The show was held until 2022/02/27
at Seosomun Main Branch
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Exhibition Location
Seosomun Main Branch 3rd floor Project Gallery
Seosomun Main Branch 3rd floor Exhibition Hall
Seosomun Main Branch 3rd floor Crystal Gallery
Exhibition Period
2021.12.16~2022.02.27
Admission
Free
Exhibition Genre
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Information on the Exhibition
Homo Natura is a solo exhibition of the media artist sanghee song (b.1970). The exhibition presents six new works commissioned by the Seoul Museum of Art, along with a work that has not yet been shown in Korea. The artist embraces various forms of media and builds her own visual language that unfolds contradictions of modern society inside a delicate narrative structure. The artist collects and studies various forms of literature such as myths, media reports, and historical records, and visits sites where these past traces remain. Based on the research, she has carried out aesthetic experiments that fuse different genres such as music, drawing, and literature into video works. Each reference has been woven into horizontally dense creative narratives, suggesting open endings, and they gradually expand into larger narratives throughout her oeuvre. In an era of media convergence, how the artist builds her narratives intersect with a method of transmedia storytelling, wherein a narrative becomes more creatively enriched when it is divided and unfolds and is re-integrated again through various platforms.[1] Furthermore, the artist can be regarded as a digital quiltmaker; her art practice is reminiscent of the process of overlaying colorful pieces of fabric sans hierarchy or a careful sewing which sublimates them into handicrafts with unique patterns and beauty.
For the past 20 years, sanghee song's body of work, which has examined the origin of the dark sides of life through literary research and field exploration, has encountered several turning points. Her early interest in various women's images in Korea soon extended towards other aspects of society, the nation state, and even the larger world to which they belong, illuminating the life alienated from social conventions, hierarchies, wars, colonial views, and capitalism. The artist, who has engaged with the voices of forgotten beings, brings up the topic of homo natura and carefully, yet actively, tries to initiate a conversation. The title of this exhibition is a quote from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche criticized the absolute dualism represented by the notion of good and evil, and said “the terrible basic text of homo natura must be recognized even underneath these fawning colors and painted surfaces.”[2]
Since some time ago, we often witness contradictions that our society does not try to understand each other, but only pushes personal stance further through coercion and sophistry. For those of us, humans, subjected to the world of infinite competition called neoliberalism, standards such as good and evil, sameness and difference, truth and falsehood seem clear at first glance, but in reality, an individual's multifaceted human nature is intertwined in complex and subtle situations. Homo Natura is organized to reflect on humans by returning to this “terrible basic text,” in order to gain clues for our coexistence. At the same time, the exhibit leads the audience to glimpse the artist's new attempt to form a mutual relationship with participants by presenting delicate drawings and objects, along with various filming devices and media. This imparts an artistic message that transcends the boundaries of media and provides an opportunity for viewers for active communication.
[1] Jae Hyun Lee, “Chapter 7. Transmedia Storytelling” in 디지털 시대의 읽기 쓰기 [Reading and Writing in Digital Era], (Seoul: Communication Books, 2013), http://www.digital.kyobobook.co.kr
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Chan-Kook Park (Paju: Acanet, 2018), 297-298.
Apple, 2021
3-channel video, color, sound, 15 min. 15 sec. Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
Apple is a three-channel video created by overlapping or intersecting various contents and images of apples mentioned in historical events and literature. The artist uses apples as a motif to rethink dichotomous standards such as truth and falsehood, good and evil, good and bad.The first video shows an elephant show and a documentary of the chimpanzee “Ham” used in the animal experiment in a space with subtitles quoted from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The video evokes paradoxical emotions that intersect with the case of using animals as tools under the pretext of advances in science and human pleasure, and the hate, confusion, and alienation felt by Gregor Samsa, who turned into a roach, and is subsequently killed by an apple thrown by his father. Here, the apple has ambivalent meanings of a reward and punishment given to a being that is used for human benefit. In the second video, lines from Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo script― a dialogue between Galileo and his pupil Andrei―are delivered through the mouths of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, shown alongside video footage from the Manhattan Project, a US-led nuclear development experiment. The heliocentric theory claimed by Galileo was regarded as a heresy by the church at the time, but now it is accepted as the truth, rather than a hypothesis. Meanwhile, Einstein and Oppenheimer urged the United States to develop an atomic bomb in order to prevent Germany’s nuclear development during World War II, developing the Manhattan Project. However, after recognizing the dangers of nuclear weapons, they regretted their judgement. The video combines two events that brought different results to show that scientific advances can be either beneficial or poisonous to humans, and what is believed to be the truth is also variable depending on history or circumstances.The third video refers to Alan Turing's biography The Enigma and the animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Turing is today regarded as the father of artificial intelligence and computers, and was the hidden figure who cracked the German code and led the Allies to victory in World War II. However, as a sexual minority, he was considered a criminal in British society and was forced to undergo chemical castration at the time―he could not escape the toxicity of his time. The video compares this to the poison apple in Snow White, based on the anecdote that Turing committed suicide by eating an apple covered in cyanide, and referencing his like of the 1937 animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Snow White who ate the poisonous apple came back to life, Alan Turing is re-evaluated today. By presenting various symbols surrounding the apple, the artist questions whether the essence of existence can be defined as singular, and to reconsider the truth or value that is taken for granted in our time.
