomorrow, which is his third feature-length documentary film after Non-fiction Diary (2013) and Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (2017). The concept of the work traces back to Jung’s 2018 solo exhibition Lash at the Ilmin Museum of Art, as well as an earlier video entitled Lash, which he presented in 2016 at the twentieth-anniversary exhibition of Vogue Korea magazine. In Lash, passive images of mannequins being moved, washed, broken, and discarded at a mannequin factory in Korea are contrasted with dynamic images of the people who work or deal with the mannequins. In the process, the artist developed certain images into a “story starting from human figures and finally arriving at the death of humans.”¹ In preparing for this video, Jung also explored other sites where artificial human figures were produced and discarded, which led him to visit and film at a sex doll factory in Shenzen, China in late 2017. Combining scenes from the two respective factories (i.e., in Korea and in China), Jung created a new two- channel video installation entitled Lash, which was shown at Ilmin Museum of Art.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must report that I worked with Jung Yoonsuk as a translator and liaison when he was shooting Tomorrow in Japan, on two different occasions. During the two shootings, I encountered the two main protagonists—Senji Nakajima and Michihito Matsuda—both of whom struck me as rather dubious characters. “Senji,” who was often difficult to understand, openly admitted to purchasing sex dolls and paying for sex, while Matsuda used his platform of “A.I. politics” to express troubling ideas about diversity politics, particularly relating to foreigners. I was primarily concerned that the two men’s unconventional beliefs and actions were superficial attempts to garner media attention, and that Jung Yoonsuk’s in-depth observation would ultimately fail to uncover any genuine story or insights. Moreover, I felt that their convenient topicality would be difficult to explain outside the context of the Japanese mass media.²

Little did I know that the dubious guises of the two men would turn out to be indispensable elements of the final story told in the video. For example, as Jung Yoonsuk explained in a video interview for the Korea Artists Prize 2020, he did not truly accept that he could film Senji until he saw that all of the tableware in Senji’s house was in a single pair for himself. Regardless of whether Senji is pretending or not, he actually treats his dolls as humans, calling them by names that he has given them and policing his language based on their ostensible feelings. In other words, after being performed countess times in front of cameras and televised across the nation, Senji’s actions have become genuine.

But in another sense, the pair of tableware might actually exemplify the fragmented nature of the story in Tomorrow, which attempts to show the divergence between Senji and “sex doll ojisan”, as he is commonly known in the Japanese media, a nickname that he has fully embraced.³ This is not to say that Jung is the first to begin a true investigation of these themes, nor to reduce his approach to the conventional dichotomies of “in front of the camera” vs. backstage, or reality vs. staged actions, or TV cameras vs. the “authentic” camera of an artist. Indeed, Jung seems to be less interested in discovering the “true face” behind the mask than in revealing the function(or malfunction) of the mask itself. In a discussion of Japanese literature, critic Kiyoteru Hanada wrote, “I think people who remain conscious of the real face behind the mask, even if the face can never be seen again, will be happy… As compared to the generation of Dazai, however, the generation of Mishima is even more tragic, because they do not know what their real face is, and sometimes even doubt whether it really exists. They have no choice but to believe in the mask and to approach the face with every step.” So, does Jung adopt the attitude of Dazai or Mishima?⁴

A World without Doubt: the Factory

Speaking of “dubious,” another axis of Jung’s work is the sex doll factory in China, where doubt is strictly prohibited. Like most workplaces, the factory is a place where people with different origins, backgrounds, and ideas gather to perform repetitive daily routines in pursuit of a common goal. For this incredible performance to be maintained day after day, the members must never doubt in its prerequisites, fully committing to their belief in the same concrete scenario. Of course, their actual belief does not necessarily need to be sincere, so long as it is sincerely performed. According to the factory’s scenario, the workers serve the ideology of their anonymous consumers’ happiness and satisfaction, thus generating profits and enhancing the happiness of every member of the group. With this scenario dominating their daily activities, the workers’ individual definitions of their labor—which one person describes as “embarrassing at first”—are modified accordingly.

In the video, the work begins with the factory manager’s speech about a deviant employee. The manager states that, although everyone knows that this particular employee has “issues,” he or she is still equal to all of the others. The manager notifies the staff that the employee will return to work the following day, and urges them to treat the person no differently than before. Despite the trivial nature of this event, which could occur at almost any workplace, this scene reveals the subtle cracks in the belief that maintains the group. Next, the employees externally affirm their belief by reciting slogans together, such as, “Joy cannot be stored like food; joy doesn’t become sweet in storage, like wine; I do not live for the future.” These slogans are inherently paradoxical, encouraging the workers to confirm their faith in their future happiness by embracing their present life. To support our knowledge that tomorrow will come, we must eradicate all doubts from our lives today.

