Web of P and Thought Fragments of P
Sanghyun Ha
In the exhibition Web of P (2022), the artist intertwines her method of composing images with the weaving act of Penelope, a figure from Greek mythology. While waiting for Odysseus to return from war, Penelope creates a burial shroud for her father-in-law as an excuse to reject suitors. Since the shroud must never be completed, she unravels by night what she wove during the day. The act of weaving and then unweaving the shroud. The artist deliberately removes the context of Penelope’s husband’s return, instead focusing on the event that arises from the labor of women itself. This is about a body repeating unproductive actions and observing the fleeting images produced by that body. Daseul Song's work is not a static and permanent painting completed by an authoritative artist. Like a vanishing shroud, her work not only presents images but also reveals the process of their destruction over time.
In the 1960s and 70s, female artists turned their attention to the non-artistic handcrafted qualities of techniques like sewing and basket weaving. Unlike phallic forms constructed with a frame on the ground and rising vertically, textiles created in this manner spread horizontally, lacking depth. Instead of being erected externally, they wrap around the body, constantly shifting in form. What if we juxtapose Penelope’s shroud and Daseul Song’s work through the lens of textile art? Patterns evolve without an original form. Moving images are projected onto various supports—monitors, projections, PVC film, and lenticulars—transforming their texture. Ornamentation becomes excessive within its own set of rules, escaping the productive order of the real world. In The Mirror of Production (1973), Jean Baudrillard contrasts decoration, seen as seduction, with production. Here, seduction rejects the logic of production, adhering instead to its internal rules in the realms of thoughts, signs, and fascinations.
Production generates objects—pragmatic signs with accumulated definitive goals—whereas seduction is deception, superficiality, and unnecessary excess. Without any basis, seduction revels in the play of signs and inverts the depth of reality into a virtual construct. As a reticular structure that perpetually reproduces contentless forms, decoration and seduction disrupt the coherence of meaning systems.
The artist visually creates the "glitch" effect that arises from errors in digital images. This process involves countless interventions, crossing and applying effect modules within the program. As a result, the viewer oscillates between sensing mechanical repetition—images that verge on meaninglessness—and discerning peculiar human forms (touches) within them. This evokes the method of the Rorschach Inkblot Test, a psychological assessment in which individuals interpret shapes from random symmetrical inkblot patterns. In this sense, Daseul Song's work can be understood as a patchwork of inkblots, as well as the continuity and disappearance of these forms. The network of meaning briefly emerges in the unconscious realm, only to be repeatedly dismantled. Here, the focus shifts from a singular image or its associated meaning to the rhythm that arises through the persistence and transitions of images. Much like a composer shaping the variations and structural arrangements of notes, the human form is perceived not in the content of any one image but in the rhythm generated by its convulsive transitions.
The exhibition Web of P juxtaposes the fragmented images created in the aforementioned manner with the act of waiting for a loved one. As the artist states, "The words that burst out from the loving subject are initially incomprehensible." Similarly, the woven patterns do not convey coherent meaning but instead defer meaning through repeated errors, allowing viewers to experience the suspended passage of time itself. The subject of love and the fragments of thought it evokes. As she began her work, the artist reflected on the possibilities that emerge when elements lacking productive meaning in society are articulated in public spaces. The following excerpt draws from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, which explores the speech of a lover. Barthes writes that in discussing love’s discourse, "the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is "unreal," i.e., intractable." This aligns with Daseul Song's work, which can only be apprehended through dispersed fragments. The quoted passage, "And the night illuminated the night," was selected for its resonance with the sensory experience of the exhibition.
2. "And the night illuminated the night"
In P's work, silver_night_02 & dark_02 (2022), two curved monitors are placed side by side. Each screen plays a video, titled silver night and silver night dark, respectively. The two videos mirror one another in reverse, each swallowing the other inwardly. P once spoke to me about the reality of day and the media environment of night. Reflecting on this, perhaps the "silvery shining night" portrays the night of someone suffering from insomnia. For those with insomnia, there is no day. For someone unable to fall asleep even as the sun rises at 7 a.m., light becomes merely the bright silvery glow of the night. The dark display they watch from bed glows intensely. To forget the guilt of having produced nothing, they expose their eyes to its light. Falling asleep only from exhaustion and waking again, the distinction between day and night dissolves. They might chastise themselves, labeling their condition as abnormal. Yet, there are moments when judgment falls away. In such moments, scenes lose their meaning and flatten into neutrality. I let those fleeting scenes pass, simply waiting. The warp and weft remain unwoven, lying parallel, repeatedly tangling into masses or unraveling on their own.
“I experience alternately two nights, one good, the other bad. To express this, I borrow a mystical distinction: estar a oscuras (to be in the dark) can occur without there being any blame to attach, since I am deprived of the light of causes and effects; estar en tinieblas (to be in the shadows: tenebrae) happens to me when I am blinded by attachment to things and the disorder which emanates from that condition. Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants, good itself is an evil to me, everything resounds, I live between blows, my head ringing: estoy en tinieblas. But sometimes, too, it is another Night: alone, in a posture of meditation (perhaps a role I assign myself?), I think quite calmly about the other, as the other is; I suspend any interpretation; I enter into the night of nonmeaning; desire continues to vibrate (the darkness is transluminous), but there is nothing I want to grasp; this is the Night of non-profit, of subtle, invisible expenditure: estoy a oscuras: I am here, sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love.
The second night envelops the first, the Darkness illuminates the Shadows: 'And the night was dark and it illuminated the night.' I make no attempt to emerge from the amorous impasse by Decision, Enterprise, Separation, Sacrifice, etc.; in short, by gesture. I merely substitute one night for the other. 'To darken this darkness, this is the gate of all wonder.' "
Sanghyun Ha(Performance Artist, Curator)
Originally working as a performance artist, Sanghyun Ha began curatorial work in 2022. With interests in sculpture and performance, he is also active in the curatorial unit QF, which explores themes of eroticism, feminism, and queerness. Ha co-curated Bench Side (d/p, 2023), an exhibition addressing perspectives of marginalized identities; curated Four Beams (BOAN1942, 2023), a solo exhibition by Minhoon Kim that reimagines the beam as a physical metaphor for masculinity; and organized A Folding Dog (QUAD, 2023), a performance by Yun Hwa Yang exploring distanced contact.