Dream, 2021
multi-media installation, dimensions variable. Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
Dream is composed of a single-channel video and objects that traverse the past-present-future, reality and virtuality. Replicas of famous paintings and sculptures appearing in the video are independent objects and are installed in pair with text messages displayed on mobile devices. Dream begins with a scene where dream and reality are indistinguishable, as a field of peach blooms from An Gyeon’s Mongyu Dowondo (Dream of Strolling in a Peach Garden) is overlaid with the trees in the dolmen park in Hwasun, Ganghwado. The scenery one encounters in the field of peach blooms after following a light is a tragic image that suggests life and forgotten deaths in our blind spots. From Gosiwon (low-cost accommodation) where you can barely lie down, the subway platform at Guui Station, to Yangjaecheon, Cheonggyecheon, and Bulgwangcheon, where you can see the skyline of high-end residential complexes and high-rise buildings, each location in the background hints at the social murder caused by poverty and alienation, which you may have seen in the news at least once. Small clothes hanging from trees serve as an analogy of blooming peach petals, a motif that symbolizes the souls of those who have passed away after this death. In this way, Mureungdowon, a symbol of utopia in East Asia, is not the dreamed world but a place where cold reality unfolds, making us question whether the utopia exists.Objects appearing in the scenes of life in the video, including Mongyu dowondo painting (which constitutes the main narrative of Dream) and Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitekton Gota, Jean-Francois Millet’s The Angelus, Paul Klee’s Above Mountain Summit, and Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, are reborn as completely different entities or creatures in the text messages exchanged with an anonymous interlocutor, rather than simply imitating the original. Arkhitekton, which rises up against the background river in the video, is portrayed in the exhibition hall as a “vertical spirit soaring from the Earth” which is created as memories of sadness and fear, and are reified over a long period of time. This shows the outline of how the latent thoughts and minds in each person's unconscious gather, creating and generating utopian attempts and projects, while implying their planned decline simultaneously. Meanwhile, the paintings of Millet and Klee hanging in the empty Gosiwon room are not unlike antiques that tell the story of a frozen time, and they are introduced as “creatures living in the black hole.” In a black hole where space-time is distorted, the square creature of “painting” makes us think about the existence of art in the space of each individual's life and everyday language. Also, as people who are consumed as instruments of capitalist society are depicted like asteroids floating in space at Guui Station in the video, asteroids are referred to as “electronic bugs” who were forced to work mechanically on the planet Earth two billion years ago in the text message. As such, the main video and objects of Dream, and the fiction delivered through familiar digital language, are a medium that intersects with the viewer's world, highlighting the scars of the harsh reality.Dream shows that the sacrifices of others we have forgotten, the weight of hard work and life that each individual has to bear, and the proximity of the hell from the reality. Just as the projects of utopia that were never realized are just a daydream, the Mureungdowon described in Dream is full of scratches.
Geegers, You and I, 2018
multi-media installation, 2-channel video, color, sound, 10 min. 20 sec., postcards, dimensions variable.
Produced in 2018, Geegers, You and I is a two-channel video presented for the first time in Korea. This work presents a history and a fiction side by side, which at first glance seem disparate. One channel captures the past and present landscapes of Indonesia and Korea. The artist collects postcards circulated in both countries that were once colonies in the early and mid-1900s, visits the places presumed to be the background of the postcards, and film the sites by juxtaposing the postcards. The places include the historical sites of the colonized, such as the building that housed Koreans during World War II, the Sukamiskin Prison in Bandung, and the concentration camp on Java Island, Indonesia, as well as the vacation spots in Indonesia that the Dutch loved. The postcard images reflect the views of the ruling class during the imperial period; the artist contrasts the postcards produced from the colonizer's point of view with the actual location to reveal the influence of the past into the present, and points out that postcards were used as a tool of cultural violence to secure the legitimacy of colonial rule.
