The Light Traps of Life and Death, Fascination, and the Flesh of the Cracks

Yang, Hyosil (Aesthetics, Art Critic) 

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Art is a scene, a site from which death leaks out. This is supported by the fact that the mediators between the living and the dead, this life and the afterlife are the predecessors of artists, and the place that preserves the decaying process or state of the organisms near to death is the predecessor of the museum. Art cannot stand if it is eaten into by death or overwhelmed by life. Art is the twilight zone that relieves any excess/stasis such as the life possessed by death or the death tied up by life and coordinates the ‘appropriate’ overlapping of the two so that life can exist ‘together’ with death. In modern times, death is regarded as something negative and is managed to disappear from our view and daily life. Hence the unexpected spill or exposure of the invisible death is perceived as a shock and fear. The perception that the two are in fact indistinguishable is often concealed by the discernibility of the two and also by modern management systems such as the agendas of health or hygiene. Productivism, promises for the future, and all kinds of protective devices kill our lives, imaginations, and doubts, making death something negative, unreconcilable, and something to be exterminated. My death is in the hands of the doctor, and the death of the others should not happen in my life. So we live as if we would not die and live well forever; but in the meantime, we are heading towards death every moment. 

Art is a crack from which death leaks out. The art that tries to remember death is a way of life that recapitulates and chases the movement of death, of the other that comes here, cannot be prevented, and always leaks out. If you gaze obliquely at the vulnerable body properly for a long time at an angle, you would find it is fraught with all kinds of signs, metaphors, and shapes of death. The body is already a house perforated with holes, a thin membrane, and it is a crack that has already festered and releases bodily secretions such as ooze, blood, urine, feces, and saliva. The effort to gaze at the in-betweens, the mediated sites, the transference zones, and the boundaries without any ideas or stereotypes, which is a “boondoggle” to use Kim Namhoon’s wording, is none other than “doing” art, “doing” or “act” of an artist who does something that is not understood. Doing art as ‘doing’ that is nothing in the context of production, value, utility, usefulness, symbol, and meaning. “Maybe that's nothing special”—just like the title of a video work of his. 

The visual emblem of Kim Namhoon’s work around the time of his graduation from college was the green tape. People seem to have attributed his work to the social function of art, based on their reading of concepts such as poverty, labor, and diligence that can come to mind from the green tape. In fact, the green tape was one of the most common necessities in the houses where the poor people gathered together to live. Houses that were common in the 1970s and 1980s, and the houses that are still common on the outskirts of urban areas, were often built with piles of cement ‘blocks’. Such poorly constructed houses had always cracks all over the place from which the outside winds always filtered into. The scene of rooms in the childhood that the artist remembers is “the green tape put on the cracks in every corner of the window frame to prevent winds leaking into the window sill”. Now he manifested the childhood memories of the inside through which the wind was leaking and passing. Moreover, the green tape for Kim Namhoon is a metaphor and an index for the inseparable nature of life and death that dimly connects him to his sisters who died in the room at that time. The green tape put on the window frame is the persistent visibility of the invisible cracks, the manifestation of the other, which we try to erase, eliminate, and cover up. 

The ‘weapons’ in the hand of the artist, who confronts the other side that leaks into this side, that destroys the vulnerable and fragile beings here, are just a piece of tape, the red medicine (disinfectant), PET bottles, and some straw. Since these weapons are already loaded with signs of invariable defeat, his battle is naive and lukewarm. We are already impressed by the Mongols planting trees in the face of the global warming, the skillfulness of the plasterer repairing a shabby house, or magnanimity of the Africans driving a truck loaded with water to save thirsty animals. However, Kim Namhoon’s rhetoric about death explains that the way he fights is right. If it is “as light as the lady’s skirts blowing in the wind on a summer’s day”, then the battle strategy will also be light. This struggle is not a struggle for victory, but rather is it not a way of bringing light indicators of death into the middle of life and presenting them as visual emblems of a person doing art, and by doing so, trying to pay homage to the infinitely light life? The artist collected the torn ears of bags of sweets that rustled in the mouth for a moment and disappeared; collected flies that had entered the residency studio and died there; collected the traces of the people left on the streets (the physical indicators of their being there); took and collected photographs of the wounds in his body—such as his hands and feet—with no particular purpose; casually gave water to the weeds growing on the sidewalk; put the green tape on the cracks on the outer wall of a building. He even put the green tape on the grass in the field. . . 

The green tape of the artist, which “had started from a very personal incident”, is replaced by the red medicine (iodine solution) to gain publicity; and the two substances are eventually classified in the artist’s “boondoggle” as a category that has a function as “protective agent or protective film”. To be sure, in Kim Namhoon‘s private ’glossary‘, the protective agent or film now includes such things as the water in a PET bottle for weeds, the sprayed shapes made of straws on the road towards a disused salt pan. Therefore, the house, the concrete piles, and the weeds are all made equal to the wounded body or flesh of the artist. This impossible taxonomy, this metaphorical similarity and difference centering on wounded flesh or dying body could not have appeared if there had been no “boondoggle” that was only possible in ‘an empty hour’.  It is natural that visually and conceptually, these acts are very small, trivial, insignificant, and far short of something touching because they are dedicated to the ‘meaning’ of life which is so small and insignificant that it can hardly be noticed. In the art world, Kim Namhoon’s work seems to be circulating in the context of social, ecological and public art. In this article I seem to treat him as an artist who moves dimly in the gap between life and death, who is, as it were, in an ontological context. Then Kim Namhoon’s work will probably continue to be written [used] between social art and ontological art. 

I think what is ‘absent’ in Kim’s work is labor, money, and ideas [ideology]. There is certainly the meaningless repetition that conceptual artists practice and the rules that control such repetition. Yet because his repetition and rules do not have the emotional quality, conceptual play, and temporality as an accumulation of a craftsman, it is colorless and has no deception. The colorless, plain, and flat, as I pointed out earlier, is because his metaphor for death is stopped at “as light as the lady’s skirts”. Nevertheless, it is a metaphor that can never be overlooked in his sentence, because the phrase "lady’s skirts" shows the lightness of the skirts of a woman to which a man of heterosexuality is attracted; because it is the lightness of the skirts that hide the sensual flesh; after all, they are the skirts of a woman; we cannot help but say that he possesses a desire to be deceived by this light life, to fall in and grope (the flesh). 

Kim Namhoon comments on his work, “It’s something like setting traps here and there for the moment of communication with someone, while remembering the moment you meet with those beings, healing the wounds, giving meanings, ruminating on the memories and revising them, hoping to be returned to something again”. The last sentence of “setting traps” appears to be a ‘spoiler’ that tells us that he himself is the “lady’s skirts blowing in the wind”. Kim Namhoon notices us of the simultaneity of the light life and death, art as all kinds of trivial and insignificant acts taking place in the meantime, being as possession of visual shapes and indicators (coming and going, having happened). The traps he laid are for “someone who discovers them and the moment he becomes aware of them, the person is connected to them with the same code”. The crack driving his work can be said to be the place, the way we continue to be fascinated and deceived, that is to say, continue to live.