Silence of Flaubert..

“I had to describe in detail to explain, but that story was something that frustrated me ” 

Gustave Flaubert spoke of his anguish in writing whilst working on ‘Madam Bovary’; what he couldn’t stand was the functionalities of the intrinsic nature and characteristics of typical story writing. His rejection of the conventional narratives has enabled him to venture onto experimental writing and linguistic silence. Mirroring similar thoughts, are four individual artists, Seungyoung Kim, Myungkeun Koh, Hyeseung Lee and Youngjin Yoo, their works are distant from the elements of eye-catching glamour or clear deliverance of concepts, and their works’ theme has been taken out of narrative images with visual details that overlaps and left to its ambiguity. Opacity of such images leads your eyes to the ulterior indefinable world. The exhibition focuses on the silence of those artworks and the momentum of its static stillness. 

Hyeseung Lee’s gazes at boundary of space, and stays at its fridges. Precisely, at a wall that has a gap in between, a window frame rather than an actual window, as a passage, she dwells in a space between its opening and closing. Emotionally restrained brush stroke of hers, thoughtfully caresses a corner of a wall and paints down on silence and desire of an enclosed space. Silence abounds from the grey wall with a stain glass, on glimmering light that shines through the door and the landscape that’s been viewed through the window, leads the heart of silence, secretly to the another place. The trace of the warmth of the brushstroke that persevered through the silence of the past captures the audience’s gaze to linger.

Yougnjin Yoo, who has been contemplating on space and time through the use of media of photography recalls on the presence, and absence. His memory on what’s existed, but lost today, slowly fades away, reflecting now only the traces of the livelihood of ruins. Objects that have been collected from Ahhyungdong redevelopment area, having been placed in a snow globe, like plastic ware and being revived as a form of architectural structure. Photographs of soon- to- be disappeared buildings are erased by acetone and remained merely as a landscape, those erased traces laments for the lost dreams and unstable future through the residues of greyish powder being scattered around the snow globe.

Yoo’s observation on memory and time and Lee’s brushstrokes that caress the walls, emerges in Myungkeun Koh’s photographic sculptures as transparent properties. His early works in 1990 delivered a strong message of silence over images of enclosed windows on old and shabby walls and abandoned buildings. Ever since, Koh’s use of transparent properties like OHP film and flexi glass into photographic sculptures, it has created an eye- penetrating experience from the surface of the object to its inside. Later year of 2000’s architectural artwork presented in his exhibitions conveyed the ecstasy aroused from the tipping point   between the reproduction and phantasm. Here, various landscape of nature versus city is being portrayed in harmony, with the eclectic places of time and space collaged together to coexist with memories, history, nature, time and symbol.

Seungyoung Kim’s work installed on the ground floor of its own solitude, allows the external world’s landscape and individual’s in depth internal silence to correspond. The ‘flag’ that has been appearing from his Antarctic experience, is a work presented with a small flag fluttering imperceptibly above the vast expanse of salt- made snowfield. Kim who also visited Lake Baikal in Russia last year, projects the time of the sublime nature of universe providence into his flag work.  The gaze of the artist that lays on the time of darkness in silence has engaged LED lights to capture the wonders of the night sky at different times. As the lucid blue night sky changes, the flag work stirs the moment of the world resonating with silence to convey the one’s inner reverberation.

The exhibitions’ space fills with vague and overlapping images, reservation, and observation of the unknown. Also, it interrelates with the appreciation of time, memories of the past, mourning for the disappeared, providing contexts about the vague and enclosed. Signs of traces that these four artist have scattered around the hall may not rise as a vivid and clear images or being a narrative at once, but soon enough, time, space and one’s inner silence will be discovered, while lingering around the periphery. Perhaps, there may be a room where a voice of silence, may reside in the midst of oblivion. 

Somi Sim (Curator, Gallery Skape)