On another channel, edited lines excerpted from Yukinobu Hoshino’s 2001 Nights (vol.3, Night 16: Colony), known be a masterpiece of Japanese sci-fi manga, are presented. It is about the mimetic organism that tries to transform by mimicking the strongest creature in Planet Blue, which mankind has visited to build a colony.
When looking closely at the video, the unknown creatures mimicking the strong overlap with our history: Indonesia and Korea were developed by absorbing Western culture and education through modernization, and achieved democratization through internal trauma such as dictatorship, ideological conflicts, and civilian massacre. The history of oppressing people cannot be justified on the grounds of recovery and growth. The work suggests us to look back on history asking whether you and I aren’t the same like those who were hurt in the past.
On My Shoulder, 2021
61 drawings in zig-zag folds, 25 × 19 cm (each), 25 × 1159 cm (total). Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
On My Shoulder is a work connecting an array of pencil drawings that has three types of content, reaching approximately 11 m in length. The first story depicts a walking person carrying another person or animal. It represents the yoke of Karma that is inescapable, such as the various duties and responsibilities one has to bear with birth, and good and evil deeds we perform in life. The second story shows the stages of development from the discovery of atoms and atomic nuclei to atomic bombs and nuclear weapons. Humanity has witnessed many occasions of scientific truth turning into evil, destroying each other. The artist points out the irony in which the discovery of the truth that led mankind to become the rulers of this world is also the beginning of self-destruction. In the third story, Nicolas Thomas Bernhard's The Cap unfolds. The protagonist, who usually suffers from severe headaches and mental illness, accidentally finds a cap on the road. He puts the hat on his head and is unable to remove the hat from his body, although he is obsessed with the thought that he has to return it to the owner. The main character is like each of us who walks and carries too much weight of existence and is unable to unleash the string of hope. In On My Shoulder, the accordion form, in which three stories are connected, seems to symbolize vicissitudes of life. The work resembles the multifaceted nature of ourselves who carry both good and evil, conscience and desires on our backs.
Talk to You, 2021
single-channel video, color, sound, 6 rotating drone speakers, 24 min. Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
Talk to You is a work that constantly asks if we, who have been hurt by each other, can still live together by caring for each other. The single-channel video―continuously splits up into 16 multi-screens then merges back to a single one―has conversations with six drone speakers. sanghee song personally visited places around the world where scars of history are inscribed. She visited sites where indiscriminate terrorism against citizens occurred (Utøya Island, the Oslo 22 July Centre in Norway, and Paris, France); where the pain of ethnic conflict resides (Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Zvornik, and Gora de in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Korea's DMZ); and places that inhabit memories of the democratization movement such as Gwangju and Jakarta, Indonesia. On the screen, the elements of ordinary daily life such as the blue sky and the trees seen from the window she encountered in the lands with different wounds all appear as if pieces of a puzzle are put together. While the pieces reflect our time in which we live in discord and division, they somehow resemble each other and create a connected landscape.
Text excerpted from John Berger's To the Wedding is added to the artist's journey to the scarred land. The characters in the novel have conversations about their own love and loss, hope and despair with those they meet on their way to the wedding. In the story, the characters are sometimes placed in an ambiguous relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. Just as characters in a novel have a conversation with a stranger, the narrator of the multiple screens and drone speakers continue to talk about the existence of ‘you and me’ while Steve Reich's minimal variations flow.
Dialogues―visualized as a colorful palette, shapes of Koch's curves resembling different snowflake crystals, and endlessly changing kaleidoscope patterns―cannot be led to a clear answer and leaves a point to think about each of our indeterminate identities and relative relationships. In the memorials of each land where a peaceful daily life has been restored, but the spirit of sadness still coexists, sanghee song seems to talk about an attitude of resilience in the face of hatred and fear towards each other, just like the characters who silently walk the path of life between despair and hope in the novel.
