To be a participant in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is to forfeit some measure of one’s reflexivity. One reason is because the artists’ roles are pre-scripted to some extent by the basic function of the Pavilion as a site of representation built to showcase Korean art to the world. Another, and more significant, reason lies in how the viewer perceives the works. Within Korea, this perception is inflected by a nationalist discourse focused primarily on locating what is categorically thought of as Western. As critic Yun Woo Hak points out, contemporary Korean art has never created its own “free, independent and progressive concepts” because “our contemporary art has always had an extremely sensitive reaction to the most recent developments and information about Western modernism…”¹ In some cases, this Our-versus-Their approach is based upon such an intense desire to assert singularity based upon ethnicity and nationality that perceived singularity is actually imposed over what is visible in the work or intended by the artist. It is almost as if the Korean viewer searches for what is Ours just as ardently as the West desires its Other.

The works for this year’s Pavilion however, pose something of a quandary for they are not easily reinscribable into the key characteristics reserved for work classified as contemporary Korean art. Certainly the works are unusual for an exhibition premised on showcasing viable national differences as none of the participating artists have been among those regularly tapped to represent Korea in overseas exhibitions. Neither the artists nor their works perform well as evidence confirming a definitive kind of Koreanness — I say “perform” because it is the case that any work exhibited in the Korean Pavilion will be subject to a scopic regime that expects, or insists on seeking pleasure, gratification or affirmation based on consumable differences —the viewer receives no cultural souvenirs, no feel-good affirmations of national singularity nor familiar, reassuring signs of periphery, political oppression, or social turmoil. The works can be read in multiple ways which thwart their categorization into the Ours-versus-Others rubric of contemporary Korean art, which, if uncritically considered, amounts to no more than a receptacle of imperatives.

Yet given their present situation in an exhibition measured in numeric sequence, the works will be construed as symptoms of the present moment. The viewer’s task is how to adapt to this without collapsing into any one kind of consolidated rhetoric of how Korean must, or even worse, should be like. Perhaps invoking the notion of contemporaneity might be a way to expand the discussion on what is classified as contemporary Korean art without becoming subsumed into preconceived expectations. Contemporaneity is certainly nothing new as a theoretical construct; already it has been deployed by art historian Wu Hung, who has discussed it in relation to contemporary Asian art as a way of “substantiating the past,” and critic Park Shin Eui, who proposed it as an implied alternative to the current discourse on modernity in Korea.² I am, however, more interested in the notion of contemporaneity for its strategic potential to unpack the gaze that frequently cedes its own criticality.

My thinking in this regard is partially influenced by readings of hyeondaeseong within studies of Korean art history. While hyeondaeseong has frequently been translated as “modernity” in a cultural studies context, it is less tied to a given narrative of modernity than to an artist’s relationship to particular historical or societal narratives. An illustration of this is critic Kim Jin Song’s discussion of hyeondaeseong, which takes for its subject modern Korean art in the early 20th century, but is theoretically centered upon an idea of hyeondaeseong as an expansive and contemporaneous relationship of visual art with other expressions of visual culture.³ Despite the fact that his subsequent location of the art object as a mere cultural byproduct reflective of particular social phenomena sidesteps the agency of the artist, the argument he professes considers hyeondaeseong as embedded in a much larger matrix of narratives. Another illustration can be found in the paradigms set forth by critic and curator Sung Wan Kyung with specific regard to the formation of contemporary Korean art history. The first paradigm is what he describes as avant-garde experimentalism, which he argues was dominant from the late 1960s to the early 1970s; the second is that of the heavily politicized works of the Minjung artists in the 1980s; and the third is the conflicts engendered by postmodernism in the late 1980s to early 1990s.⁴ What is notable about these paradigms is that they are centered upon the relationship and the position of the artist in relation to other discursive practices.

The continuous persistence of this kind of conception of hyeondaeseong arises not out of a celebration of postmodern relativism but from the fact that Korea, perhaps more than any other place in the world, happens to be a site inundated and assaulted by events, histories and subjects that want to identify it and its inhabitants at every turn In this regard, the works of Whang Inkie, Bahc Yiso and Chung Seoyoung are notable for their consciousness of positions unfurl in such a way so as to circumvent expectations of contemporary Korean art as iconic, transcendent or as a symptom of some irrevocably dystopian condition. Put differently, the artists’ differently constructed contemporaneities enable visual art to be read outside of the tropes of progressive Korea, oppressed Korea as well as Our Korea. The works however, are so based upon the subjectivity of their positions vis-a-vis variable contexts that their ability to transmit a coherent message is greatly diminished. Leaving behind no reference points, trail markers, landmarks, nor even ruins to indicate direction or a final destination, the works force the viewer to navigate his or her own way without any guarantee that the works can eventually be mapped.