For some, this statement might recall Max Weber’s comparison of Protestantism and the spirit of modern capitalism.⁵ But what is significant here is not capitalism itself, but the system of established beliefs called capitalism. As long as that core is maintained, the name of the system is irrelevant. Naturally, this core depends upon a world ordered by its pursuit of a common goal, a world that ensures the inevitability of tomorrow by banishing doubt. Hence, the reality is manifested not on the genuine belief of the individual performers’ belief, but rather on their tacit agreement to believe. In ancient times, religion developed into a potent reality as people believed that it was “real,” and acted accordingly.⁶ When enough people buy into belief systems, inconspicuously repeating whatever actions are required, those systems acquire increased probability, to the extent that they can sometimes exercise repressive impacts. The wide spectrum of belief systems ranges from “everyone believes it,” in which case it is considered a world principle, to “only a few believe it,” in which case it is considered madness.⁷

If the belief system within the factory matches (or at least comes close to) the guiding principles of our world, then the belief system of Senji and Matsuda borders on madness. Interestingly, however, the relationship between the factory and these two individuals does not seem to exist in such a continuum. Instead, Senji and Matsuda represent a type of “meta- movement” that objectifies the world of the factory from the outside, instigating doubt that thereby threatens the inevitability of tomorrow.

A Person Who Left the Factory and the Landscape of Doubt

Within such interpretation, Matsuda is situated between the factory and Senji. Although A.I. seems to represent the extreme expression of the automation and rationalization that the factory implies, this is only true if A.I. is used for the goals of the factory, i.e., to generate profit. Matsuda, on the other hand, is presented as a point of intersection, in that he hopes to utilize A.I. to modify the worldview of the factory. Slogans like “Taisei Hokan” (i.e., restoration of power to the emperor) or “new socialism” are invoked not out of loyalty to their specific cause, but rather to oppose Japan’s current political and economic system in any way possible. Thus, Matsuda may be thought of as someone who has left the factory.

In a case that made headlines in Japan in the early 2000s, Matsuda, who had founded an online music file-sharing company when he was twenty-eight, was sued by the Japan Copyright Association and ordered to pay a huge compensation fee. Having directly witnessed how the equality that new technology was supposed to create was crushed by a “power cartel in which a small number of people monopolize rights,” Matsuda launched his own political challenge through the apparatus of A.I. Interestingly, in Japan, this type of narrative somehow still “works,” in that it cannot simply be dismissed as madness based on the limited number of people sharing it. Matsuda has attracted a few sympathizers, and he emphasizes his goal of attracting more.

Spawned from his own failure, Matsuda’s campaign has provided ample opportunity for him to spread his worldview and seek public approval, even if he has yet to acquire it. Allowed to present his case before “objective” journalists, as opposed to the virtual audience of Twitter or social media, Matsuda can at least see the results of his efforts in quantifiable figures. But it should be obvious to anyone that his challenge contains some irreconcilable contradictions. The basis of Matsuda’s campaign is that humans are inherently driven by will and emotion, and thus should not be allowed to govern. But he is conducting that campaign within the very system that he aims to abolish, which was devised specifically to mediate between humans. The “A.I. Party” is based on a fundamental rejection of this system, yet its participation in that system represents an endorsement of its validity. Surprisingly, Matsuda’s group does not seem to acknowledge this until after the election, when they admit that all of their efforts were “the same as doing nothing.”

Leading up to the election, Matsuda and his coalition engage in several tacky attempts to promote their cause, only to find themselves ignored or dismissed. The campaign members are ignored by passers-by and engage in meaningless conversation over canned beers from a convenience store. Meanwhile, a robot named Unibo that is supposed to make an endorsement instead starts sharing public transit information. Their campaign efforts are inept, as the members lack the ability to create suitable visual materials for the party, the logic to compensate for their flawed worldview, the charisma to inspire loyalty, and even team unity. But the underlying reason for the party’s failure is not incompetence or ignorance, but rather Matsuda’s uncertainty in his own principles. Bombarded by questions from reporters, Matsuda lowers his eyes, scratches his head, and arouses suspicion with absurd statements, as when he explains that his party “is running a robot candidate because the election needs a symbol,” or claims that, “It would be fine for humans to disappear (from politics).” While Matsuda is certainly not a mindless fool, neither is he an astute trickster who is intoxicated with his own narrative. As other people get caught up in his scenario and he is obliged to answer more questions, he gradually realizes that his story ‘does not make sense.’ This admission casts a shadow of doubt on his face and creates a stutter in his actions.

