Moa Picks
Reminiscing the medium‐a ‘post’‐syndrome
Recently. It appears as though some artists are already growing out of the realm of melancholic ‘post‐’syndrome. The beginning of the postmodern society was proclaimed most definitively by Jean‐Francois Lyotard in his acclaimed 1979 writing “The postmodern condition”. Arthistorically, the metanarrative of the visual art, Modernism, had come to surrender itself to the postmodernism that rose in the 1980s and was held effective all though the 1990s.
John Rajchman, the poststructuralist critic, recollect the post modernism and says, “For the kind of arbitrary ‘eclecticism’ to be seen in postmodernism in fact had its sources in the turn from specific media to generic sorts of ‘art’; and to get out of it we thus needed to rethink the idea of medium self.” Medium, denotes different categorical outlooks of visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video, referring to the structural frame of an artwork that is the ‘vehicle’ that contains the stories. The medium suddenly came to the center of critical attention when in the 1950s the American Formalism focused not on the narrative aspects of paintings but rather on the physical structure (flat and rectangular surface), place of installation (on the wall), and their existential limits (canvas covered with paint) of the ‘vehicle’. This pursuit of the pure medium, however, came to quick dead‐end as the empty canvas hanging on the wall was the ultimatum physical support of paintings. Moving on to the 70’s and 80’s, the persistent pursuit of medium was replaced by the emergence of various forms of arts such as performance, video and conceptual arts, opening the era of stylistic eclecticism.
Installation view at Moa, white lush#1&2, 165X165cm(each) 2007
Whether they remember the glorious days of medium specificity or they know only of the era after the collapse of the medium, the artists participating in “Moa Picks” are characterized by their consciousness toward the individual medium. Such consciousness might remind us of the primordial function of the painting; or lets us be lost in the beauty of its surface; or it might increase the aesthetic role of photography that is fundamentally a recording device. These works leave behind the socio‐political and opportunistic conventions layered upon the physical support. Such historical aspect of medium is well reflected in these artists’ works.
The surface of Hong Sooyeon’s paintings represent the moment of pure visual pleasure that had been an arthistorical taboo since the age of Enlightenment. It is the closest vision of the sublime, offered by the chemistry of paints and polymers. According to the socialist critics, pure vision of beauty is a bourgeoisie luxury and the propagandistic opportunity gone to waste. And yet, the Marxist view of art may have been right as behind such vision lies tremendous amount of labor by the artist.
By Shinyoung Chung / Chif Curator, Museum of Art, Seoul National University
