Recurring Lines: About Jeoung Jae-Choul’s Leaving and Returning
Le roman francais est profondement pessimiste, idealiste, "critique de la vie plutot que createur de vie".Il enfonce ses personnages dans le trou, il les fait rebondir sur le mur. Il ne concoit que des voyages organises, et de salut que par l'art. C'est encore un salut catholique, c'est-a-dire par l'etertenite.Il passe son temps a faire le point, au lieu de tracer des lignes, lignes de fuite active ou de deterritorialisation positive.Tout autre est le roman anglo-americain. "Partir, partir, s'evader...traverser l'horizon..." De Thomas Hardy a Lawrence, de Melville a Miller, la meme question retentit, traverser, sortir, percer, faire la ligne et pas le point.
- Gilles Deleuze, from < Thousand Plateaus >
1.
Jeoung Jae-Choul is the artist who showed many changes. In his early 80’s work, he presented ordinary wooden figure in a sculptural form. Limiting his interference to the material only as peeling or digging was a key at this step. This interference was based on essential questions of the center of the sculpture on dialectical opposition of mass. While converting mass into an image or stressing extreme materiality, and in David Nash or Toni Grand`s pioneer style and critical mind, Jeoung Jae-Choul learned his solutions that he aimed for. As a result, he produced direct speaking masses move out from dual opposition of mass. In case of Nash, he allows extreme possibility of implicit association in a given format and expresses in drawing or sculpture. For Grand, he substitutes each sculptural and geometrical element into the unfamiliar context of the non-visual form, for example, fishes in resin. Both cases can be examples of extreme modern sculpture issues. However, Jeoung Jae-Choul evolves one step further.
Jeoung Jae-Choul found an answer on how to embody sculpture’s visuality as a constant attitude in Nash and Grand’s work. It was repeated effort of dispatching himself from historicality and semantic organism of the sculpture. In the movement of going first to edge and backing to center, various solutions that the sculpture essentially questioned are included. As I mentioned above, such as dialectical contradiction of mass and image controversy or gravity of material and process of visualizing non-material, object’s materiality and the relationship with its usage are placing de-territorized attributes which is different from the conventional sculptural element association and lead them into completely new level of questions. What would be brought in to essential problems of the sculpture from the area called outside, edge, and outskirt? Finding answers to this question itself is a link to another difficult problem. Understanding Jeoung Jae-Choul’s art, the hardest moment is the second stop; could be found in the gesture of expelling himself and then dispatch with outer area of the sculptural question.
2.
It was at Escale Studio Program in 1998 at Mauritius Islands when he first treats ’out’. Instead of doing sculptural work, he collects shells on the beach while his residence time with no tools. This work is kind of time record through collecting and it motivates his thought that establishing conventional context in sculpture may change by time and space. From this time until the year 2002, Jeoung Jae-Choul represented series of projects based on displacement.
At the solo exhibition held in Ellen Kim Murphy Gallery (Seoul), 2002 he presented enough tensioned work that reflects his new principle while maintaining his formal condition of the sculpture. The formal condition means that certain limit of interference would be a key to its accomplishment. The artist explains it as "stop pouring water into a jar at a right moment." At the same time, this exhibition showed active form of work pointing back its original by reconstructed various collections from various places, for example, making a glass bottle with its broken pieces that he found on the road or making pots in the same way. This is a self-indicative recycling. Encounter by displacement, minimum interference, discovering the narration by disposition characterizes this period. It refers both the ethical aesthetic of the sculpture and overcoming the sculpture by overcoming its semantics as well as the narrow boarder line between them.
At another solo exhibition at Keumsan Gallery, in 2002, Jeoung Jae-Choul displayed his collections from travel to India and Japan. For the first time, the artist’s journey becomes a main theme of the work. He exhibited a broken piece of bottle, a pebble, dried bugs, and picture of dead animal or flower on the road, a manhole cover as a protage, and copied India earthenware in a transparence case, in a display stand and on the floor. The exhibition would be differed by collecting method moreover way of presenting them and previous character becomes more radical. What would be remembered or maintained within the process of non-material pass way; far from essential sculpture? Encountering, minimum interference, narration of disposition. Through the exhibition, Jeoung Jae-Choul tries to show the weakest form of returning kinetic from the farthest place to its most center. The act of root up and throwing them endlessly might be seen as a self-injury of putting oneself in a trouble but also it could be the act of replacing the root and saving the center from the fixed area.
The hardest problems that the artist might be faced in the practice process would be finding center of the spot of the subject. According to Leibniz, the subject is made up of many identified spot and each time its organization and arrangement are changing.
If one cannot enumerate all of them, he/she might be fall in poor situation of drawing one’s identity with much smaller possibilities. The worst case ever could happen in art will be achieving it with only little amount of spots. If these spots are moving within time passes such as life, the problem becomes even harder. It is because artist should find the identification form in wide range of spot spread in kinetic or time. In case of it, the spot of identity will be drawn on the time line following the practical passage rather than drawn by essential questions. The spot would be valued not by its position drawn on the stable surface but by the trace in moving spaces.
3.
