Unable to Succeed and be Sufficient
Hyukgue Kwon
The motive for Keem Jiyoung's recent work, Glowing Hour, is found in a specific target called candles. However, the series of works does not reproduce the object. They are on the same line as Blue Series (2018), which specifically revealed sinking ships or collapsing cement buildings and such, and the candle sculpture of praying hands displaying a charred black wick, Look at This Unbearable Darkness (2019) but are presented in a different form. Their appearances are also distinguishable from Sleep (2015), which attempted to recreate the motif of death and sacrifice by overlapping it with a sleeping face. Glowing Hour does not depend on the imitative depiction of the object. These paintings do not show what is commonly referred to as conceptual or concrete figures. However, they manifest the image of fire, a mere lambent of a certain state. Just as the cropped and enlarged image of an object becomes distant and abstracted from its origin, the painting in front of you appears as a visual image that eliminates the explanatory elements of the object called a candle.
.jpg)
Installation view of Scattering Breath, P21, 2022
However, Keem's works are often described as the logic of reproduction. The reason may be that her works have been continuously recalling the incident of April 16, 2014, and in the case of Glowing Hour, it might be because they are visualization of the object, candlelight. For the same reason, it is said that Keem's pieces recreate something in an allusive and indirect way. Is reproduction an actual method utilized for the Glowing Hour series? These paintings simply display large red-colored surfaces, right? What do we see from them? They continually evoke tragedy and disaster, but they never directly present tragic and disastrous scenes. Maybe we need to accept the fact that these ambiguous and blurred beautiful paintings would never take a form of recreation.
Peter Osborne reexamines the critical discussions that stirred over Gerhard Richter's abstract and aesthetic paintings introduced in the late 80s in his writing titled Abstract Images: Sign, Image, and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting (1998). He explains that in Richter's photo paintings, photographic characteristics function as an index rather than the figurative likeness of a certain object. Furthermore, he said that the decision of smearing the image using a squeegee is the result of taking only the directive function without any iconic similarity. In other words, he is saying that they are not abstract images with iconic resemblances and that they are simply generating symbols, meanings, and observations through directives. Perhaps Keem's paintings found themselves in a predicament that was not much different from what Richter's abstract paintings had to deal with in the 1980s. The point is that even the remembrance of April 16, 2014, incident is considered abstract and overly aesthetic which can be seen as formalism. However, Keem's recent pieces act as directive symbols that evoke meanings even though they do not appeal to specific iconic resemblances, despite being aesthetic and abstract. They are activated while overcoming the media conditions of the time, including photos and videos, without prompting metaphors and symbols.
.jpg)
Glowing Hour,
oil on canvas, 405×194cm,
2022
On this premise, the relationship between the artist's past works and the series of Glowing Hour can be examined. Based on her past works, including the reproduction of visible objects, and the reproducible functions of contemporary media, photos, videos, and text that were part of the past works, we can infer whether the recent pieces are seeking to represent something other than an iconic resemblance. For example, we see Paengmok Harbor in her video work Glow Breath Warmth (2020). Since 2014, Paengmok Harbor and the nearby sea have had a special meaning for the temporary community that can be referred to as us. It embraces the unclarified tragedy, Sewol Ferry victims, inadequately concluded condolences, and those who paid their condolences, and it ceaselessly calls for an ethical responsibility to remember a certain issue. The indicative state of the video is clearly quite influential in viewing her paintings. Nevertheless, to be exact, the abstract paintings are drifting away from the actual tragic scene. Thus, the gap between the video and the paintings, between the indicative symbols and the physical traces, and between the expanding meanings and the meaninglessness can be confirmed. Such opaque images continue to create cruxes between symbols, meanings, and the possibility and impossibility of reproduction. The images of the color surface, which their meanings cannot be hastily anchored and only unknown and heavy emotions are presumed, are continuously pushing us to verify something.
The series of Glowing Hour, which would be better to be said abstract, nevertheless engages in the tragedy of that day, forming candles and several semantic networks surrounding them. To be exact, Keem's paintings are attempted in the position of those bereaved of the victims, in other words, those grieving. Therefore, the artist does not choose to reproduce the tragic disaster, but the method of mourning is embodied while the indicative state is planted inside the images. The abstract paintings in which nothing is apparent are related to mourning, although they could be understood as evoking candles or the sea where the tragedy transpired.
.jpg)
Installation view of Scattering Breath, P21, 2022
As an audience, all we see are abstract paintings as simple facts, and traces of brushwork that follow color and light. As such, the series Glowing Hour does not easily allow the visible image to instantly adhere to a specific meaning. I hesitate to explain the artist's recent pieces in any other connotation that candles symbolically embrace or refract. The brush strokes as traces of some sort of a mind, time, and action are significant enough without specific declarations and instructions of figures. Keem's paintings leave an opacity as a purely visual state through aesthetic convention. In other words, the emerging method of an image in a painting is to make the impossibility of internal clarification a kind of essential condition. Keem Jiyoung's works embrace the inexplicable sorrow brought by the loss and embody the situation that is incomprehensible as how it is. By doing so, they compel the tragedy to not become something that could be simply remembered or disregarded. The abstraction and opacity of the paintings/images make us face mourning, which Butler says cannot be successful or be fulfilled, as something internal and present. As such, her works tell us not to be swept away by the unclarified ambiguous facts and sentimental metaphors but to face the loss that is already originated in the paintings or us. Maybe we can compare all these processes to the procedure of grieving that encounters unfathomable loss. The mourning attempted here is to repeatedly confirm the fact that not only some entity's life has come to an end but also that the world and others are gone (those out there are already within me).
Hyukgue Kwon (Curator)
He mostly curates exhibitions and writes. As the chief curator of Museumhead, he has curated exhibitions including NAME (2020) and Injury Time (2021). He participated in various programs, such as SeMA Nanji Residency (2019), the International Studio & Curatorial Program (2016), the Cultural Affairs Committee, Denmark Curator Research (2015), and the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (2014).
.jpg&description=Unable to Succeed and be Sufficient Hyukgue Kwon You will encounter a multi-colored spectrum that delicately oscillates within a canvas, a...){kind=link}