Kim Sang Jin’s work starts from having doubt about the cognitive attitude and system of firmly believing in something. Things that are constantly present in the basis of his work are error and limit appearing in man-made order, norms, and massive system, along with the lost and concealed presence/confirmation of fact brought by the instability of human’s cognitive system/method, the contradictions/absurdities resulted from the gap among perception, cognition, and existence of the reality as we know it. Since our cognition is inherently imperfect, it is impossible to fully capture and understand the subject. Although it could be possible for some sign system (visual, lingual, auditory symbols, etc.) to resemble the subject as much as possible, it cannot correspond one-to-one perfectly with the subject. Dog Sounds (2010) aims to find the gaps and contradictions coming from the process of perceiving the subject and utilizes with the wit ‘arbitrariness of linguistic symbol’ spoken in what has become the classic, linguistic theory of Ferdinand De Saussure (1857~1913). The difference and repulsion coming from the onomatopoeia of foreign language would have experienced at least once cannot have any inevitability to combine signifiant and signifié, while only an arbitrary relationship will become the case that compressively tells the establishment. Simultaneously playing the extracted onomatopoeia sounds of 48 barking dogs from 40 languages including ‘mung mung’, ‘bow wow’, this work attempts to combine the signifiers of each language as if anticipating for the coming of the language before the Tower of Babel. However, the result becomes a mystery. The disparate signifiers of each language clash with each other, become completely disconnected with the signified, and finally degenerate into ambiguous sound after floating meaninglessly. In other words, since the boundaries of actual barking of numerous dogs or unspecified noise become unclear, it loses its function as a signifier (onomatopoeia) and is inverted to the sound before the previous relationship setting of signified-signifier. As the sound (signifier) and the concept cannot build an inevitable structure, the presence of undeniable gap between them confirms the lack of sign system in reality that surrounds us.

In the digital technology era, surrounded by the overflowing information and a giant virtual network densely woven within it, we are faced with the epistemic uncertainty of another dimension that is adhered to the hidden side with its endless possibilities. Being eaten into by the media, such as TV, Internet, and smart phone, modern people live in the world where spectacles, in which everything becomes incidents and issues, are rampant as Jean Baudrillard (1929~2007) has diagnosed. For them, simulation, in which spectacle and sign are strengthened through replication and manipulation, and the hyper reality produced by it are not unfamiliar anymore. Prior to Baudrillard, a media theorist Gunther Anders (1902~1992) in The World as Phantom and as Matrix has called this properties of media (TV), phantom, which is a third dimension that does not belong to anywhere like presence/absence or fact/fiction. The system woven by this phantom is matrix. In this deceptive virtual reality, phantom replaces the reality in the form of imitation and replication. The advancement of cloning technology by contemporary digital technology more thoroughly gets rid of the gap between the copy and the original. On account of the self-replication of ‘the replica without the original’, perhaps we are addicted to and living by conforming to the ‘phantom of feeling’, in which the fake that is more realistic than the original is guaranteed a status and the division between reality/imagination, existence/fiction has no meaning any more.

In Sound Sculpture_Phantom Sign (2014), presented for the first time in this exhibition, Kim Sang Jin deals with the epistemological problem of existence from this ‘phantom of feeling’ through the mechanism of auditory reproduction. The artist places 84 recorders and speakers at 1 meter grid spacing, and the sound recorded in each position is simultaneously played back at the same location. The recorded theatrical scene possesses a performative character to explore and experiment with the process of auditory mechanism but does not resemble staged direction that requires audience participation. Today, approximately 130 years since the invention of phonograph by Edison, the auditory reproduction technology(sound technology) has advanced rapidly, combined with the popularity of 3D stereoscopic displays, a 3D stereophonic sound system like multi-channel surround system, such as Dolby 7.1 channel and 9.1 channel and reached commercialization. In order to reproduce a more realistic ‘Actual Feeling Sound’, this system artificially creates sound field, reproduces virtual sound, and realizes it within the appointed system, thus it still places the audience ‘passively and two-dimensionally’. At this moment, sound only becomes another inevitable industrial product within the standardized mass production system that cannot be and does not need to be optimized to each person. Despite the advancement of technology, this system cannot escape from the early ‘perspective representation of sound’, and it provides the audience with auditory simulacre in a unilateral and standardized way. Another name for perspective representation, perspective with vanishing point is invented for idealistically depicting the shape of the objects in the Renaissance. As a ‘way to set the viewpoint’, it is a perceptual mode that has systemized the relationship between the subject and the line of vision. Getting away with saying that it is a very scientific method, this system forces to perceive in a specific way within the auditory system as it is the case for the vision, and it makes to decide the listener’s behavior, judgment, and thinking within it. On one occasion, Theodor W. Adorno (1903~1969) criticized that a record album degenerates the listening skills, since it does not communicate the real music and fixes the listener’s manners of perception to specific patterns. Hence, special arrangement, which forces one to perceive in a determined manner, becomes a system that operates power.

