Concrete Garden

Crossing a small threshold, the visitor abruptly enters the exhibition. The cool neon light bathes the space in an atmosphere that is clearly distinguished from the outside world. What could be more improbable in a new building made of glass and erected by a fashion company than a space with a raw concrete floor and ceilings so oppressively low that the visitor soon finds himself fleeing to the exit across the room? There—on the other side—warmer light is already flowing towards him. If only there weren’t this mysterious being that blocks a swift passage across the space.

Chung Seoyoung has added a small square vestibule in front of the proper entrance to the exhibition space, its floor elevated by an additional layer of concrete a few centimeters thick. A larger-than-life goose, made from the same material, stands at some distance in the middle of the space, facing away from the viewer. A little surprised by the rough-hewn form, the visitor approaches the object, uncertain whether it is a character out of a comic-strip or a find from an ancient excavation. A closer inspection shows that the goose is modelled only in outline, rather shapeless and with a heavy body—without any trace of wings—and sitting on an equally clumsily shaped base in which the bird’s feet disappear. Lacking all identifying traces, it is designed purely from the imagination.

And yet this seemingly monumental appearance evinces the various characteristics ascribed to geese. Headstrong, awkward and inevitable, it stands as though some kind of defense shield near the door that leads the visitor forward into the subsequent exhibition space. Its head is turned to the left, almost as though it noticed the visitor as he enters.

Chung Seoyoung has thus explicitly created a separate space that marks the transition from the world of everyday life to something else. It functions as a lock of sorts between the real world and that created by Chung Seoyoung’s works. It articulates a demarcation that indicates that the next step will lead the visitor to an entirely different place, an altered situation or atmosphere. It seems almost as though, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, “things, places, animals, or people {were removed} from general use and transposed into a separate sphere…”

“What has been segregated by force of a rite can be returned to the profane sphere by force of a rite.”

“There is a profane contagion in this, a touch that cancels the magic and returns to use what the sacred had segregated and turned to stone.”¹

Chung Seoyoung’s space shelters an atmosphere that is tantamount to a ritual passage through this kind of lock. As though things had been turned to stone by the touch of a breath in order to create a short moment of standstill; a site of memory and forgetting. As a sort of shaking-off of the exterior world, through which the visitor had passed before, in order to enable immersion in a new situation. This world of ideas is left behind in this space, which persists in complete segregation from the spaces that surround it. By virtue of this constitution, it functions as a threshold between society and the individual, between the world of things and the world of ideas.

Insubstantial Reification

In the large space adjoining in the back, the visitor is confronted by various objects and sources of light that are precisely coordinated and seem to mutually interrogate each other’s materiality or immateriality. The visitor lingers in a room filled by a twilight exempt from the rhythm of day and night that creates an indeterminate state of suspension.

Extended on the floor is a shape reminiscent of a geographical outline, a surface delineated by an aluminum frame and covered in evenly distributed fine-grained sand. The sand’s invitation to make a playful inscription, erase it, and re-inscribe it mirrors the way this object came into being. From Noon to Midnight, the title of this work, points toward the hours of the day when productive powers are at their height. Yet not every production is subsequently useful; this object, for instance, is the result of mere scribbling on a piece of paper that was to cover up some writing and make it illegible. An idea that, by being abandoned, has generated a new shape. This simple formal means of covering up, the enactment of which can take any form and whose size and shape refer to what lies underneath, functions in this respect in complete dissociation from the original subject—the word or sentence—and, as a firmly inscribed shape, attains a degree of autonomy. The sand, however, as a form of filling a space, now in turn invites a scribbling that can be indefinitely rejected and reinscribed. Only the reference to a former negation remains, to something rejected and yet fixed in memory, much as one attempts to erase the traces. Something rejected as insubstantial becomes the substance of a work.

Sculpturalization of Light

In a precise inversion, the three light-boxes standing side by side probably occupy the most voluminous space. Storage objects usually serving to display the wares of ordinary cake or ice-cream vendors, they are familiar objects that have here been divested of their function. The neon light flowing through the opaque glass panes emphasizes the objects’ surfaces and surroundings rather than permitting a gaze into their interior. The works Ice-Cream Refrigerator and Cake Refrigerator must be seen in the context of other sources of artificial light in the exhibition. Long power cables traverse the space and connect all illuminants. Power cords running openly across the floor, really a makeshift solution, become graphical elements that structure space and at the same time, explaining their purpose, direct the gaze toward the various modified lamps.

Two flashlights lie on the floor. By virtue of their unpretentious orientation toward a wall and a window—for they do not serve the stagy illumination of objects that are to appear in their best artistic light—they are the means of a presentation of light itself that stays most true to its essence. The minimal light emanating from them is in turn drowned out, and thus rendered redundant, by the room’s present skylight; the flashlight directed toward the window moreover competes for luminosity with the daylight entering there.

Be it that these everyday objects have been transformed in this composition of light into pure means of illumination, or that objects that are generally used as illuminants have been staged in an exaggeration of their function.

Another cable leads to a bicycle. It stands in front of an added wall that leaves a small corridor between itself and the existing wall, and directs the light of its headlight at a circular aperture in the wall. Only by virtue of this aperture, equal in size to the cone of light from the bicycle’s headlight, are the elements of the work—bicycle, cone of light, aperture and wall—fused in indivisible union. At the same time, light and shadow meet, evoked by the aperture, yet both remain fixed in their essence. With this work, Chung Seoyoung again points toward light in its materiality, which attains a sculptural dimension.