The Song of the Earth, 2021
7-channel video installation, color, sound, dimensions variable. Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
The Song of the Earth is the video archives based installation that presents various views of the earth that the artist has captured by exploring different parts of the world. Each channel shows the trajectory of the artist’s endeavor to find a shooting method suitable for the context and situation of the places since Mohang in 2008. At the time, the artist emphasized the tragic destruction of the ecosystem by attaching cameras to the port and starboard of the bow to show the fish’s point of view, filming the sea route to Uihang from Mohang in Taean-gun, an area affected by the oil spill in South Korea. In 2011, the artist heard about air pollution caused by a chemical factory fire in the Netherlands and visited the site. There she found brussels sprouts abandoned in a field and captured them by rolling a camera made of ball-shaped modules. Additionally, she attempts experimental filming methods such as hanging a camera on a chest or attaching it to shoes and backpacks to realize the appropriate viewpoints for each location, as seen in the case of attaching a camera to the end of a pole to capture mango trees in Tanzania in 2012.Throughout the process, the artist experiences the place through her body and communes with sadness and hardship inscribed on the land. The two-channel video of walking between low piles of stones amid the faint sound of pinwheels was taken in 2010 by visiting the Osore Mountain in Japan, which is said to be a spiritual place where children who died before their parents during World War II are buried. The artist personally captured the scenery by walking with cameras attached to both shoes to remember and console the deceased buried in a desolate mountain. It is to experience the land where human history is born or only traces of pain remain in the same manner as a pilgrim.Each of the places and forms of nature sanghee song passed through, such as the sky, the sea, the road, and the floor of a building, at first glance, seems like an ordinary landscape, but keeps a long history of human, geopolitical events, and scars. The location of the video includes a ghost town (Chernobyl and Pripyat, Ukraine) covered with trees and bushes after the radioactive dust swept through 30 years ago, making everybody leave the town; the sea (Taean-gun, South Korea) turned black due to an oil spill; a sacred mountain (Mt. Osore, Japan), where the souls of the dead who died in the war inhabit; the cemetery of the victims of World War I (Verdun, France); the territory that served as a base for the transatlantic slave trade from the early 16th to the late 19th century (Bagamoyo, Tanzania; the Canary Islands). The Song of the Earth reveals all various faces of the earth. As though walking through the landscapes of the earth like a visual requiem, the audience will hear the song of the earth.
The New World, 2021
mixed-media, dimensions variable. Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
Composed of tiles, pencil drawings mounted on light boxes, and plaster bonsais, The New World focuses on the multi-layered aspects of human civilization built through conquest and exploitation. Blue tiles produced in the Delft region are crafts inspired by blue and white porcelain made while the Netherlands exchanged with Asia. Motifs covering the history of trade, invasion, and colonization of Western civilization are represented in drawings on the Delft blue tiles, which is itself a symbol of trade.
In the center of the tiles, one can see Hermes, the god of trade, commerce, and theft. Also depicted are spices and ingredients (olive, pepper, cacao, sugarcane), which are major trade items from ancient times to modern times; animals (elephant, beaver, dodo) victimized by the discovery of a new continent and trade wars; infectious diseases (smallpox, tsetse fly, a host of sleeping diseases) created by exchange, conquests, and invasions; and the first page of Robinson Crusoe, a representative travel literature that emerged under the influence of the Age of Discovery. From the perspective of the artist, the trajectory of this conquest extends into space, as exemplified by the US military communications satellite Milstar and the Opportunity, a rover used to search for the existence of water on Mars.
The six pencil drawings mounted in the lightboxes show the light and dark side of the development of civilization. The pencil drawings depict desert kites, a large hunting 'trap', estimated to have been built over 10,000 years ago in the Middle East to catch herds of ungulates such as rhinos, horses, camels, and deer; the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which the Ethiopian government has been constructing on the Nile since 2011 to generate electricity but has become the cause of conflicts between neighboring countries; the ruins of Palmyra destroyed by religious conflicts and wars; Head of a Buddha artificially cut out from the Borobudur Temple during the Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia and displayed at a Dutch national museum; two paintings created during the period of rapid social, economic and cultural development―Number 32 by Jackson Pollock and A Monkey and a Dog Beside Dead Game and Fruits by Dutch still-life artist Jan Weenix.
If Jackson Pollock's work rejects the traditional painting techniques with pours or sprinkles of paint symbolizing his will that expresses itself externally, the bonsai signifies nature sacrificed by humans for growth and development. Bonsai form artificially restricts plant’s growth and is grown to a size suitable for human appreciation. The repressed will to grow evokes ironic emotions as it contrasts with the endless desires of humans. As such, The New World shows the benefits of technological and cultural development and the other side of humanity's desires, conflicts, and the destruction of cultural heritage and ecosystems.
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