Seeking diversification of documentation and reproduction, Sound Sculpture_Phantom Sign (2014) destroys the myth of this perspective representation, claiming that it can clearly and idealistically possess the subject with symmetry, balance and stability in the center. The listener gets out of the normative and regulative position controlled by the existing sound system, wandering freely among the speakers, and is able to select the sound by himself. Sound no longer is taken into consideration as one point but is divided and fills the space with multi-layers. When multiple audiences listen to various sounds at different positions provided by numerous speakers, the only place for getting the correct information pointed by the existing system loses its exclusive, privileged position. (Every sound point provides its own information recorded in that location.) On the other hand, we would need to question ourselves whether our sense is still tamed for being cut out by Actual Feeling Sound Technology, or the system is abandoning the real sound hidden from the ‘illusory sound’ without superfluity, which is more realistic than the provided reality. Through this work, the artist says, “I want to show that there are other various existing facts when a new fact arises, and I wanted to give equal opportunity to the other sounds that could not be documented and reproduced while they existed in the same place as the sound provided by the informant.” In addition, the artist reveals, “Instead of bringing to the audience the sound they want to obtain, I would like each one to choose the reproduced sounds on their own.” It reminds of what Slavoj Žižek (1949~ ) proposed in Welcome to the Desert of the Real. He suggested to take a step back from the present life in matrix which is peaceful but controlled, and to contemplate our firm attitude towards the reality, as Neo in the movie Matrix did by swallowing the red pill. Perhaps the artist wanted to skim off the imaginary reality and suggest a route to escape from the well-constructed illusory maze, which has been concealing the real by presenting the reality that exists somewhere with us but is ‘ignored and excluded’ by the Big Other (law, ideology, global capitalism by extension) borrowing the expression of Žižek.

Meanwhile, in An Approximate Value (2014) the artist attempts to show the actual explicit naked face by peeling off the layer of the deceptive reality, in which human’s ambition-capitalism and anthropocentrism are projected onto and which could be sustained only by fictionalization. Since year 0 AD till 1800s, the worldwide population grew from 200 million people to 1 billion people in 1800s, and it has now reached 7.2 billion people in 2014 today. Experiencing the rapid growth since the Industrial Revolution, the global population has shown explosive growth in numbers, more than three times, within just over recent 100 years; however, ecological damage like the extinction of the Earth Biology is also progressing at a fast pace. (It is said that 3 species are becoming extinct every hour at this moment.) As Stephen Jay Gould(1941~2002) explains in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, when converting the 4.5 billion years of the history of the Earth to 24 hours, humans appear in the last 1 minute 17 seconds, and compared to this late appearance, it is a paradoxical situation. In the background, there are humanistic values, in addition to the empirical reasons of the development of science like medical and social sanitation systems and the food production technology. Modern Western humanism, characterized as ‘demythification’, has produced a long-lived convention of dominating, controlling, and utilizing the nature, and since then it is still applied as the fundamentals for human to receive a powerful authority to the nature. Because of this, at an endlessly highest position, human being depreciates the value of any other subject. Secured by this reason, humans justify objectification of all ecosystem of the Earth as their resource (desire) including not only animals and plants, but also minerals, air and water. They even justify the preservation of ecosystem as ‘gene carrier’ for resource management, which is to disguise the anthropocentric value. We can often see the human dignity getting distorted by the human desire in the protection of endangered species. How many species are there disappearing forever in apathy while the animals with high effective value(trafficking, rental, tourism resources, etc.) like Roland gorillas estimated to remain around 1,000 of them on Earth, giant pandas and whales are treated with the utmost devotion as ‘dignified life’? The protection of animals(ecosystem), in which we often talk about while wearing the philanthropic mask, is a frigid hypocritical virtue that would satisfy the desires of the human behind the stage by operating with the value of (economic) resource and scarcity and anthropocentrism. Kim Sang Jin in this work digitizes the arithmetic value of human with a method generally used in the value evaluation for the logic of scarcity. The value of one human entity on Earth is 1 over 7.2 million, the entire population. This means that the value of one Roland gorilla (1 over 1000) is 720 million times higher than one human entity. Since ‘dignified human’, enjoying the highest status of ecosystem, cannot be the subject of value evaluation, this comparison is both economically and commonsensically nonsense and even insulting. By applying this extreme calculation, the artist metaphorically reveals inflation of resources like resource depletion and food crisis-due to mass production and uncontrolled development-laid by the human desire and deflation of each human being as economic commodity, which is the referent of the former case. By regarding the depreciation of human value like surplus labor force (layoffs due to restructuring and unemployment), disparities in income distribution, wealth gap problem, and etc., as the problems of social structure and individual ability, ironically humans are lost in the contradiction that makes their protection like ‘human rights’ and ‘human dignity’ that has wielded absolute power over other species null and void on their own. Whose humanitarianism is it for if it conceals the traumatic reality distinctly existing to keep the beautifully covered hypocritical reality?