The Transparency of Whang Inkie’s Visions

Nevertheless, the intrepid viewer might first attempt to begin reading the geography of the Korean Pavilion through the works of Whang Inkie, which seem accessible through the interpretive device of the East/West binary. From the mid-1990s, Whang has incorporated images derived from Korean literati painting (muninhwa). His earliest versions consisted of images that he produced himself by hand, sometimes with ink on wood, and other times with paint. Around 1997, Whang began to scan the images of well-know paintings, of which he then magnified through Photoshop so that the images themselves became aggregates of thousands of small pixellated bits. The bits then served as the grounds upon which the artist constructed his own pixellated, mosaic-like image of a traditional painting using thousands of tiny squares made of acrylic, crystal or applied silicon in works such as “Like a Breeze,” “Starlight”(2001) and “Bang inwangjesaek”(2002), or even rivets as in “Spring Wind”(2001). In this respect, Whang, like Kang Ik Joong, Noh Sang Kyoon and Do-Ho Suh before him, amply fulfills the unwritten mandate that at least one Korean artist in each Venice Biennale must present a work involving the accumulation of small objects, preferably done in as painstaking a manner as possible.⁵ Yet the concurrent use of traditional imagery and 20th century techniques and materials makes Whang’s works a particularly attractive focus for the East-plus-West equation much favored by the gatekeepers of canonical visions of visual art, namely, established academics and curators at large institutions. As Chung Joo Mo, curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art writes, “his [Whang’s] works display a world of Eastern sensibility combined with the aesthetics of Western formalism.”⁶

But Whang’s works do not fit very neatly into this formulaic approach. He is neither a traditional ink painter utilizing contemporary media nor a Western-style artist trying to up his authenticity quotient by incorporating elements that could be construed as “Oriental.” “I didn’t set out to make the works because I wanted to use new technology or create a ‘modern’ version of these paintings. The reasons why I started using a computer was pretty much because my back began to hurt,” he points out. It might then be argued that Whang’s remastering of the ink brush landscape is a manifestation of the search to claim Koreanness, which art historian Kang Tae Hi has epitomized as the common denominator connecting all Korean art.⁷ What is problematic about this argument is that it defines Whang’s works within the notions of the indigenous, the authentic and the inscrutable; the excess assertion of “Our” art ironically mutates into another variation of the process of Othering. While the artist is aware of the inescapable, or rather, the inevitable emphasis of his position as a Korean artist, if his works appear Korean, “it is not because I absolutely intended to make a Korean work but because I am Korean.”⁸

Still, Whang realizes that his attraction to a very traditional kind of medium happened bevause of the years he spent in the U.S. following his university training in Western-style painting in Seoul. “I began to be drawn to things I was used to. It’s not so much that I really like those paintings[muninhwa], but I wanted to look at something that was familiar,” he states. Had he remained in Korea, Whang muses that he world have become “too concerned with how art was being made in the U.S.” There is a contrarian impulse propelling this desire to seek or claim residual signs of one’s origins; the search begins only when one is in a site where there are very few of those signs to be found. In some ways, this act of searching might be described as an aspect of Koreanness, a concept which itself is not so much “wrong” as it is dangerous because of its amenability to essentialist and reductive thinking. Local specificity matters, but the question to be answered is how to talk about what is “ours” without ceding all one’s reflexivity to the language of territoriality, to the collective discourse of urigeot.

Eventually, the provenance of the digitized landscapes is less important than their disappearance in certain works like “Starlight” and “Like a Breeze.” The process of computer-aided manipulation which alters the image causes the abstraction of the original image. The viewer is thrust into a position of visual discomfort for he or she must resolve the conflict between the conventional desire of the gaze to seek a recognizable image and the contradictory tendency of that gaze to take at face value anything placed before it. But this conflict is never resolved and the randomized patterns taken from an image are more in the possession the artist than in that of the viewer.

Bahc Yiso: Fleeing the “Violence of Interpretations”

Operating on somewhat of a different plane are the works of Bahc Yiso, which are more explicit in repelling the arsenal of frames reserved for Korean, and more broadly, Asian art. This is less a reflection of changing historicities or political intnt than the artist’s acknowledgment that the act of configuration results in an erroneous, incomplete or a dangerous reading because “depending on the position of the observer, the narrative can be east, west, north or south.”⁹ Although Bahc staunchly disavows any insinuation that he is trying to offer a definition for Korean art, what emerges throughout the course of his work is the construction a non-definition focused upon the unspecified conflicts between what is seen, and what the viewer ardently wants to see.

