An Artist’s Record to Delay Oblivion

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Sim, Somi <Independent Curator>

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Some words become clichés as soon as they are spoken. It would be a poet’s karma to test the limit of language and widen a crack in imagination, but if I may confess, I myself who is not a poet fell into the crack and was buried immediately after perceiving it. There is, at bottom, a limitation on our understanding of what we see, hear and feel. Like a scholar who entered a sand dune in the book Woman in the Dunes by Abe Kobo, curious, I stepped in the crack and was trapped in it. I took language as a spade to heave out the sands pouring onto my head, but it just does not help me to get out. I only hope that someone with sensitive thoughtful language comes along and cures my aphasia. Now, I begin this writing in a self-contradictory condition in which I try to speak about an artist who has led me into this situation. This piece of writing, therefore, has a limit in language from the beginning and aims to rescue me before I start criticizing an artist’s work.

 

To speak about the time my attentive viewer’s eyes were gradually paralyzed, I have to go back to a late spring day when I visited Kim Nam Hoon at a studio in MMCA Residency Goyang. Things were being positioned one after another in the studio which he only moved into a few months ago. During the conversation with him, I was busy categorizing and interpreting things in my head to know in what context I could approach his work. If I had written this at the time, I might have been able to hide behind conventional wisdom. Piles of drawings at one corner of the somewhat empty studio were as thick as accumulated layers of time, other works lying scattered like fragments. Unfamiliar corpses which had intruded into the space where everything was carefully nestling caught my eye. They were small winged insects dying in the studio. The insects remained since the artist could not bear to sweep them up. Could they have known about the world of rupture which emerged after passing a severe summer, and about the loss of language in the watcher who encountered it?  

 

The insects were piling up during the summer and about to become a dust ball. Kim Nam Hoon finally made a decision to save those poor bodies from dust hell. Using tweezers, he started to pick up and line up the bodies too delicate to pick up by hand. Beside each line of insects, deaths calculated for that day are recorded — 230, 264, 243, 284, 287... He records the mass deaths in the room every night (18911 Enumerate Death, 2017). Faced with this work demonstrating that we “neglect thousands of deaths” in our daily lives, the standard of perception that I have relied on up to now collapses. These discontinuous and disrupted numbers of deaths are derived from a world that is impossible to interpret using human-centered reasoning. Linguistic reasoning, normally reassuring, broke down faced with the numbers that counted deaths. Thus, to repeat, this writing is to pick up the decomposed words.      
 

Lights, blinking as if they are faulty, send a signal in the air using Morse code to convey the message “Don’t forget me” (Morse Code _ Don't Forget Me, 2017). Some lights were from the building, and others were left behind in demolition sites. Things that are always around us in our everyday life but are abandoned, disappearing, and unnoticed become visible in his work. Opening our eyes wide is not seeing the world as it is. Man has been accustomed to a life style emphasizing efficiency, setting aside and neglecting many things of value and standards of human life. Counting the deaths of the insects which flew in through the window, watering weeds growing in a crack in the concrete, recording small things (which we call rubbish) blowing about or being crushed on the street, gathering the corners of plastic bags normally thrown away, soaking debris from a building in iodine solution, marking with blue tape cracks in buildings and where things have disappeared — his work constantly directs us to see the places where our eyes rarely reach. Also his work draws our attention to places in the world where things are ambiguous due to the forgotten and absent, and memory lost in an abyss. As if it testifies to “forms of blindness or paralysis inherent in everyday life” (in George Perec’s words), his work illuminates the microscopic world, delays disappearing, forgetting, and death and insistently pursues them.              

 

It is said that art plays a role in opening up a space for thinking, leading us to avoid falling into blindness like someone whose eyes are open but cannot see. However, art has extended the scope of the subject, offering a space where it is possible to subvert even the status of the object. Likewise, some artists broaden the area of subjects by surveying narratives in the world; others refuse this and try to get closer to the world. Kim belongs to the latter. For him, having stepped back from the approach of intensifying visually narrative of a work, the most significant thing is a minimum ethical attitude to the world. Thus, every time, his work threatens the status of the subject, which is familiar to us, and reveals that the marginalized or neglected world ‘has existed’. This could also apply to the memory of death situated deeper within his practice. His “trivial records”, which persistently holds onto things which are disappearing, would be a way of resisting that ‘forgetting’, the most cunning means of survival, as well as an earnest wish of the artist who tries to delay this for as long as possible.

 

After Don't Forget Me, another work regarding Morse transmits a line in a movie which begins with “My fears? Oblivion.” (Morse Code _ Stars, 2017). Pieces from demolished buildings, rubbish from streets, dead insects, cuts on hands, cracks in architecture, all are trivial things to be forgotten. The persistent process of collecting, categorizing and recording these is not only a reflection on our perception which ends up forgetting but also an ethical practice to testify even to the act of forgetting. The artist’s contemplation on the uncomfortable begins with the breakdown of the standards which we usually think of as ordinary or normal. Saying “as if an architecture makes a crack itself in order to escape from its instability … as if cancer can be seen as part of my body”, he presents through his work the world beyond the sphere of thinking, the world on the opposite side of our perception. By retracing the error of dividing normal and abnormal, order and disorder and paying attention to the principle of symbiosis namely “codominance”, which is also the title of one of his solo shows, rather than separating dominance and recessiveness, he speaks about the things that have failed to achieve recognition. Just as he gropes in the dark to estimate the space under a crack on the wall, so I should find words beyond the limit of language; however, the more I try, the more words disappear. Instead of the words that I cannot say for now, I want to end this piece with a phrase found by the window of the artist’s studio: “We are just fleeting dust”.   

 

2017.12