A keyword in understanding this exhibition is sense: sense derived from material; space and time, sensed through the body: all senses like sight, touch, and smell. He says, “The body-subject is material and the sense of existence. To be precise, we can contemplate a changed life-environment through the experience of change in our body. ----- The frame of daily perception, visual perception, clashes of body senses, the revolt of gravity resisting against the body’s daily perception ------ My body-senses lead unfamiliar mutant sensations as if experiencing a foreign substance in the body.” (Artist’s Statement)

Running Railroad-Running Sound Road (2012), Waterproof (2012), and The Way of Existence of Body-Time (2012) all induce viewers to physical activities, almost like sport. In Running Railroad-Running Sound a tape-drawing like a railway traverses the venue’s four walls, and ambiguous, dynamic space and time is engendered as sound like the wind coming from speakers installed in the following the rail-shaped drawing. In this space and time viewers experience his work with their bodies. Moreover, viewers execute exercise combined with the senses of the body, resisting gravity in heavy iron slippers. They are no longer Cartesian subjects contemplating the world from the watchtower of the soul separate from the world of the body, but are body-time-space compounds, undergoing metamorphosis, becoming drawing and iron slippers. Their perception of things is comprehensively disturbed in the process. The body is added here to the sense of sight; time intervenes in pure space; pure form shatters and becomes formless; and the orderly meaning of things is disturbed.

Visual perception is here influenced by physiology. Unlike spiritual intelligence seeking meaning, physiology is associated with skin sensation, muscle, pain, fatigue, and sportive activities. The notion of pure visual imagery is revealed as fictitious amid experience of following the trajectory of sound in iron slippers. It changes into creative experience - visual-physical experience. In this respect Hong’s works are aligned to Duchamp’s Rotorelief and Anemic Cinema, which criticize the concept of pure vision and combination of vision and body. Duchamp transformed visual perception into physiological experience by rotating images with a motor. Rosalind Krauss referred to this as “corporealization of vision”, a typical overthrowing-strategy of the concept of pure modernist vision. It means body suppression is involved in the concept of vision, and disturbing vision by reviving the body is an overthrow of ocularcentrism dominating modern Western culture.

Hong does not see the other as a completely new, entirely heterogeneous, and fully different being. It is not even a perfectly good being. A complete difference is another concept of complete sameness. It is the same taken into the interior of form and meaning and defined when Bataille’s ‘expenditure’ is completely restricted. The other here is a weird unfamiliarity (called ‘the real’ by Jacques Lacan), accidently erupting among palpable beings around us, or in the same, not as coming from a new world through romantic emancipation. The other is also seen as a suddenly un-familiarized being, indefinable as it always remains divided and deconstructed, with its own place. After Bataille, we have an “accidental disaster occurring in existence itself, the overflowing of existence”. In this sense, and as it has no meaning kept or understood, the other may be resistant to all the politico-social and subversive only in this way: It is not resistance but a disaster or terror in recent philosophy. The methodological context for Hong’s work is involved in politics and is revealed at this point.

His work’s socio-political aspect is represented by unfamiliar feeling and the reaction it induces, not by the messages it conveys. Hong expressed this as “an aesthetic resistance trying to construct reality differently, not as art different from reality”. Such unfamiliarity causes change in the stable status of the subject with a socio-political consciousness, and so his work’s socio-political meaning is never lucid expression or semiotic communication but is felt as simply an ambiguous allegory, and integrated socio-political value and trust. In this sense, it is wrong to see Hong’s work as a pure aesthetic exploration departing socio-political issues.

All art is political. The problem is the theological, Enlightenment view of art, regarding art as the object encapsulating political connotations, separate from the subject’s existence. Hong clarifies his position here: “My work has no interior for critical social concern, reflection, political content, or reality. If there is something triggering response and friction in my work with the exterior, it is perhaps a dream of and reaction to my age and world. That is my work’s political aspect and reason for being.”

by KIM Wonbang 

*image (left)
'ringwanderung', lenticular, dimmensions variable, 2012
© Myung-Seop HONG