[Cha Ji Ryang] Critical Essay/ Wonhwa Yoon

Striking a Strike

Wonhwa Yoon

When everything is going to work out sounds like a lie, when we are desperate for sayings like “our efforts are going to pay off” or “tomorrow will be a better day” as if they were beleaguered unbeliever's prayers, when our feelings swell up narcissistically like a boast at a drinking party, when we cannot choose a path between unconditionally working hard and doing nothing, we go on a strike. In the summer of 2020, I was doing research on the history of art strikes. If it had been a better time, that research might have been another book in a set of books along with the book on art labor. However, I would not have done such research in the first place if the situation had been any different. The reason why I actually looked up past strike cases at the time was that I wanted to learn how to strike. In the poorly concluded paper, I wrote,“If a strike is to cease working in order to be able to work properly, it can be compared to getting off work or vacation rather than bankruptcy or retirement. Of course, a strike is not a holiday! If everything is still the same when you return from leaving work, then the pause is meaningless. The strike is defying the order that defines work and taking a determined action, redefining work by oneself. So a strike is not about not working. In other words, you cannot stop working even when you go on a strike.”

dream pop Logo, 2022

 
There is something dubious about the idea that a strike is a productive interruption of work. Who gave the order that you have to deliver results even when you are not working? However, being involved in art actually means doing something else during your work time for other tasks. Art, if there is such a thing, occupies your time and bends your path like protesters. It already is sort of a strike in that it stops for a while to change lives, and I had to stop working once again to think about how such a moment operates and serves us. Striking a strike is not just about lifting the occupation, it is about questioning the life in which a strike becomes a job. The reason for the lengthy explanation is that I thought that Cha Ji Ryang's work could be seen as a striking technique. In fact, in Strike, Sync, he defined the record of his time as a “strike resume” that continues to be updated. It was unclear whether art was a means, a target, or a goal of a strike. From time to time, he gathered people and organized a form of small strikes or slowdowns refusing to be swept away by trends. These gatherings were virtual lifeboats to avoid being swallowed by the waves, but at best, they were fragile eggs that revealed only some of the outline of the rock. Maybe he just wanted to build a theater in a slightly different form each time and want us to become actors, viewers, and directors of our situation on our own accord. This is a way of escaping. However, it requires some imagination to paint the theater as a place of strikes. Will we be able to strike in our dreams?
 

Surfing,

Video installation, Dimensions variable,

2022

Still, I think I have no choice but to quit this job if I do not want to work on Sundays. Strike becoming a job means that you are unable to set the boundary for your work. Watching a series of video works in which the artist speaks silently is not work, but also work at the same time. When you are tired of one life, you lose the ability to evacuate to another life. More precisely, you can not escape from the situation where you are constantly being thrown out elsewhere. This is not an exception in a world where creative destruction is almost providential. The book that I was slowly translating in the fall of 2012, which eventually went unpublished, begins as follows. “A retreat of meaning. The social situation in which collective life programs are dismantled without the time for mankind to devise new life programs. I put my feet on the ground.” The last sentence is an idiom meaning “worldly-wise,” which can be rewritten as “standing on the ground on two feet,” and some dictionaries explain it as “not having unrealistic ideas”. However, the author of the book has worked all his life to rewrite his world as a transparent dream. Of course, he did a lot of other things, but I think he was unable to get away from the front of his desk. Ten years ago, I thought it was a strange form of curse. Now, I take it as a way of life. If I was to document the time in between, I think a more suitable title on the first page would be “A History of New and Invisible Overwork,” rather than “A History of Strikes.”

Only people who decided to leave, can see everything: Stray Birds,

Pigment print, 124.5x70cm,

2021

 

Over the past few years, Cha has been experimenting with several ways to tie the knot with time. This does not carve out the past from the present or preserve every moment. It seems that even understanding and giving meaning to past actions were not the final purpose. In the winter of 2019, he reconstructed a collection of data containing memories until now into an airplane-type multimedia theater. Then came another winter when the plane could not fly and we could not continue what we were doing. During this unexpected strike, he updated his theater and added several audiovisual tracks to create “an album” called Only Those Who Want to Leave Can See Everything which still seemed like a transportation device borrowing the form of records. Where can this song take us? For a while, he passed out a track from the album to people as if he was asking a question. The track titled Surfing functions as an interlude between dark hard-to-see spaces and light-filled spaces within the album but does not draw clear arrows. In an acoustic landscape that seems to be a mixture of the white noise of the plane weighing on your ears and the careless rattling of the train, you can see traces of the past vibrate like a fly sitting on the tip of a turntable needle. It is an illusion, but it would no longer be an illusion if you actually start moving along with that vibration. You can walk out of the scene if you want. In the forest of frequencies, the song opens up such crossroads.

Wonhwa Yoon (art critic)

Wonhwa Yoon is an independent researcher, art writer, and translator based in Seoul. She is the author of The Story of Shells, or Fragments on the Incompleteness of Art (Mediabus, 2022), Picture, Window, Mirror: Photographs Seen in the Exhibition Space (Vostok Press, 2018) and On the Thousand and Second Night: Visual Arts in Seoul in the 2010s (Workroom Press, 2016), and translated Friedrich Kittler, Reza Negarestani, and others into Korean. She also co-curated Human Scale at the Ilmin Museum of Art and co-produced Soft Places for the Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018.