The combination of the bicycle with the architectural element of the wall results in a bricolage-like composition of objects held together by the cone of light. The light creates a seductive play that pretends to trace the enigma of what is hidden, and yet in the end, nothing becomes visible but light itself.

Without fulfilling the function of a useful illumination of space, this constellation of various illuminants, in their exaggerated presence, does yet not remain related solely to itself. The inherent quality of light—however staged it appears—of making things visible in the first place and contributing to the total atmospheric design, unmistakeably points toward the subliminal power of artificial mechanisms of staging that are able to deceive and to direct the gaze; to illuminate what is to be displayed in the best light, and to overshadow what is to be withheld from view.

Concrete Garden

To Clean Up Once a Year reaches back to the work situated in the entrance. Long individual palm fronds, growing from large lumps of concrete, lean against the window wall, spread across the floor, and seem to resist any comprehensive arrangement. Similar to the potted palms which, irrespective of their origin, serve the decoration of office landscapes across the globe, these palms, in their redoubled artificiality, represent only the idea of nature. Yet whether it be a living potted palm or a fabricated one, it evinces the function of the imitation of nature.

Here, too, we encounter the instant of erasure. Once everything has been swept under the proverbial rug, or rather obliterated by a lump of concrete, that which lies underneath is no longer accessible. In their awkward shape, the palm fronds demonstrate their unrelenting resistance to equalization and oblivion. Only the notion is left of a remainder that no longer benefits any social utilization. The method of walling-up offers a means to deal more easily with unusable products that stand in the way of productive employment.

Means to an End

In contrast, the work installed in the most remote section of the exhibition space is based on a technical instruction regarding the modification of a table. At this point, the show’s long-winded title comes back to mind, equally a user’s manual for the construction of an object: On top of the table, please use ordinary nails with small head. Do not use screws.

From the table-top of an ordinary table, a rectangular section was removed using a saw, by order of Chung Seoyoung but at the carpenter’s discretion. Strangely enough, the bracing underneath the table follows the altered outline of the removed section, while the edges, sawed aslant, have remained untreated. The object thus continues to meet the norm despite the fact that its construction is incapable of a detailed motivation and although no additional functionality or improved elegance of the commodity is discernible. The dinner table, whose measurements are subject to unequivocal norms, seems to have been almost brutally deprived of its proper function and to be, after this act of subjective alienation, without an unequivocal place other than in the art object dinner table.

Behind it, a large coffee spot extends across the fine parquet floor. While the viewer at first associates a domestic mishap, the work turns out to be an artistic gesture that presents as a sort of signature. Whereas nothing is left to chance in the other works, where materiality is fundamentally a point of departure for formal design, the outline results here from a seemingly unintended instant. In Fleck [Spot] Chung Seoyoung addresses her own authorship, while the other works are marked precisely by the latter’s absence. This work points out that there is always someone responsible behind the origin of any thing or situation, even if this someone disappears behind the surface. “The same gesture that denies any significance to the author’s identity yet maintains his irreducible necessity.”² Just as Agamben calls the gestural a sphere of pure “means without an end,”³ gesture can here also be described as the expression of a “fortunate accident” that indicates a chance observation that was not initially the purpose of an inquiry. It thus corresponds to the casual gesture from which From Noon to Midnight originates.

The visitor then steps out onto the terrace. Added to the railing already in place is a knee-height barrier, painted in blue lacquer, running along the edge of the terrace’s square. Where such barriers usually serve to delimit or enclose an area not accessible to the public, the work East West South North includes openings on all sides that provide access to the inside of the enclosure. The entire construction stands on wheels and is joined by pivots that suggest a playful interaction with the sculpture. The size of the work, reduced to a minimum, also attests to the notion that it is a model rather than an actual barrier that would serve to stop undesirable intruders.

Seen in the context of the exhibition, this open/closed structure serves as a joint between the exhibition’s first work and the end of the course. The visitor regards from this standpoint both the entrance situation and the last room, only now uncovering the architectural design of the exhibition in the form of a circle.

The exhibition by artist Chung Seoyoung is based on a seemingly immovable composition of heterogeneous elements whose arrangement forms a narrative of sorts, although they are capable of presenting a no less striking view as static individual images. Narrative strains are discernible in every work that are incessantly taken up anew yet interrupted again. By no means does the story proceed in a linear fashion; it can hardly be comprehended in one total image. The reason is perhaps that the viewer of Chung Seoyoung’s works, which are frequently based on texts, consistently embarks on a search for the text-immanent statement. At the moment when he or she thought to have found the subject behind the statement, it disappears, as it were with the continuation of the narrative itself. “Writing is not about a subject giving an expression of itself but rather about a space being opened in which the writing subject incessantly disappears: the writer’s characteristic consists only in the unique character of his absence.”⁴ Conventional locutions, technical instructions, gestures of marginality as well as individual words are transported into images and offered for three-dimensional contemplation, without functioning as pure visualizations. Objectivity occupies a space that offers a state between the levels of meaning. Instead of disengaging things from their utility altogether, or, on the contrary, employing them as allegorical means to something else, they are rather a form that necessitates a variety of modifiable standpoints of perception.