An imagineer of city light aurora
The exposure of city space as “place” in visual art happens here and “harbors certain values where the subject’s bio-sexual needs is satisfied”, as experience itself is sustained in a presupposed comfort. If “space” is thought to be strange and inducing fear, “place” can be described as multiple sensations in sufficient alteration and thereby giving a stable aesthetic sentiment, creating a sort of comfort belt which envelops our field of experience. In many cases of visual art, the concept of city is recognized hence as “place”.
What is not known as “flâneur”, designating in similar terms saunterers or loafers leisurely strolling distance of the large city seemingly without a particular purpose, as they first did in 19th century Paris. This, as an artistic concept, has been popularized among young artists based in Seoul. Many different experiences of flâneurship, in some cases from a particular subjective point of view, is reconstituted or amplified for artistic expressions, like buildings and apartments observed at close range or at differing personal radii as to their moving perspective along city grids.
Jo-young Han too deals with this problematic, but from and with highly differentiated features. For the artist, the city of Seoul is not perceived as merely having multiple experiences imbricated, or in terms of “place”. It is but an existential being with no accurate sense of belonging in an utterly vast arena of city life. The night view of the city as represented by the artist is a reflection of complex psychological remarks, symbolic of the existence’s instability, unfulfilled desires, willing to get away from the present.
The artist’s high-level panoramic perspective is more than instrumental in the reflection on the city’s psychological landscape. The succinct arrangement of glimmering points reveals a myriad of lives in its abstract terms. The observer, in its nature foreign vis-à-vis the elements viewed in the dark, keeping a metaphorical distance from that which he is to be integrated into, shuns any direct embodiment of his/her sentiments.
The apparent instability and uncanniness in the mise-en-scène of the dark view, springing from his subjective psychology is not to be understood as a generically negative idea, which is evident in . As for the latter, the work shows the willingness to be laid bare in the multi-layered entity consisting of different lives. The artist’s objective is to re-integrate abandoned “stuff” to be used again as constitutive elements of the city. The city’s “space” shall then be turned into “place” where experiences and memories are ensnarled.
In one of his more recent works, , his discretion is based on the energetic astronomical phenomenon, and the artist’s faithful sentiment rests again on his personal experience. Concerning the subject matter, it might seem to be performing cognitive displacements from urbanized environment to Nature, while his focus still lies beneath cityscapes. From the childhood admiration for the flow of sky radiation, he pushes the abstract image of aurora that becomes symbolic of “the energy required by modern people living in the hiatus between the reality and the real.”
The city has been his sphere of life; he cannot get away from it, or perhaps shall he not due to its charm. In it we find elements of extraneousness stringing out, leading the artist to intuitively draw boundary from others. There exists however a sensitive dialectic between the effort to achieve certain proximity and that for the opposite. This is shown by the paradox of distantiation. The effect that he envisages, estranging flâneurs longing to witness aurora as the imagineer has come to know through experience, will continue to be expressed through means of bright ‘glow’ rather than ‘darkness’.
By Miyoun Park (Curator)
