Art space pool presents “Stuttering,” a solo exhibition of Koh Seung Wook introducing his new production for the 2010 pool production series. Since his first solo show in 1997, Koh Seung Wook (b. 1968, Jeju Island, Korea, based in Jeju/Seoul) has addressed alternate values and sentiments found in everyday manual labor, fleeting personal memories and play, against the domineering social paradigm of consumerist capitalism and authoritative power. Speaking in terms of the western art historical reference, Koh shares the “life-like art” attitude of Allan Kaprow and the nonscientific, irrational qualities of Italian movement, Arte Povera, but differentiates himself in particular forms and problematics intertwined with empirical realities of the local. In contemporary Korean art history since the 80s, Koh has inscribed the terms like “Lay Men's Art”1 (Park Chan Kyong, 2000, translated term by Young Min Moon in 2006) as the next application of Joo Jae Hwan (b. 1941)'s postwar Korean realist Dada, “Poor Art” ; and Bob (Rice) Art,” a supplement to Choi Jeong Hwa (b. 1961)'s traditional market-motivated Korean Pop Art ; “Charyuk2 performance,” instead of avant-garde art performance or traditional spiritual performance ; and finally, “super-low budget crafts” instead of high-end sculpture tradition in art. Notions in such terms coined around Koh's works provoked the local art scene of the 90s in its search for diverse possible modes and ideas to integrate private and public concerns, around such impending issues of the times as ordinary citizens, consumerism, kitsch, the aesthetics of everyday in urban living and the public. Koh‟s particular qualities of unassuming honesty, cruel burlesque and absurd play for failures are still cherished as a valid frame of reference in the praxis of artists today, mostly due to his full resonance with counter values and sentiments in all that are degraded as useless, shabby, out-of-date, retarded, inefficient, and malfunctioning by intense social normalization of Korea.
 
But this exhibition is neither a retrospective nor a semi-retrospective of Koh Seung Wook, but a show featuring his latest ongoing endeavor. The above introduction is for offering viewers a context in which his new trajectory can be located, rather than for defining Koh's artistic position in official art history by historicizing his entire oeuvres. Koh Seung Wook's works are identified as three groups : first, early conceptual works on institutional nominating system of art and creative activity (“Honor us with your presence.” Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, 1997) ; second, satiric performance works on the realistic gap between local everyday reality and national manipulation of the real under the slogan of national security, economic prosperity and environmental development (“Red Fried Chicken” alternative space pool, Seoul, 2000 ; "Playing on the Vacant Lot,2001", "Für Elise,2004", "Triathlon, 2004", "Standing Funeral, 2009", and most recently, "Book of Triangle, 2009"  ; and third, video and text works on individual/collective memories that are terminated, deleted, deprived, displaced or simply ignored in the repeated traumas of local history ("Proposal, 2008", "Legend,2008", 'Driveling Mouth,2008").
 
The new series "Stuttering", shows the artist's much bolder step into intangible terrain of memory, away from his prior attempts to call out memories to tangible public terrain. “Whether be it in Korea or anywhere else, any community from a family to a modern nation, there are the marginalized and fallen out in its forming process. While being sad, enraged, mocking at the system and trying to restore the community of absence in our historical memory by identifying and calling their names, I came to realize that I had always positioned myself inside, not listening to their voices calling me. Silence was their language. Perhaps I had kept myself inside, due to personal fear and artistic arrogance. This time, however, I worked with the kind of modesty, cautiousness and respect to the unknown outside, naked of knowledge and position as others.” (Interview with Koh Seung Wook, 2010)
 
Then he detected traces of anonymous human face on the rocks which he meets in the city and nature. He cast the collected rocks, more accurately, the vague contour of eyes, nose and mouth, and lit his paraffin casts. And he took the “portrait” photos of each candle/rock/being. Iconography of is very simple as of a few of candles and dozens of poetic outdoor still life photographs, but reveals fundamental difference from the artist's previous attempt in "Driveling Mouth" where he actually tried to “articulate” the silence of “avowable community”(J-L. Nancy). In "Stuttering", Koh imprints the faces as they are directly from the rocks, not transferring or representing them in any other means, because silence already is their way of existence.

Digging under such Zen Buddhist aphorism, "Stuttering"  proposes Koh Seung Wook's questions on the nature and quality of “relationality” among individual subjectivities, which had in fact been reserved under such obsessive agendas of complexity, diversity, locality and individual particularities, etc. in the post-90s local art scenes. The other question he explores in"Stuttering" is a question of innovative form, which is still counted as a critical factor of avant-garde art. In one of the interviews back in 2008, Koh said, “there is an artistic layer that I have made as an individual artist, and here is a social layer that demands full commitment to immediate political and historical concerns. I am probing a way to overlap and intersect these two layers.” This remark by the artist in his mid 40s does not simply note the aesthetic question how the socio-political subject matters can be applied in the frame of aesthetics, rather an ontological question how two layers of subjects - an individual and a collective - can be completed reciprocally, while not forsaking each other. This question is related to M. Blanchot's notion that an individual existence completes itself in its entirety of “ex-sistance” (opening up) and “ex-position” (external/in-between relations).

Koh finds his answer not in progressive experimental art forms nor in strategic methodologies, but in an intuitive language of enchantment. Viewed from the folk beliefs where the dead and the living coexist, especially the mystic animism abound in Jeju Island, Koh's discerning of human faces in rocks is a natural behavior. The problem lies in authority and colonialism deeply embedded in the system and structure of disciplines, discourses and languages. Jo Ju-Yeon, art theorist, in discussion about the issue of formal innovation as a requirement of avant-garde art, pointed out that “When the historical memory is terminated by traumatic intervention, and subsequently artistic forms and resources are deficient from the forgotten or disinherited past, artists explore 'degenerative' forms as a way to assess the forgotten.” Over the barriers of individual interest, favoring styles, generational experiences, sentiments and modes of expressions, cultural producers today share general worry about increasing phenomenon of displacement on both layers of subjectivities that eagerly replace and consume one's oblivion with the other's desire.
 
Koh Seung Wook continues his formal experiments as he had done in his hanging relief knitted from black plastic bags, a roasted chicken made of red scrub bath towels and string figures made of the shards of plastic pig coin banks. Difference would be that he had “tried to open the gate of 'truth' by responding to the false reality using the metaphor of false” (Park Chan Kyong3), whereas Koh is now trying to actually open the gate of unbelievable truth that had been displaced both by the false reality and metaphorical rhetoric. Intentional exaggeration is the key in satirical jokes if they want to make a critical effect on excessive reality, but when the situation compels one to not play such jokes any longer, “stuttering,” the act of dissolving the language, can be a harsh criticism. Such doubts - as even the stuttering itself is a metaphor, a much more fantastic lie would be more like 'truth,' or 'the unbelievable truth' would also be false as well, -become the sound of stuttering in Koh's new insight.                                                                             

Heejin Kim, director, art space pool