화화 花火 火花
Solo Exhibition: Flower-Fire Fire-Flower
@대안공간 루프 Alternative Space LOOP [2016]
글: 이정아 Jung Ah Lee
We who live social lives confirm our own existence and relational significances through continuous exchange and communication with the outside world. Intermediaries are indispensible for communication of circulating messages, and linguistic symbols are most universally involved in this process. However, the signified and the signifiers of a language run parallel to one another without being able to reach a perfect union, and one’s consciousness is constantly exposed to the possibility of error. A perfect means for transparently reflecting our thoughts and the meanings of objects has never existed in the first place, and the essence of any phenomenon we commonly represent is a kind of virtual reality on a screen that we have projected on through a process, consistently premised on our subjective interpretations, of selective extraction, reconfiguration and editing.
Soyoon Lee has persistently inquired into the theme of communication to expand her realm of thought regarding her critical awareness of the subjective translation and interpretation arising in the process of one’s interactions with and understanding of others and the world; and the various misalignments and ironies stemming from the innate limits of symbols, which are a necessary medium of communication. While Lee is demonstrating a broad change in direction in terms of medium and forms- from works of spatial collage mostly consisting of drawings or variously arranged found objects from daily life to her recent works of painting, printmaking and manual installation pieces, etc.- the artist consistently maintains her singular sense of theme.
You are All Part of the Same Rainbow consists of seven brightly colored paintings of clear planar demarcations, with a color of the rainbow being central in each painting. Focusing on the suggestive title encouraging us to reflect on the epistemological issue of daily life, rather than on a formal analysis, would be more important in this piece, which consists mostly of abstraction. Does the rainbow indeed consist of the seven colors we are aware of? Actually, it is said that if one analyzes the spectrum of colors in a rainbow as produced through a prism, tens of thousands of tints could be identified in the nearly infinite chromatic variations between each main hue. As Wilhelm von Humboldt had pointed out, our awareness of reality may subliminally rely on certain frames (as those created by language). Since ancient Easterners identified just five hues, while the British have identified six, thus excluding violet, and other cultures identify just three or four hues, of the rainbow; and since it is said that white rainbows actually exist, the formulaic “red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and purple” colors of the rainbow we had memorized are of our own, narrow construct. Perhaps this is why one is led to turn their imaginative attention to the tens of thousands of invisible colors lying outside of the highly limited chromatic configuration of the rainbows as framed by our minds or paintings, when viewing this piece. As many are aware, in such a subjective process of interpretation, which the American psychologist Daniel Gilbert has explained in terms of “filling in perception,” is involved the whole system of experiences, knowledge, language, culture, values and ideologies already accumulated within oneself. Since such a priori understandings operate in even the short moments we are aware of, highly complex interpretive filters must be in play in our routine thoughts, judgements, interactions and communication, etc.
Any mnemonic representation of facts requires communication between the past and the present. Since such would amount to traces pursued by traveling against time, it stands on an ever enervated foundation for having lost any vivid live contact. Although this representation, or communication, is sometimes clear, it can also become depreciated, and substituted into current time and subjective contexts to be added or destroyed; so that it inevitably possesses differences from its actual contents, as similar as it may be to them. In the case of collective memories, diverse interpretations abound and their sharing and communication slide indefinitely. The More One Loves, The Farther One Becomes consists of memories of a certain time the artist had spent together with her family of six, and the varyingly composed stories regarding the same past have been overlapped over a mirror surface to be like a palimpsest and ultimately become illegible. Representing actuality is a representation of the differences existing between linguistic symbols, and therefore it is impossible, in any case, to fill the void between actuality and representation. Past realities are diverging versions distributed by the subjective prisms of the subjects of reminiscence, and the subjects seeking to share memories merely contrast their misaligned pieces. It is like how a mirror, due to minute inflections on its surface, could never reflect an image with perfect purity, completely free of distortion. What image the mirror can reflect is then exposed to certain risks due to the fragile materiality of the mirror itself. The narcissistic text here becomes trapped within the mirror to meet with a collapse of communication. The discrepancies and ironies of reality, symbols and systems of awareness reveal themselves in another form in the print piece, For a Beautiful Ending, which reminds one of a kaleidoscope. The hundreds of flower images the artist had either personally photographed or collected from the Internet and magazines pass through a process of inversion and overlapping to lose their inherent forms and become distorted into irregular figures appearing like common stains. This piece, which infinitely includes unpredictable, transformed images beyond flowers’ inherent forms by the logic of symmetry and mathematical arrangements, displays a fantastic image in which tens of thousands of flowers blossom like in the original significance of the kaleidoscope, which was called wanhuatong, or cylinder of ten thousand flowers, in ancient China. Although the flower’s inherent, natural beauty becomes more distant, to an irredeemable extent, as coincidental combination is repeated in this virtual image, which is ceaselessly distorted by the principle of optical illusions; the more such an infinite propagation of transformation repeats itself, the more of an irony there is of the flowers’ enchantment being more fascinating than their original beauty.