Following his undergraduate training in painting, Bahc moved to New York in 1982, where the multicultural moment in the U.S. was just beginning to allow previously marginalized artists of color to be visible, and to a lesser extent, heard. Working in this context under the name Mo Bahc(literally, “Anonymous” Bahc), the artist made conceptual works based on the position of the Asian subject in the West. Works such as the faux-calligraphic painting “Simply Grass”(1988), teased the Orientalist gaze from under the stealth of its liberal cover. These works satirized the tendency of the gaze to succumb to the Othering process. But the artist realized that while it was one thing to cause a rupture, it was entirely another to sustain the effects of that rupture. The potency of the critique disintegrates because it is made acceptable, fashionable, and finally, expected by the supposed target. There was only so much Bahc could do in maintaining a critical eye towards the deadening framework of unchallenged categories could do in maintaining a critical eye towards the deadening framework of unchallenged categories before the co-optation of the very positions upon which this works were based. In recalling the reason for his return to Seoul in 1995, he comments, “I think I could do the kind of works I wanted to after I came back to Seoul. It was important to be free from the frames in which the social context of America demanded for someone like me [such as the frames of] multiculturalism, the minority, the immigrant, the Oriental and the exotic.”¹⁰ It was important to be, as he later put it, “free from the violence of interpretations.”

Consequently, what appears to motivate Bahc’s recent works is the disconcerting absence of positions, in part because of the excess of positioning to which the artist had previously been subject. This absence is visible in the lack of evidence offered to support the assumptions of the viewer’s gaze. In “Untitled(Drift)” (2001), the artist inserted a navigation device inside a plastic bottle, which he then threw into the Gulf of Mexico. From the signals emitted by the tracking device, Bahc charted the movements of this bottle as it floated aimlessly on the sea. This is a very perplexing work on two counts; first, it evokes a romanticized notion of identity as being infinite and unpredictable, a notion much celebrated in contemporary art. But it also acts as a parody of the search for identity which has somehow become extremized in the present moment.

“Your Bright Future”(2000) goes one step further in that it appears as if it should be read as a critical statement but without the evidence to uphold that reading. The work consists of approximately seven to eight lamps angled like upturned sunflowers so that a group of spotlights appear to shine on a certain point. This concerted arrangement triggers suspicion on the part of the educated viewer who certain point. This concerted arrangement triggers suspicion on the part of the educated viewer who expects a hidden message or some kind of subversiveness on the part of the artist, as implied by the loaded title. Is the title a sarcastic comment that elucidates the uncertainty of the future? Or is it a mimesis of present emptiness? The answer is unknown because there is no object basking under the adoring glare of the laps, no one to take center stage, in short, no “Your” in the tableau to confirm the viewer’s expected reading. Like “Today(at Yokohama)” (2001) which featured a skeleton stage that showcases nothing but the passing of time, the absence in “Your Bright Future” is so pointedly devoid of subjects, or of consistent narratives, that the un-necessity of a message is arguably the crux of the work.

But Bahc never goes that far - his works are premised upon the tension of the half-baked where the viewer’s expectations are almost, but never completely fulfilled. In “Venice Biennale,” the artist almost begs to have his work positioned as a critique of some kind. Like his other recent works, it is an extremely odd piece because on the one hand, it plays to expectations of Korean art as being necessarily politicized, a justifiable, but preclusive reading reinforced by many overseas exhibitions of Korean art such as “Across the Pacific” in 1993-94 in which Bahc took part, or the Korean section of the large-scale “Global Conceptualism” in 1999.¹¹ On the other hand, the physical appearance of the work’s absurdity negates the validity of these expectations. Situated outside the Korean Pavilion, the structure with its tiny, toy-like pavilions appears almost as a veritable prank of a project. But what is the butt of the joke? The viewer might try to reconcile the dissonance by unilaterally positioning the artist as a subject who wants to express the absurdity of national identity, but such a reading lacks persuasiveness given the spectacle of literal absurdity that tis the work itself.

“World’s Top Ten Tallest Structures in 2010” is based upon a similar gap between what might be expected and what is actually depicted. Plastiline (oil-based modeling clay made from clay powder mixed with oil and wax) models of all the tallest structures in the world as of 2010 are encased in a glass box adjacent to the entrance of the Pavilion, as if they were on sale, a placement suggesting the marketplace atmosphere of most large-scale international exhibitions. The almost carelessly modeled structures seem to point at a critique of vertical or patriarchal desire but in order to be considered a full-fledged critique, the message must have some clarity. Is vertically-oriented desire (phallocentricism, upward mobility, industrialization, and so forth) being criticized because the buildings are vastly reduced in scale? Or is the visible absurdity of these tiny structures produced by their juxtaposition with a long and grandiose title something else entirely? Try as one might to come up with a suitable response, these remain rhetorical questions because there is no indication that Bahc has a position from which he speaks, or that he is even speaking at all. The act of critique suddenly feels hollow, its efficacy voided by its own gravity, which in turn, does much to erase the viewer’s faith in the certainty that a comfortable explanation for these works can be found and more importantly, the viewer’s faith in the artist to provide one.