We can never know whether Matsuda is actually serious about A.I. politics or if he is hard at work to prepare for the next election. After all, A.I. politics might just be a means for achieving his primary goal of generating attention. Recognizing this, Jung Yoonsuk focuses on the doubt that creeps across Matsuda’s face when he realizes his self-contradiction, rather than the supposed intentions of his actions. The power of Jung’s video comes from watching the man who claims that “humans cannot be trusted” as he gradually loses trust in himself, knowing that his doubt cannot be resolved without somehow unknotting the grand contradiction of his scenario. The only conceivable solution is to forcibly spread the doubt that caused him to leave the factory, not by participating in the official system, but by staging a revolution against it. Without such action, Matsuda will either abandon his worldview of A.I. politics or continue to wander around the underworld of doubt. To represent the logical extreme of this fate, Jung Yoonsuk presents the case of Senji Nakajima.

Senji as an Indiscriminate Flow

Almost all of the scenes featuring Senji (the “sex doll ojisan”) are shot inside his home (or homes). Senji seems to have moved into a new residence at least once during the course of filming, but even when he is not in the process of moving, his residence looks like a chaotic mess of boxes and clutter. Whatever the reasons for these boxes, the video captures Senji’s residence as an ephemeral space of constant motion and no fixed position, like a ship at sea. But no matter which residence he is occupying, Senji always stays as close as possible to the television, which is always on. Although he apparently works for a living, we have no idea what his job might be. We can only guess that he scrapes by doing a variety of odd jobs. At one point, we see him in a karaoke bar, but it is not clear if he is a worker or a customer there.⁸ In this scene, work mixes with play, night mixes with day, and dream mixes with reality, thus heightening the delusional sense of the video.

Because his state of being seems to follow a random flow, with no consistent coordinates within the system of order, Senji lacks a stable stage from which to present a consistent ego. This view recalls Erving Goffman’s analysis of the self as something that derives from the “whole scene of [one’s] action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses,” rather than “something housed in its possessor… in the psychobiology of personality,” i.e., a manifestation of a cooperative “performance” with others.⁹ Moreover, Senji clearly states that he feels no guilt and does not engage in self-reflection. As such, the video shows that he does not use reflection on the past as a mechanism to bring meaning to the present.

Adding to the overall sense of confusion, Jung Yoonsuk himself is not present during the first interview scene, temporarily leaving the camera operator to translate and relay the director’s questions to Senji. Although the camera operator often seems uncertain or hesitant when delivering the questions, this does not seem to bother Senji in the slightest. He pays close attention and answers with sincerity, but only responds to the given question, without offering any further information. Sometimes he provides answers that seem reasonable, even intelligent, while other times he blurts out words that might have been made up on the spot. He does not seem to have any desire to present himself as an individual with personality. Instead, the conversation resembles a psychological counseling session, in which both the counselor and client fail to faithfully play their roles. Through all of this, we come to realize that Senji does not conceive of himself as some type of entity that contains and performs its own identity, either by using past experiences to distinguish itself from others or by allowing external analysts to extract problems or order from its personality.

In the second interview scene, however, Senji discusses his own memories. He mentions that his loneliness may have originated from his mother’s death. And he also explains that he cannot forget his first love from when he was fourteen years old. But given that these stories have now been repeated in several media profiles of him, it is nearly impossible to gauge their truth. Even if the stories are fictional, however, they seem to be truthful. It is easy to align the current character of Senji with such a past, which may be why Jung Yoonsuk offers such a tidy solution for the dilemma, suggesting that Senji has chosen sex dolls as a proxy because of the sorrow and loneliness that he received from human relationships, while asserting that the “real” Senji still craves “something human.” However, Senji himself has already refuted this interpretation in the first interview. After a long delay over the uncertainty of the translation, the interviewer asks Senji if he was living with the dolls in order to fill some lack from his human relationships. Senji responds, “It’s not about filling the lack. I just saw Megumi (i.e., the sex doll) was there.”