To point to significant change in Soyoon’s latest works, they originate from the artist’s self-reflection regarding whether her previous works had not been causing misunderstandings and desultory readings for her viewers through complicated and abstruse stories delivered in the process of addressing the limits and dilemmas given rise to during the signification and communication of general symbols, including languages. The artist seeks to display an ideal landscape in which any potential challenges to successful communication are completely eliminated by introducing the most intuitive means for recovering visual pleasure, which the artist had confined until recently in her practice. For the artist here, the Buddhist term of avatamska, which refers to a world elaborately decorated with all kinds of flowers and jewels and in which everything exists in perfect harmony, comes to mind as a metaphor for an extreme abundance of communication. Soyoon thus gives form to the abstract concept of the highest plateau of harmony and communication as a concrete landscape in which, to quote the artist herself, “all kinds of flowers cohabit a large expanse of space in harmony while preserving each individual flower’s peculiarities amidst an absence of any hierarchies or conflicts, like in a community of wild flower.”
A semi-abstract representation of a community of flowers in the form of kaleidoscopic lumps of color vaguely retaining their semblance to flowers, When It Rings forms a decorative composition with brilliant flowers in full bloom, as if it were an embodiment of avatamska itself. Rather than reflect the profound ideological concept avatamska communicates, Soyoon has sought to reveal the overflowing excitement and replete sensibilities offered by avatamska-like scenery, which represents the quintessence of symphony between all things, by projecting them onto nature’s gift of dense verdure, landscapes of splendid hues or peaceful and harmonic sights. The smaller painting of chromatic gradation, hanging beside its larger counterpart like a footnote, clearly displays the colors used in When It Rings; and it causes a double deferral from reality by denoting the larger painting, a representation of a flower community as indices consisting solely of chromatic brightness and saturation while lacking substance, just like remnants of reality.
We Won’t Talk Anymore, which faces When It Rings, is filled with plain, achromatic flowers as if all of its elaborate and clear, prismatic tints and tones have become discolored. The surfaces of the crudely textured flowers roughly and untidily overlap with one another, and the flowers give the opposite impression of the usual, effulgent, delicate or fair contoured image we have of them. The irregular, disorganized and humble black-and-white community of flowers constitutes a sight apparently close to chaos. However, it is just that we are incapable of easily perceiving it, and nature forms its own, neat order and harmony even within complicatedness and disarrangement. For Soyoon, the chaosmos in operation while conflicting and heterogeneous things are reconciled is also a world in which harmony and communication flow through. Through the relationship between this pair of two-dimensional artworks; the artist presents an appearance of all objects and phenomena coexisting without distinctions between ugliness and beauty, the normal and abnormal, and the superior and inferior, free from confrontations and conflict.
Another dramatic landscape negotiating with ultimate symphony and beauty emancipated from all misalignments of interrelationships and communication reaches its zenith in Hanabi, installed on the center ceiling of the basement gallery. One must look up in order to properly appreciate Hanabi, which embroiders the sky. For the prismatic fireworks providing a brilliant sight with flashes of light like a comet in the night sky, the artist, Lee So-yun has likely kept in mind its analogic relationship with avatamska in the aforementioned context. Hanabi is an installation piece in which acrylic flowers, and the boards they were cut out of, hang adjacent to one another. Like all instrumental linguistic symbols, the template, or the pattern, is a medium with which one can create an almost infinite amount of originals through various compositions, combinations and ways of editing. Although, due to the industrial, mass productive characteristics of the template (flowers and their frames), it looks like a group of flowers mass reproduced according to a certain code; Hanabi demonstrates an irony, of mediums, resulting from the artist’s arduous labor of drawing some eight hundred unique flower designs, which she then used to manually cut out her acrylic forms.
Unlike with actual fireworks involving the self-emanation of light, semi-transparent flowers mediated by artificial lighting reflect and refract light off of each other so that their images are projected onto the wall in Soyoon’s Hanabi. Shapes of flowers sequentially sparkling and traces brilliantly fragmented on the wall create an optical illusion while revealing colorful aspects changing according to the air flow and one’s vantage point. Filled with reflected images made more dream-like and mysterious by the participation of uniquely beautiful flowers in a play of light, the space feels like facing a fancy, majestic and beautiful world as revealed by light, the essence of enlightenment. It is as we realize that everything around us had been a dazzling jewel in the moment of enlightenment, that is.
The template flowers, which finally reveal their beauty when light is projected upon them, remind one of the god, Indra’s net of jewels, which is of infinite relationships between mutually penetrating and intersecting light and countless images illuminating and reflecting one another on their transparent surfaces. In the garden of Indra’s net, where it is said various marbles at each knot of the netting, with surfaces shining like mirrors, can reflect all of the other marbles (the flowers are actually hanging from a wire net); all of these fire flowers mutually exchange influences and form an ideal landscape in reconciliation while each indiscriminately maintains its uniqueness, since none of them can gain independence in a self-contained manner and exist in isolation.
Even if unintended, contemporary works of art, which rely on interpretation, often exclude their recipients from communication while excessively embracing (philosophical) concepts under the justification that such is a requirement of contemporary art. The artist, Lee So-yun’s recent works, which depart from her self-reflective recognition that artworks which have negotiated with the theme of communication may in fact produce misinterpretations and cause ignorance while demanding ceaseless conceptual and philosophical interpretation, are a process of the artist answering her own question of what ideal kind of communication is possible in the multi-layered spectrum of interpretations working together from different horizons through these landscapes, which appear as though they may exist somewhere between one’s ideals and reality.