What is the meaning of the line of displacement for Jeoung Jae-Choul’s First of all, it would be the dispatch to physically out in the simplest way. Distancing from the sculpture, distancing from the geographical boundary of Korea where he lived, distancing from the artistic convention, and distancing from daily life could be the answer. Yet these distancing are different with ’the out’ that I am going to talk about. Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, displacement refers the extension to the outer space of practical principles of the sculpture that he established. Encountering with the object, minimum interference, narration of disposition are basic elements that he establishes in a weak sculptural condition year by year. Although the sculpture is now right before the turning into the form of ’collecting’ through this moving step, it is important that the ’sculptural practice’ is still there. In case of Richard Long, the process is completed at farthest spot; the weakest point of the sculpture once artist practice minimum interference and record it. However Jeoung Jae-Choul focuses on the point where the sculpture makes big difference between accepting it and its usage instead of going toward the weak point. He travels to mid-Asia and Silk Road area in India where there is no institutional modern art practice. He meets with people and works with them. Here comes the third meaning of his displacement.
done through 2004 and 2005, constitutes seven steps. collecting old banners (step 1), wash and pack those. (step2) Washing and packing performance with the exhibition (step 3) in 2004. Continue to the year 2005, passing those old banners to people in India, Nepal, China and Pakistan during twice of travel.(step 4). Make people to use those banners,(step 5) record their use and collecting them back. (step 5) At last, hold an exhibition expressing entire process. (Step 7)
During the preparation time, Jeoung Jae-Choul travels the area several times and studied. In fact, people surprisingly well used these banners and it contributes a lot to the success of the project. Report kind of exhibition that held at ’Project Space Zip’ in Seoul during October and November in 2005 includes recycled product and pictures of them, artist documents, culture encounter goods. Besides, the exhibition well showed the festive mood of the project exchanging two different cultures.
How could this project be understood in relation to Jeoung Jae-Choul’s previous series of work? There are several problems that I have to talk about. : 1) The concept of displacement in is little awkward. His collecting work abruptly developed into larger scale of collecting industrial wastes which are old banners, in Seoul. It suddenly moves across the cultural and societal boundaries and displaced artificially in India and Pakistan. This is the part where misunderstanding could happen as ’narcissistic receiving’, ’visual and civilizational pollution’, ’spreading one-sided taste’
2) ’Artist’s travel which included in the concept of ’displacement’ previously means that distancing from the departing point and producing passage through new encountering. However, the passage at is interiorized since it is planed and expected. In this case, there is a need of defining where the ’out’ places.
3) If Jeoung Jae-Choul’s archive style exhibition which suggested ’unknowability’ of narration through the arrangement of traces of the ’out’, this ’report’ kind of exhibition could be viewed as ’a viewpoint of colonial subject’ due to its method of classifying unknown space and region. Then, what makes him to choose this style of exhibition in spite of all the negative possibilities Artist must be influenced by various hypothesis, researches, checking process and results from all of them. This kind of question is still unsolved to the artist as well as all the eyes that view this exhibition.
However, this project is pretty interesting as much as classified in ’social sculpture’ according to the language of Joseph Beuys. The most crucial part of this project is the fact that the artist carried whole project as one large ’educational process’. Within encountering with regional people, understanding, acceptance, cooperation and enjoyment of both the artist and people is important. The ’education’ in here reveals not only the objective people but also the artist himself fall into the process of conversion or affecting. The conversion or affecting means that both parts are experiencing changes by each other through meeting and encountering.
Secondly, the concept of sculpture for Jeoung Jae-Choul has extended from physically isolated space or objective ’out’ as far as the exchange form of societal, conventional and cultural encountering. In this case, the ’out’ progress one step further to the boundary of post-post-modernism from modern or post-modern sculpture form and style and opens new possibilities. Moreover, basic elements ; encountering with object, minimum interference, narration by dispositionalso advances from the use of object to the exchange and understand method, educational conversion for each other, acculturation, reversal of the subject and the center and most critically, to the wider view of sculptural phenomenon.
4.
Jeoung Jae-Choul’s ’displacement’ related work is an excellent example for the limitation of interpretation and extension on how much artist could practice one’s practical boundary and method. The most important thing is that how he constantly managed limits and issues that he found in his practice and his desire of conquering it. is the one displacement step. Displacement course from his early sculpture to the farthest formal end reminds of a parabola which extends to further and weaker point. Every single time, it came back to its original conditions that are the ethical, visual and aesthetical qualification. Since the artist chooses them as basic principle of his sculptural practice, these will continually applied and considered to newer objects. Therefore, the most important thing is not a sculptural format itself but the practical principles of life that the artist realizes through the sculpture. It is something that originated from a sculpture and educates and made up the artist through it. The artistic, sculpturalistic results that we obtained by Jeoung Jae-Choul is a materialization of those principles. Although, a repeated parabola always returns to its original place, it reveals a leaving format or its methodology. The order to an artist is not to stay making same dots but to leave drawing a trace. There is a hierarchy even to the leaving. We need to concentrate on his next step.
By Yoo, Jin-Samg / Prof. of Kaywon School of Art & Design, Art Critic
