YS Entertainment Co
When you sit on a couch, the living room is turned into a Western play stage/ a fake leather sofa/ a wall clock stands at 9 o’clock in the morning/ A Cezanne-esque still life painting/ A television set/ A Dracaena Fragrans/ three hard-covered copies of ””Capitalism““by Karl Marx of Moscow, Progress Publishing Companies, laid horizontally/ Books merely for show in a lazy bookshelf/ and a perpetually bubbling aquarium:/ There is, however, no tragedy to be translated and played for this stage. (Hwang Ji-woo <A Diary of a Fat Couch>)
Clowns are a recent subject in the history of painting, maybe less than a century. It is rare to find paintings that have clowns as the main figures, and the simple depiction of clown was not much of importance. However, in the contemporary art world, many artists have projected themselves as clowns, even the most prominent leaders of modernism. Now, artists are seeing themselves as clowns before anybody else, i.e. a viewer, regards them as such. This is an important change. The artists humble themselves and diminish their identity. This may be due to a sense of alienation, a feeling that they are detached and distanced from reality.
Perhaps, the authors believe that they cannot do anything about the real world and have realized that the real world takes no interest in art. People now neither seek consolation nor comfort from art. This is because art has reluctantly acknowledged that reality has completely conquered it. Neo-classicism saw a revolutionary compromise with reality, and critical realism saw a passionate unity (or concordance) with reality. However, after that, art has never truly reconciled with reality. A sense of alienation reached a climax, after which the artists have plummeted into the deepest abyss, feeling more abandoned and isolated from reality.
Is not a clown the stereotypical symbol of surplus humanity? In this respect, seeing oneself as a clown is inevitable in this era of de-centered subjects, only natural to be fit into reality. Clowns are not the only item that reveals a sense of alienation there are also mannequins, as well. Frederic Jameson said that a mannequin is the true symbol that represents the sentiment of a surrealistic era and the ultimate totem of the surrealistic modification of life. With the mannequin, the human body itself is shown as an outcome of mechanical reproduction. If the clown downsizes and diminishes the value of the body and mentality, the mannequin completely abolishes the inner parts of an existence. They both symbolize and signify the downfall of the subject.
As time has passed, these subjects have, ironically, gone through numerous variations. The course of modernism portrayed a subject on a flat surface, and the painting’s surface was raised as the motto of the modernism. As a result, this flat surface became something so grand that it is indifferent to and unrelated to reality, leaving no trace of a subject, or an author. Through this change, modernists have been abandoned by and isolated from the real world, and are thrown into a barren world like a small clown or an empty mannequin. It seems as though they have voluntarily given up on their lives. This is the starting point for Park Yong-sik. He plants and nurtures himself into this barren world. He houses and clothes the clowns and mannequins that are now so diminished and regarded as unimportant. With them, Park builds his own small republic.
As time has passed, these subjects have, ironically, gone through numerous variations. The course of modernism portrayed a subject on a flat surface, and the painting’s surface was raised as the motto of the modernism. As a result, this flat surface became something so grand that it is indifferent to and unrelated to reality, leaving no trace of a subject, or an author. Through this change, modernists have been abandoned by and isolated from the real world, and are thrown into a barren world like a small clown or an empty mannequin. It seems as though they have voluntarily given up on their lives. This is the starting point for Park Yong-sik. He plants and nurtures himself into this barren world. He houses and clothes the clowns and mannequins that are now so diminished and regarded as unimportant. With them, Park builds his own small republic.
The two different methodologies are shown in different times of his works, but the fraternal twin motif were displayed together in his first solo exhibition <Keep the Earth> (1999). Park presented photographic works and various installments with a huge robot Mazinger Z as the main theme. Here, what is interesting is that Park took pictures of himself wearing an iron shield and the costume of Mazinger Z. Maybe his intention was an earnest acknowledgement of his childhood nostalgia, or perhaps he sees himself as a male figure, who is strong and masculine like a heroic robot. However, this male figured underwent quite a regression after the show <For the sake of love and justice> (1999). This is when the installments and photographic representation departed from each other. As mentioned above, these two idioms still reflect one another, but with a contrast. One is three-dimensional and the other is a flat surface. One is a corporeal experience and the other is optical only.
Besides these, the former constitutes one independent and real world, while the latter builds a representative world. They reflect and supplement each other like a mirror. However, when we look closely, there are some subtle discords. The two mirrors are standing facing each other, but the reflections are infinitely retreating and regressing with bizarre distortion. The real world and the represented world do not correspond to each other, and, most of all, Park established a twisted world from the first.
When looking only at Park’s installments, it is (or it seems) complete as a real world, but in fact, his world is nothing but a temporary expedient: a world made up of and made from the black-hole of the reality. When mirroring such world, it is only natural that it produces distorted reflections. At the crosswords of his two different systems, ‘Park Yong-sik’ disappears.
Where did he go? Why did he expel himself? What is important is that he took an active initiative in making his self disappear. He chose to present keen retrospect on his experiences rather than explicitly revealing himself. With this, we can see that his formal methodologies reached maturity.
The momentum for this was his series of <Dog and Soju bottles> (2002). He completed the formalities of the two separate systems and established relationships between himself and his works, and between his works and the world. There is no doubt it: “YS Entertainment Company"(4th solo exhibition) is the final edition of this series.
The relationship between the two systems as the reality and the representation has been defined. However, the representation deviates from symmetry since his works produce a twisted distortion. More likely, the relationship is similar to ‘quoting’. Park indirectly quotes himself using the locution of his works. As a result, any dynamic experiences are subdued by orderly formalities for the sake of great disguise, i.e. quoting. This in turn makes his work a highly sophisticated allegory.
Walter Benjamin has said that under the deeply engaged ‘melancholic’ visuality, the subject is turned into allegory, but the subject still remains itself even when its life is ended. He further said that this subject is dead yet perpetually preserved; and the producer of the allegory breathes his existences into an object (or an allegory) and voluntarily climbs down to reside within it. However, he also warned that we have to understand this not psychologically but ontologically. I agree with him in this respect: that the inevitable happens as we lead our life. We are slowly dying surrounded by the agonies of life, a life in which banal soap-operas prevail even though we desperately desire to bequeath a heroic tragedy.
By Sang-woo Kim