Troubling the Conceits of the Familiar: Chung Seoyoung’s Skepticism

To a large extent, the circumvention of the viewer’s expectations is the common denominator linking the works of this year’s Pavilion. The subversion of these impositions may potentially lead to a more critical view of the various roles that contemporary Korean artworks are often prodded into playing, such as that of an icon, a didactic lesson, or a tool for some purpose. It is time to explicitly think of such works as irreducibly Neither in order to deny the tendency of the gaze to become tyrannical, whether that gaze is perpetrated by a Korean or non-Korean viewer. By saying this, I am trying to imply that the viewer channel his or her efforts into the act of reflecting previous readings. Nor does such a process of “neighboring” mean that the viewer should back away from difficult issues. In fact, the viewer has an even greater responsibility to proactively engage with the processes of “Our”-ing or Othering in order to avoid being subsumed into the polemicism of either.

Some artists, however, present works that facilitate the viewer’s task as in the recent sculptures of Chung Seoyoung. Dating from the mid-1990s following the artist’s return from Germany, these sculptures are often images of common objects, such as a gatehouse, an observatory point, a cactus or a flower. They are so simplified that only their most characteristic parts (a streetlamp, a ladder, a pot or a petal) are recognizable. Often, these works are scaled in ways that skew optical conventions set aside for these objects. A gatehouse might be reduced to child-size proportions, while a flower might be magnified beyond the perimeters of what we would consider as reality. It would appear that Chung intends to convey some kind of message, perhaps something along the lines of subversion-by-kitsch that was de rigueur for many artists categirized as so-called sinsedae, or “New Generation” artists of the early 1990s.¹²

She insists, however, that the works remain “just a gatehouse, just an observatory, just a flower.” They are meant to be representations firmly planted in the domain of “as is,” but that can never been taken as such. The artist observes that “people, especially those who have some knowledge of art, are trained not to take images at face value. They are always looking for some kind of message. It is actually those people without any knowledge of art who are best able to see the objects as objects and not as hidden messages.” She asks why viewers feel they have to find a message in order to validate their experience of the visual object. This question may very well be one asked by the large number of Korean artists who are reframed according to the demands of the global art establishment that prides itself on a desire to see the Third World or Asia in all of its quivering splendor-squalor. “It’s a problem of attitude,” states Chung, “and until that attitude changes, Korean artists will always be subject to the same kinds of labels.”

In the present moment, it appears that the duality of utopia and dystopia is ever more appealing, and ever more powerful, particularly in international exhibitions that almost have to espouse a polemic agenda in order to be taken seriously. Chung, however, refuses a position that lies on either side of the utopia/dystopia dichotomy. In the absence of identifying exterior details and the prominence of unexpected largeness of scale, “The New Pillar” strongly resembles previous works like “Cactus”(1998), a replication of a catus plant made out of the Styrofoam used by florists, and “Gatehouse”(2000), a wooden block topped by an improbably prominent globular light fixture. These calculated alterations of scale and detail reveal neither a proclivity to satirize by means of hyperbolic exaggeration nor a will to subvert through sly nondescription. The challenge faced by the artist is a struggle with scale and proportion and the works that emerge from this struggle do not readily conced to the constraining polemicism of a familiar message. As the artist admits, “I am very skeptical about the process of becoming familiar [with things].”¹³

In “A New Life,” Chung has placed a reconstructed motorbike in a doorway so that one half is outside the Pavilion building and the other inside. On one level, the concurrent exposure of the interior and exterior flouts spatial conventions for exhibitions in that there is no sharp delineation between the physical outdoors and the interior exhibition space. On another level, however, the pristine exhibition space is disrupted by the view of unkempt weeds that grow unchecked behind the Pavilion’s facade. The expectations of what an exhibition space should look like are uprooted in favor of a space that is incongruous and unfinished. As in “Lookout”(1999) where the focus is no longer upon the object, but upon the viewer who always looks for recognizable elements to possess, Chung’s works, along with those of Whang Inkie and Bahc Yiso, suggest hat it is time to rethink the mechanics through which the viewer considers “contemporary,” “art” and “Korea” as premises that are both separate and connected.

Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all artists’ quotes are taken from interviews conducted by the author on March 7, 11 and 17, 2003.