shinilkim@hotmail.com
Recovery of True Relationship through Perfect ‘Seeing’
Park Soon-yeong(Program Manager, Nanji Residency)
The work of Shin il Kim can be interpreted as the negation against modern intellectualism. The typical characteristic of the intellectualism is that it categorizes all objects through reason. He negates this type of intellectualism through his works. Let us take a look at the typical works of Kim. In <Not an Absolute Object but Absolute Seeing>, he took a quotation from a minister, “Not an Absolute Object but Absolute Seeing” which he used as the topic for the work, as it is to divide words, piled up an alphabet which form the word in layers to create a group, and eliminated the relational formation given from outside the work in the format where a group of words is followed by another group of words at regular intervals. In another work, <Absolute Seeing>, the same phrase is combined in the form of the em, and the video filmed while wandering around the street is projected to the structure to convert letters to images. The relational formation from the outside in the former indicates the categorization by reason and the conversion of letters to images in the latter, the dissolution of concept. Through this, he suggests us to think about the issues that objectify all objects including us within the scope of intelligence.
The modern rationalism or the intellectualism of the West categorized them as a means to understand an object or an event. For this, everything becomes an ‘object’, something that is thrown (-ject) forward (ob-) to intelligence. This type of attitude was intensified through the synchronization of objects. Everything was aligned to a single viewpoint and everything was adjusted to a single rule. All objectifications are applied to the scope of immaterial ideas such as space and time. By conceptually understanding and categorizing spaces, it one can say those spaces are the same for a single space. The unilateralism of modernization and violence were exposed due to the wars that started on the pretext of enlightenment, and a number of Western ideas rose in rebellion against them. The major critical minds of such ideas involve the suspicion whether the actual spaces are always the same so that they can be categorized and whether such an absolute object can be established. Their conclusion is simple. There is not an absolute thing that can perfectly define an object or a matter. However, it was insoluble with metaphysics and science. Also, it was logically impossible for science and logic are the techniques that the intelligenceunderstand the world. When intelligence was the yardstick for understanding everything, the issue about the time along with the space was also reduced conceptually and was defined as a form of a category that it was handled separately from us, but the field of sensitivity deals with the actuality of time and space rather than conceptual space or time. The space is inevitably related with the person who occupies the space, the person who participates. Such inevitability becomes more solid as we feel it but separated, as we think. As an alternative, it requested for the domain of sensitivity that the intelligence could not objectify and set low values to, and that role was taken by art which deals with the expression of sensitivities.
Kim carries out this type of duty of art well. Seeing becomes a perfect seeing in the absolute and innate meaning when it becomes free or absolutely independent from the habit of rationality such as stereotype, bias, and manipulation. He suggests the recovery of the actual relationship by symbolically separating the instinctive means through which we participate in the world, ‘Seeing’, from the intelligence, the subject of categorization, by concretizing his topic.
 shinilkim@hotmail.com Recovery of True Relationsh...){kind=link}