[Youngle KEEM] Expansive stories built through de-construction / Anna Harsanyi

  Expansive stories built through de-construction

   Anna Harsanyi

 

In Youngle Keem’s film, Searching for Seahorse (2016), images of ocean fauna and flowing waters are interspersed with a gentle narration: “One day, seahorse disappeared. When it happened, some of human capability was also lost. No one felt sorry about that. Everybody forgot about it soon.” The story is of a missing, suddenly disappeared seahorse, and of an anonymous protagonist’s search for it within an ever-changing world. At first, the viewer might think this is a true story, blending scientific fact and the tale of one individual’s search for a specific seahorse. But through a subtle unraveling across image and narration, Searching for Seahorse can be understood as a parable about reckoning with history while simultaneously navigating a rapidly changing contemporary society. When looking for seahorse, the anonymous searcher must turn to the world around them. We see images of crowds, of newly built housing blocks, of city dwellers crowded in commuter clusters. We see closeups of diplomatic hands shaking in ceremonial commemoration, world leaders passively gazing into the glare of atomic weapon detonations, and violent scenes of civil war. In the viewer’s process of connecting such disparate imagery, the seahorse emerges as an anonymous, potentially universal symbol for the individual who contends with memories of the past within shifting worlds of economic, technological, and political tumult. Where the video began with the ebb and flow of an ocean tide, its images swell from natural sceneries to those of man-made physical and social scenarios. Even when seahorse reappears in memories, she is unrecognizable and unable to swim against the tides she has been missing from. Seahorse drifts away in the naturally occurring rhythms of her own environment. This story, it turns out, is not a story at all – it is a structure for breaking down and then re-constructing visual language.
 
 
 
Keem’s practice encompasses both publication and video formats, treating the book as an art object and its text as a framework for visual contemplation. A book shifts in form and function over time and can develop a relationship with its reader. In terms of what is presented on the page, there is no “right” or “wrong” interpretation, no singular culminating message to be gleaned at the end. For Keem, the book and its contents have a fluid and expansive life, a place of conceptual reflection and personal meaning-making.
 
 
 
In the same way that books serve as a tool for critical imagination, in Keem’s work the act of interpretation is often situated in the in-between, in the invisible spaces which tie together image, text, and sound. Pictures and words are presented outside of their usual contexts, stories are shaped by their proximity to images, and an image’s meaning shifts in relationship to other ones. This relational structure forms a network of symbolism and metaphor in Keem’s work, a language which holds at its core the familiar and ubiquitous aspects of our visual culture.
 
 

 
The artist’s book Monami 153 Chronicles (2009) tells the story of the Monami 153 ballpoint pen, a pervasive object of daily use. Within its pages are ruminations, histories, photographs, song lyrics, and other materials which are applied to reflect on the pen’s many qualities including its color, uses, and design. The images and subject matters laid out within the seven chapters traverse Korean histories of authoritarianism, economic progress, and cultural development. Shifting contexts and narrative voices present the pen as an object with a rise and a fall, and whose memory contains multitudes. At times the pen is its own character against a national backdrop of modernization. At others, it is a utility which makes possible the writing of personal notes on paper. Freely associating between word and image, page and frame, true stories and invented ones, the publication at once ties divergent elements together while intentionally keeping them disconnected. There is a tension here between the instinctual reaction to the pen – it is a familiar object, and any viewer or reader can recognize at least something about it. But this book refuses to adhere to traditional story arcs or exposition. Instead, it guides a journey into the construction of this object’s identity, which can only be completely understood in the reader’s mind and through their own interpretations of the disparate visual and textual elements. What Monami 153 Chronicles offers is a synchronous trip through past and present, fact and fiction, an experience of fluid critical conjecture rooted in that which is recognizable.
 

 

 
The publication Captive Stones (2019) gathers visual representations of stones in art history, daily life, and the environment. Here again the reader is presented with juxtapositions of stones in their naturally occurring states, or as materials for sculpture, or in historical paintings. Stones, it seems, are manipulated in many ways – they are props in image construction. What happens, then, when we pay attention to the stones themselves, as opposed to the context in which they are viewed? This type of removal through close-up focus in Keem’s practice does not tell, it shows. Employing a process of examination of the familiar, the artist allows the reader to think about their own subjective systems of observation, understanding, and application.
 
 

Keem’s work draws out the power of images and words by revealing their social and cultural capital – the recognizable, the ordinary, and the accessible. Blue Land (2019) is a short film which intertwines the Smurfs with the history of Korea and its global politics, which influence its cultural and governmental institutions. In the film, the Smurfs are introduced as they are commonly known - illustrated characters created by a cartoonist - but their story morphs into a narrative in which they become integrated members of society, their lives overlapping with Korea’s societal changes in political and cultural systems, urban planning, and class dynamics. The film intersperses quick cuts of archival footage with a voiceover conversation in French (the language of the Smurf’s real-life Belgian creator, Pierre Culliford) which meanders between self-reflection and abstract questions. The experience of watching is one of inquiry – to follow the trajectory of the film is to move from passive viewing to actively questioning the links between the many source images and voiceover narratives woven together. The notion of context is removed from all that is presented in the film – there are no captions for the archival footage, so it is up to the viewer to consider what the connection might be when, for example, a series of images from political ceremonies, meetings of industrialists, social uprisings, and urban daily life flash in succession. The film’s end posits the nuanced omnipresence of the color blue, which appears in contemporary events like blue paint being sprayed on Hong Kong protestors or the blue background of the Twitter logo. The process of making sense of what is presented here is one of realizing that, without a prescribed context, the meaning of images and narratives change. Perhaps the artist is signaling this approach when, in the beginning of the film, a close-up shot shows Smurf characters being meticulously cut out from their cartoon paper. They are literally being removed from their usual, familiar context (the cartoon), and being placed into a new one – a multivalent world which drifts between past and present, a narrative shaped not by a traditional story arc, but by its own details.
 
 
 
Drifting between fact and fiction, between real and imaginary, can also be a tool for critical reflection. By starting with ubiquitous imagery or familiar story-telling formats, then subverting assumed contexts through a composition of smaller narratives and disparate image groups, the viewer has an opportunity to challenge the idea that narratives must be linear, that images have universal meaning, and that a story follows a trajectory. Within this blur of truth and fiction emerges a politics of de-construction. Keem’s works do not overtly suggest political ideas or specific social messages, but they raise questions about our own realities in order to piece together new ones. The unknown or the unclear becomes less of a point for confusion and more of a space for pondering potential alternatives. Through works that present truth as fiction, image as text, book as art object, and vice versa, Keem’s practice offers up a space where critical imagination can become reality.