Ubiquitous - The Space of Connection and Communication
On the first page of Margaret Wartheim's The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace is
spotted an impressive sentence, which goes "to my mother Barbara Wartheim, the space where we originated from." Like the 'chora' Julia Kristeva refered, we are bearing inside a memory about a certain profound space where our existences came from, or the space of pre-lingual stage. That space hidden in our innermost part always links and communicates with its incarnated symbols in outer world, as if they are connected with the invisible umbilical cord. Communication is the very process that my internal and external spaces come to be unified and regain the original memory through this invisible cord. Psychological spaces, while dreaming, are visualized as various stages and stairways like the spaces appeared in the Book of the Apocalypse of St. John or Dante's La Divina Commedia, and a kind of metaphoric incidents, which show my current location on such spatial coordinate, occur unavoidably in the real world. And from these facts I come to realize that the physical reality is just a symbol of the inner reality and both dimensions are interrelating continuously. The previous works of Haiyoung Suh showed the overlapped layers of spaces, and to me, the coexistence of different dimensions on her image of bricks were read as the signs of the multiple structures of reality. It is not merely an effect of slick surface of ongoing brick-line, but a sort of a string line unwoven from a huge skein of thread, or a meaningful starting point to reach the whole depths of the spatial reality. I've been watching with keen interest what kind of spatial entities her thread lines will investigate.
In her past works, diverse spatial layers exist arbitrarily, and overlap or cross each other. The spaces is displayed as hollow as in a gravity-free state, going cross without connecting with one another. The perpetual gap between alienated dimensions are never lost, and brick-lines on each dimension seem to be derived from themselves and proceed back to their origination endlessly like a Moebius strip. Within this perpetual circulating plan, there is no concrete and physical site where human beings actually intervene in. It only exists as an idealistic and immaterial space. When she spoke during her last exhibition in the Gana Art Center that she would like to interpose human "gaze" in the next works, I could sense that she would have her spaces connected to material spaces anyhow. Going across the bordering surfaces of each dimension, she captures clear connection points in between dimensions in her recent works. The fourth dimensional space, she's been groping for, finally began to communicate with the third dimensional one. The emergence of human beings' images means that her artworks are becoming more humane. Through finding a certain umbilical cord latent between mental and physical spaces, the previous idealistic space is being alternated to the artist's own psychological one. The way of expressing it by pencil drawing, not by taping, implies such a change. Fine pencil drawing is another way to interpret a volume of space into a line, but it is more personal and physical in its subtle reflection of the artist's breathing, "inhalation and exhalation".
In this context, it is very meaningful that her recent works are treating the
icons of the Annunciation. She is staging in her works the silhouettes of an angel and Virgin Mary in the Annunciation pictures drawn by Renaissance masters as Fra Angelico. Like actors on the stage, the aura given off by these familiar icons generates a dramatic situation, the Annunciation. The Immaculate Conception by Holy Spirit is an incident that humans and the God, substance and nonsubstance, inside and outside, and the third dimension and the fourth dimension finally become to connect and communicate. The exits in the scene of Suh's Annunciation, opening up continuously from inside to outside, suggest that the very essence of the Annunciation she intensely focalize is the contact between the inside and the outside. While the interest of the previous works is in the bordering surface where dimension never meet with each other, recent works concentrate on the connection and communication among dimensions. The new appearance of columns is also implying this intermediary meaning. In the aspect that columns are the most basic unit of construction, they play the same role as the bricks, the main component in her previous works, whose function is dividing the realm of inside and the outside. But in the meantime, the columns show the construction of physical spaces while the images of the bricks show the incessant division of spaces. Just as the Ancient Greek columns configured the transcendency of time with the visible structure, vertical form of columns are representing the transcendency which is immanent in the actual spaces.
Haiyoung Suh said that she wanted to express through this works the human being, a space that has both the material and the immaterial. Her recent works surely shows human-oriented vision. In the scene of the Annunciation, it is noteworthy that Mary's meeting with divine existence is occurring in Virgin Mary's own room, which is a physical space, or a specific, actual site. The moving direction of spaces in this incident is from the fourth to the third dimension, not from the third to fourth. This structure that immaterial spaces infiltrate into material ones and connect with them shows the state of 'ubiquitous space' called as 'the third space'. It is these traits of spaces that makes the figures of the Annunciation between the columns appear to be open wide toward the real space of viewers. The structure of spatial communication that I, standing on this site, connect with ubiquitously opened transcendent world. This can be the metaphor for the space of human being himself, the existence who constantly send and receive messages with the omnipresent God through antennas latent within their intimate soul.
By Eun-joo Lee / Independent Curator
