Conference paper, Friday, October 20th, 2007, 06:15 p.m.
Wonil Rhee: The Exhibition-Project Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves
(ZKM, 2007-06-15 – 2007-11-04)History – The 20th Century – The Sea of Humans
There was a picture of a man who had been at once thrown right in the middle of the world history and, simultaneously, out of the world. It was a press photo of an Asian in German military uniform who waslooking off into nothingness as if resigned to all while being held for interrogation at the US military base immediately after the Normandy invasion. It was supposed that, though not highly likely, he could be a Japanese guy because there were Asian prisoners of the Russian army or mercenaries in the German troops. However, the caption of the photo said that the prisoner identified himself as a Korean. He could not even figure out what the interrogators said and no one in the military base could understand his language. The man seems to have chosen ‘silence’ rather than words and disappeared from the official history, just leaving this black-and-white news photo. You were not allowed to locate the final destination of these strange turns of his fortune. I thought that perhaps, he might have not wanted to complain of any injustice and wrong or require his due portion in history; but, rather, it appears to me that he only desired to ask them to return him to his home. Nevertheless, he was unable to make even this desperate wish understood by them, only to vanish into history hopelessly and absurdly.
Neither do I intend to exhaust myself by using this picture as a means to fulfill my ‘artful’ mission as a curator; nor do I dream of the historical restoration of the subaltern, the minority that ought to be reestimated or reconstructed, encouraged by the passion for documentation associated with press photos. What I can say is that, in the reality of the photo where even all of the prospects and memories of the subject were completely sealed off and even the communication between minds based on reason and consciousness was clearly denied, blockaded and not given, I just wondered what kind of the sea of time he was looking at: Where was the horizon he was staring at placed, on the sea of the 20th century humans who longed for the immaculate ocean; and what will the posterior history comment about his gaze?
Beginning from the story of an Asian man in the photo who escaped out of history after leaving the unanswerable questions behind, I would like to describe ‘the 20th century of Asia’ within world history, Asian modernity which has penetrated the ‘Meta History’ as the structure of its grand narrative, and the history of Asian contemporary art which, by reflecting the unique modernity peculiar to Asia just like a mirror, has born confusion, ambiguity, and absurdity as the driving force of creation. When I first saw the picture of the Korean soldier in Normandy, my only impression of him was that he had humble but very hostile eyes. And, in his gaze, I could witness the moment of ‘standstill’ when the ego’s internal and exterior visual perception toward the world were totally broken. That moment of short sigh of ‘standstill’, I found the temporality all of whose messages or intentions, whether be it history, ideology, war or anything, were castrated or removed and, thereby, which existed as an emptied sign. It resembled the eyes of an animal, caged in the zoo and crouching on the ground, where deep despair and the desire of escape were mixed. For me, it was the ‘situation where a text escapes out of itself’, a kind of bursting sound suggestive of the break of the discontinuity and disconnection of fixed reading, ‘fuzziness’ and ‘hallucination’, and the very condition of ‘absurdity’ and ‘confusion’. His poorlooking body evidences the state where the corporality as the common place of desire and reason is destroyed, existing as the sign of the anomie of ‘loss’ and ‘absence’ which occurs when you resist against extremely unendurable noise coming from the outside regularly. His body and stationary pupils disclose the tendency of self-torment and self-hatred which devour even the secret shelter of self-love, bringing the consequence of exhausting, squandering the fate of the self. What only remains in the place that has been evacuated of both body and soul in that way is meaningless ‘monologue’ like nonsense murmuring. The message of that blind and nonpurposive ‘confusion’ is nothing more than the painful confirmation of the reflective self-existence, for the ‘murmuring’ does not suppose any external receiver and thus, is a lonely boomerang returning towards the self. This condition of ‘panic’ where the pure functional horizons of the visual and auditory (the American soldiers’ interrogation was a mere noise to the Korean man) perception toward the external world are both eliminated at the same time brought about the total ‘overturn’ of all sensory orders, which interrupts the rapid passage of time and ultimately promotes the emergence of the synesthetic world of ‘disorder’.