Considering the order of these scenes, is this Jung Yoonsuk’s way of denying Senji’s interpretation of his own actions? That is definitely not the hypothesis of this article, which now finally arrives at the subject of “sex dolls.” As mentioned, Senji’s residence is littered with numerous things (some of which actually belonged to the previous tenant), to the extent that Jung Yoonsuk describes the place as an “entire world from my perspective.”¹⁰ As Senji admits in the interview, he hates to discard or burn things, because he believes that they contain memories or souls. This is the story that Senji presents to explain why he lives with sex dolls, which are one of the things in his home (accompanied by accessory items, such as wigs, female underwear, school uniforms, etc.). Rather than a proxy for human ideas, such as loneliness or regret, perhaps the sex dolls are simply objects with physical mass and presence that have persisted in “being” by actively evading disposal. In this case, the objects do seem to have memories, souls, and even agency. No matter how objects are brought into contact with people, they have already been infused with the circuit of ideas supporting their significance. At some point, they live their respective lives.¹¹

Lending further credence to this story is the treatment of Senji’s television, which is arguably more important than the sex doll to both Senji and to Jung’s video. Viewers will quickly realize that Senji is always shown either watching or dozing in front of the television. At times, the television conveys additional information about the sex dolls, such as a show about wig factories. But more important than the content is the nonstop flow emitted by the television, which becomes an artifact that Jung treats with the utmost care. Even so, some of the television scenes obviously have greater importance, which can be discerned by both their content and by Senji’s level of attention. In particular, he is most fascinated when looking at himself on the screen. When we first meet Senji, he is looking at photos of himself from his younger days, and we later watch him watching himself on a television show. Through these scenes, we realize that he is completely obsessed with the television screen.

Building upon Roland Barthes’s assertion that photography was the manifestation of a reference in which the “departed being” comes to touch “me,” Jacques Derrida claimed that remote technology, including television, “joined the referent and death.”¹² Derrida wrote, “… because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here.” From this phenomenon, Derrida derives the “logic of the spectre.” A spectre is something that we cannot see, but which can see us, thus generating an asymmetric relationship with the absolute Other that “exceeds me infinitely and universally,” the same structure that governs the relationship between the law and the finite beings before the law. According to the logic of the spectre, when Senji Nakajima sees himself on the screen, he is watching nothing less than his own death. But the sex dolls sitting behind Senji are free from that asymmetrical relationship with the Other who we can never see. Every human will die and vanish someday. No matter how arduously we struggle to understand this, our contemplations “do not mean that Yukiko will come back to life.”¹³ Of course, the sex dolls will also vanish someday, just like the mannequins that are shown in an insert shot, being discarded. But unlike humans, objects do not exist in a present that is infused with the certainty of their demise in the future. This brings us to the issue of “tomorrow.”

Outside of Tomorrow

In his second interview, Senji speaks about forgetting. In fact, the word he uses is “bokeru”, which is translated as “forgetting” in the subtitles, but actually refers to becoming senile in old age. In everyday language, bokeru is often used to mean “dementia,” which describes a condition in which one not only forgets things, but also forgets that one is forgetting things, thus losing the coordinates that guarantee the existence of the self. Moreover, unlike everyday forgetfulness, bokeru is inevitable. In the video, however, Senji suggests a more proactive interpretation of bokeru. While agreeing that it would be sad or lonesome to lose one’s memories of the past, he goes on to explain that forgetting is natural in old age, as it helps to mitigate the fear of death. Beyond the loss of the past, bokeru enables the possibility of losing our awareness of our future death, thus offering an escape from the grid of time.

All mortal beings are distressed by the knowledge that their actions and identities are destined to fade. Addressing this despair in his story The Immortal (1947), Jorge Luis Borges wrote that, for immortal beings, any action or thought is the “echo of others that preceded it in the past” and a “faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem.”¹⁴ Through bokeru, a person might exist outside of the infinite continuum of today, in which things arise one by one only to be extinguished, and tomorrow, which promises the same fate. In such case, one becomes “everyone,” or “the world,” or eventually, “one who does not die.” In Comparative Sociology of Time, Yusuke Maki explains that, faced with inevitable extinction, people must rely on bokeru, which is the fear of death and the ensuing futility of life. Noting that this concept is distinct from the fear of impending death that animals feel, Maki speculates that humans may be the only species to have contracted the “disease” of this idea.¹⁵ From the opposite perspective, perhaps the modern subjects who rationally developed this notion into an objective fact, preventing them from seeing alternatives, have been categorized as “humans.” Whatever the case, the human condition makes it almost impossible to simultaneously objectify this concept while assuming a transcendental space outside of the concept. In addition to the linear and irreversible sense of time, this narrative could be applied to many other concepts that we have internalized. For example, is it possible to find an “outside” from which to criticize capitalism The artist is ultimately an ordinary person who is subject to countless historical, modern, and personal conditions. In fact, artists are even more restricted than average people, since they must also wear the mask of an artist. Even so, if an artist does not ask if it is possible to stand outside, then why should he be called an artist?

