본문
- Memories of time, soon to be shattered -
Joo, Sung-yeol (Art philosophy / adjunct professor of Sejong University)
Prologue: In the secret garden
“I live on what others don’t know about me.” – Peter Handke
Whenever I confront works of Yoosung Kim I could feel a scent of red rose. I could also sense a soft, comforting scent of fruits that were kept and grown in the secret garden. When I walk in front of the pictures while thinking that I could smell a lively fragrance that could make me feel better, the scent vanishes away quickly. Behind the warmth of the red light exists a time of sadness or an oppressed emotion of the artist that changes the greyness into a rosy color. It also feels as if a droplet of blood that failed to coagulate and lost its life squeezed itself out from the wound and dyed the space with a red color. Loneliness or a sense of void can also be found from objects like an owl, a cage, and scattered mirror. The artist does not let the audiences inhale and indulge the fragrance and leads them into a frightening and anxious world that is expressed by the picture itself. When audiences get drunk with the picture’s scent and open their eyes later, the uncanny picture that stands in front of them finally reveal an exit that is either too deep or too far away.
Even though the ideas of Kim later became pictures, I think that what made these pictures was a vague sense of longingness. Although the audiences may want to keep the atmosphere of the picture itself rather than thinking deeply about its meanings, the story which might have been secretly kept by the artist, despite the discomforting feelings that come after, makes the audiences concentrate the picture even more. It is as if the picture itself is telling that the memories of the past, of which the body couldn’t handle, penetrates through the reality. The vague fear of the upcoming future makes the subject remember the past, and the memories are catalyzed so that the dark space turns into a red light that signifies a place of cleansing. If the dark past is represented by greyness or cold blue light, the future may be a rosy color.
1. The room of silence
“…and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free…” – Thomas Mann
The artist, who tells that her pictures are the psychological properties that can be represented through space, utilizes her private bed as a method of ventilating the world of unconsciousness. The bedroom of the artist, who thinks that resting is sleeping, becomes a place that suddenly restores incidents. Void and sequestered spaces are also expanded as special spaces that might have been recognized yesterday, letting the subject wipe out the memories or escape from them.
The reality is a prison of dreams, and a dream is a tool that provides liberation and a place in which freedom dwells in. However, without the meaning of life, dream loses its meaning of liberation. The composition of irrational picture indicates that the reality, of which the subject feels while sitting on the bed right after waking up, and the dream have been born from confrontation and conflict without reconciliation. The chaotic and irregular images that represent dream and reality also present ways of finding new methods and compositions, such as ways of taking a look at a person who is awake. If a dream is an expression of this world, paintings and pictures are languages of dreams that allow artists to think and imagine freely. Personal and private properties of dream that deals with a pure and clean space allows a complete new places that reach out to the far side to be opened. It is an exit that exists only in oneself and liberates the subject from an ample and free space into a void temporal space.
2. The shattered time
“In fact, all works of art need to not only reflect life and objects as they are but also accompany the curtain of objective and subjective views, so the works tend to show life and objects to us in a way that we can figure them out directly. Art rips out this curtain of time.” - Schopenhauer
Even though it is a room, it shows various kinds of objects scattered around within a dizzy space which has endless darkness. Yoosung Kim’s pictures are filled with Menippean satire, which is a technique of the early medieval era that includes segmental images that were brought up from the past, created by memorial objects, and form the pictures by moving freely. This is the artist’s formative language that speaks and engraves the world’s specific pain and lost words which can’t be described by themselves. Also, remembering the memories of the long gone past is a way of witnessing an alternative reality that unfolds the objects that were unrecognizable in reality rather than simply missing and longing for fantasy. In other words, the depaysement space that depicts time that does not exist is also a means and a method that are used to remember and recognize the lives that were once lost.
Memories are poorly made and can be easily distorted. In essence, the process of remembering is a reconstruction of stories that is caused by the brain which gathers the parts and fragments of the memory. Because of this, the artist might have felt harder to write a dream scenario rather than dreaming. The reason why dreams have values is that it does not simply include a context of a scenario, but contains a vast system of symbols. Dreams that were created in the reality are not real but more like buoyant objects that could not enter the dream world and wander around instead. Yet, whether they disappear into our minds or evaporate by soaring up to the surface, all objects that are not fixed, albeit not complete enough, tend to become something. Yoosung Kim understands this phenomenon not as a mystic world but a sincere real world which is hidden in the surface of reality.
Epilogue: A sad lie
“Hell is other people.” – Sartre
Indifference hurts in both sides. Indifference covers its pain with lies and hypocrisies. The road that leads to others is always dark and unsure; those who walk on the road always look around constantly. There was once a world where, no matter how one would live, life itself becomes a sin. That world, in which all kinds of Confucian customs or rules were not free, was filled with evil. The moment in which the bitterness and resentment of the memory, shaped by the days that were lived, are resolved is the exact moment of which, to Yoosung Kim, allows oneself to face the truth and gain freedom. She replaces her stories of the past of which only she knew with pictures and paintings. The process of discovering memories once more and engraving them equals the process of unsealing them and conveying their meanings in the future time. He wants to become pure in front of a reality in which fragments of memories that cling on to the edge of life act in a hostile manner.
Now that the audiences have come out from the painting, the cage door has become wide open, and the owl has stopped surveilling and looks with warm eyes. The concept of Thanatos that resembles the first tremble that dissolves everything into red colors returns back into Eros’s physical sense. Between Camus’s two souls, one is the one that breaths suffocating heat and builds a grand novel in the middle of the desert all night, and another is the one that plunges itself in the middle of the cold ocean and enjoys a pleasant sunlight on top of a pile of warmly heated sand. If the artist Yoosung Kim’s sad lies come from the desert, his pictures come out from the ocean. Her pictures, that did not ignore his own thirst within a hot desert, now give out fragrance. Along the wind a soft violin sound comes along. Now the audiences try to watch the scenery within the pictures that seems to create a puzzle that creates a certain emotion that cannot be distinguished due to fragrances, colors, and sounds being intermingled together, and then leave.
The artist may know that, even though a dream catches another and gets repeated and overlapped, dreams never get combined. It is hard to tell the memories that were grown within the sadness that expanded and pierced through darkness reminiscences. I do, however, hope that all these do not stand out as a grotesque image that represent a hidden deficiency or a potential death.
