Experiments with Media
These works emerged almost simultaneously in 1993, during a period when my perception and thinking were moving unusually fast, largely without external references. Such biological rhythms of creation are rarely visible from the outside, yet they are crucial to an artist’s process.
Anonymous mirror, 1993
pigment print, 140 x 100cm
Around this time my sensory attention was shifting from natural objects toward my own body.
To produce Anonymous Mirror, I blocked all the windows of my studio to create a darkroom and purchased an enlarger so that I could develop film and make large prints myself. Using my own body as the model, I performed the body of an “other,” staging gestures such as adjusting the camera angle and lighting, hiding the genitals, or tilting the body toward the camera.
This work was an attempt to transfer the sensory approach previously applied to objects onto the body itself. By separating the “self who sees” from the “self who appears as the subject,” the body image framed by the camera became another form of repositioning through estrangement.
To achieve this, identifiable parts of the body were placed outside the camera frame or obscured through gestures, creating anonymity and gender ambiguity. In this way the image functioned as a mirror of alterity that disturbed the stability of identity and the structure of the gaze.
The refined black-and-white contrast and the decision to print the images at a scale much larger than the actual body were also devised as devices to intensify this sense of otherness.
At the time, the work did not produce any visible response. However, four years later, in 1997, I was struck when I encountered the phrase “I’ll be your mirror” on a poster for Nan Goldin’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. The following year, through exhibition catalogues, I also encountered works such as Marc Quinn’s self-portrait cast from his own blood and Sarah Lucas’s Get Off Your Horse and Drink Your Milk, 1994. Although the contexts and methods were different, I became interested in the historical simultaneity through which artists in different places were proposing new perspectives on the body.
The Room of Silence, 1993
Slide projection, 21 seconds of blackout, heartbeat sound and silence
Inside a completely darkened, enclosed space, a slide projector begins to operate and suddenly shuts off.
Twenty-one seconds of blackout and silence press down on the viewers. A faint heartbeat becomes audible. When the projector lamp turns on again with a yellow glow, it projects images of the brutal massacres of Korean independence activists by the Japanese army, scenes of liberation and war, demonstrations, and records of the May 16 military coup. The blackout and silence then return for another twenty-one seconds.
This work was conceived as an experiment with media.
By forcing viewers to smell the unpleasant hair of prisoners in earlier works, and here confining them within sudden darkness and silence, I attempted to reposition the notion of “safe viewing.” The spatial and temporal structure destabilized the authority of the viewer who believes themselves to be merely observing.
This experiment later developed into the electrical sparks of Epilog, “Łódź Ghetto” (1996), the emotional violence of Spitting (1997), and the exposure of private experience in untitled 97-7.
Seeing, after all, is not as simple as it appears.
18th May 1993
Single-cut slide projection and sound (played at double speed)
On May 18, 1993, I wandered through the streets of Seoul collecting images and sounds. Using a single slide frame and sound played back at double speed, I created an installation.
Although I had experienced the terrifying vibrations of May 18, 1980 while serving in an artillery unit on the front line, thirteen years later the streets of Seoul carried no visible trace of that memory.
With this single frame of film and sound, I attempted to reposition the invisible and inaudible void of memory.