Tomorrow represents just such an attempt; it begins in the world where tomorrow will certainly come, so long as we avoid doubt, and then progresses through the doubt of someone who lives outside of that world (while realizing that his outside operates by the same principles as the inside), before finally presenting an extreme possibility that could result from one person’s doubt. By doing so, the work asks if we can stand outside the most evident conditions of humanity. Among the countless efforts by people to resist death, the most beautiful are those that are still breathing (or dying) in museums, libraries, and cinema theaters. In Tomorrow, which represents another such attempt, Jung Yoonsuk constructs a temporal assumption of death within a spatial realm outside of that world, adding an annotation to cinema as the “science of time.”¹⁶ Given that the artist has only just begun his investigation of this realm, his future works may hold even greater significance. What will we see in a world that denies tomorrow?

Postscript: the Issue of Time in Jung Yoonsuk’s Work

Tomorrow has been in peril ever since its initial release to the public. As of this writing, the work is being presented as part of an exhibition at an art museum. The running time of the video is two hours and thirty-four minutes, an acceptable duration for movie theaters, where the immobility and passivity of viewers is presupposed, but far from ideal for an art museum, which induces a completely different attitude for viewing. In addition, the video is accompanied by a series of large photographs that were taken in 2017 at a factory that produces sex dolls. These photos have been criticized for attempting to aestheticize problematic objects associated with sex, perversity, and violence, with some even calling for Jung Yoonsuk to be disqualified from his nomination for the Korea Artist Prize 2020.

In the context of the exhibition, the photographs lose all meaning if separated from the accompanying film, and vice versa. The two works simply cannot exist apart from one another. It is little surprise that all of the controversy has surrounded the photos, rather than the two-and-a-half-hour film, since the photos are the only works that can be immediately seen, processed, and disseminated by most people. As a result, the photos have come to be considered as the entirety of the exhibition, not only by most visitors, but also by all those who have not visited the museum. This problem could possibly be resolved by insisting that the video is the most significant featured work, and thus deserving of more serious evaluation. But if that is the case, then the artist seems to have ignored the practical conditions of the exhibition, which is somewhat ironic given that “time” is the very subject of the work on which he has invested so much effort. It must also be noted that the controversy is closely linked to a certain visuality that has been taken for granted, which is another theme of Tomorrow. With all of this in mind, I am curious to see Jung Yoonsuk’s future works, and also to hear his response to the current controversy.

 

 

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1 From the introduction to Jung Yoonsuk’s exhibition Lash, written in 2017.

2 In November 2020, when I received a copy of the final cut of Tomorrow for this exhibition, I discovered that only one scene that I worked on appears in the final video (a discussion between Michihito Matsuda and Tetsuzo Matsumoto, author of The Day A.I. Becomes God). I had not been informed about the supplemental recording that was carried out in Japan, beyond the primary shooting.

3 Similar to “ajossi” in Korean, “ojisan” is an epithet for a middle-aged man.

4 Kiyoteru Hanada, “Face of St. Sebastian”, Bungei (1950). Quoted in Kim Hang, “Representation of Sovereignty, or Taboo of Vacancy: Tenno and Beauty for Mishima Yukio,” Korean Bulletin of Art History 42 (2014): 33–60.

5 Weber noted that Protestants who believed that they were predestined for salvation still tended to live industrious,moral lives as “proof” of this “destiny.” See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003).

6 Oddly, the home where I met Senji while I worked on the production does not seem to be featured in the final video. This may be due to some discrepancy in the ordering of Senji’s residences, or simply to my own confusion.

7 Late in the video, Senji’s work resume can be seen briefly. On a personal note, I do not remember him working at a karaoke club while I worked on the production.

8 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 252.

9 Excerpt from the treatment of Jung Yoonsuk’s Lash, written in 2019.

10 People often develop emotional attachments to objects. For example, a car may be purchased as a practical form of transportation, but it inevitably requires significant investment from the owner in terms of management and maintenance. Over time, the car’s role in facilitating the owner’s care and supervision might eclipse its original purpose, causing the relationship between the owner and object to tilt towards the object.

11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

12 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 117.

13 This quotation is overheard from the television in the scene where Senji Nakajima is introduced. It is from a news report about the 2004 murder of “Yukiko,” an elementary school girl in Okayama Prefecture.

14 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

15 Yusuke Maki, Comparative Sociology of Time (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003).

16 Borrowed from the artist’s own words in the interview with Kim Jung-a. See Kim Jung-a, “Jung Yoonsuk, Reflections on Humanity and Humanness” [정윤석, 인간과 인간다움에 대한 사유], Misulsegye [미술세계] (April 2018), 106–111.