“A street landscape passes by. A moment is captured. Can I call the moment the present? Though the temporal moment that I sensed has already passed away, I am still in the very moment. The sensed landscape comes into my mind, merges with elements in there, and then is perceived again anew within me. A nebulous feeling blurring the real and the surreal.... Where is the landscape I see in the continuum of time—the past, the present and the future?”
In Yang’s works appear familiar cars and street landscapes you can easily see anywhere around you. Common automobiles and street scenes are the subject matter for his work because they are the ones he readily encounters, according to Yang himself. To Yang, nothing is more important than the object right before him. He is accustomed to communicating with objects familiar to himself without knowing himself from when he got used to it. Such conversations with his intimate objects help him to be conscious of his “self.”
When Yang is ‘aware of something,’ it primarily refers to the ‘consciousness of an object.” Consciousness establishes a relationship with the object in the midst of being conscious of it. This consciousness-object relationship is of “intentional relationship” explained by Husserl (Edmund Husserl, 1859 ~ 1938), the founder of Phenomenology. According to Husserl, what makes an object as it is and what makes an act of feeling and desire directed toward the object is representation (or objectification). If consciousness does not perform such representation, it is like that the object is nothing—which does not exist—to the consciousness. Husserl viewed an association process through which a sensed external object combines with a similar representation process and creates a meaning intrinsically as one of intentionalities. What Husserl designed to explore was not natural time but internal time of consciousness—not realistic space but phenomenological space, the space that becomes the “living present” from the present perspective.
Between the object he actually looks at and his “self” who is conscious about it, Yang is doubtful over what is real and when is “now.” On such phenomenological and ontological question, Husserl claimed that sensation and perception should be distinguished by means of the exclusion of objective time in terms of time-consciousness; and that perception is more fundamental in composing time. What is sensed is composed of what is perceived. And it is also phenomenological resources for what is perceived. What is perceived can last because continuity of perception is one of the properties of internal time. Let’s look at Husserl’s account:
“If we look at a piece of chalk and close and open our eyes, we have two perceptions. In this situation, we say that we have seen the same chalk twice. We have two temporally separated contents. We also see, phenomenologically, a temporal apartness, a separation. But there is no separation in terms of the object; it is the same. The object endures; the phenomenon changes.”
While you are interacting with the world, you come to realize that the more you know of your “self,” the less you depend on anyone else, and the less you claim. What you realize is you are self-conscious about the fact that “I am in a certain state.” Here, the intentionality that the consciousness holds refers to the whole that a concrete empirical self experiences, or the reflective consciousness of internal perception, or the consciousness toward an object. The process where various sensory contents are interpreted and form conscious relationship with self-identical objects was called prehension or apperception by Husserl. Intentionality lies in the foundation of an act of perception and sensation contents and becomes self-unifying constitutively through prehension or apperception.
The subject in Yang’s works appears as if it drives the car or captures a patch of exterior landscape sensed at a moment. The moment is surely of a phenomenological time and thus can be understood not only as an act of unified apperception by time-object but also as a representation of the object that has already passed by but still occupies a temporal space in an intrinsically conscious way. Thus, a temporal stream consisting of time is not a stream that just flows away and continues to change, but an objectivity represented as “now” after the objectivity is sensed by Yang, modified and then perceived and re-modified from the present perspective. This indicates the unity directed toward the past and transcends “temporal-omnipresence” and continues to pursue something new. In this process, a sight towards an objective object is created and consciousness that always dwells in a continuous stream is formed in unity.

By Seonyoung Hwang/ Ph.D in Art Therapy