Time

On April 16 this year, many children died. Born after me on the forward-flowing orbit of time, they vanished before me. Time is said to be changeable, relative, even arbitrary. Such comments, however, are generally made by those mindful of the possibility of expanding experienced time by reconfiguring and reconstituting the past. But the temporal experience that April 16 incident cut loose. The annihilation of so many young people had left a big hole in future time. It was both a hole in the present and a hole in the future. The sinking of the Sewol ferry was the death of the future in the present. Present that cannot become future loses its very grounds for existence and is left tottering precariously.

 

Sinkholes

After the sinking of the Sewol on April 16, I kept staring at the vivid future hole that had appeared in the present. As if corresponding to the temporal hole, there emerged spatial holes in the middle of the street. These sinkholes were very real holes that had appeared in the spaces we walk and stand upon. While others marveled at these holes in the surface of the earth, I was more surprised by the huge subterranean spaces they revealed via images in the news. Sinkholes appeared when the ground beneath the surface “disappeared.” The sinking of the Sewol and the appearance of these sinkholes confirmed to me the existence of positive forms created by “absence.” Absence, unlike nothingness, is a positive, clearly tangible entity. It is a very real substance that completes existence, but in a way different to existing.

 

Memorial to Absence

Absence is a powerful entity. Paradoxically, however, it only appears in an interdependent relationship with existence by borrowing the language of existence. Attempts in art to express the mode of absence ultimately have no choice but to borrow the language of existence as it seeks to detect a sense of absence. I wanted to make a monument to commemorate absence. I wanted to build a form that embodies and enacts absence’s mode of existence. Over the last few months, I found myself making a series of small sculptures in paper and clay that translate senses of narrative, formal, temporal and spatial absence in material dimension. When I cut paper, light was divided and space became partitioned. When I put the cut pieces together again, a form was created with a new hidden space emerging at the same time. The form of absence started to take shape, sometimes following narrative, sometimes following icons, and the coordinates of temporality and spatiality. I took photographs of these forms. I wanted to create images that functioned as the gaps between the material and the immaterial, existence and absence.

 

Monument Zero

“Monument Zero,” the result of these processes, is the fourth work in my formal research series. The series began in 2013 with “Mansejeon( A Chronicle of One Thousand Years),” a collection of narrative paper objects based on the novel of Yeom Sang-seop. In winter of the same year, this was followed by “Danbaekgwang(Opalescence),” paper sculptural objects that depicted Mt. Bukhansan in various displaced states in spatial and temporal dimensions by flashing light on the mountain. “Antenna,” presented early this year, consisted of fragmented objects, people and tools in an interdependent relationship of mutual signal sending. “Monument Zero,” a continuation of this formal research, is an attempt to form absence using tangible materials, and print the result. To me, this series is paper drawings on space, a concrete sculpture as immaterial image, which is continuing up to now. This is how absence exists.

September 9, 2014   Sangdon Kim