The February edition of Art Talk looks at (lm)Possible Landscapes, a rather ambiguoust titled exhibition at Plateau that showcases 14 modern Korean artists who represent different generations and tendencies, but share the common theme of "landscapes." Landscapes have been a subject for innumerable artists throughout the world since time immemorial. They admit a limitless range of interpretations, each differing according to the perspective of the observer. The viewer‘s perspective is no less capable of expanding those infinite meanings into infinite analyses. Here, experts from Korea and overseas train their perspectives on the (im)possible landscapes of 30 works by 14 artists who use the theme of landscape the show the diversity of modem art

Drawing the impossible landscape

As someone from Japan, any thoughts of “landscape” I have now are affected to an indescribable degree by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. This shocking event forced us to ponder the cruel and more complex aspects of our landscape. The searing images of the devastation by tsunami, and the utter transformation of the northeastern coastal landscape distributed through the mass media, delivered a harsh message about the wonders of nature - and the helplessness of us humans in its face. More serious still was the accident that occurred at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant when the earthquake struck. Even now, our landscape is being sickened by the invisible specter of radiation.

Thousands of lost lives, the irreparable damage to cities, the contamination of soil by radiation - as despair and anxiety swirl, we find a positive voice on the other side uttering words of “reconstruction” and “rebirth”. In some ways, it forms an overlapping image with the Japan that lay in ruins after the Second World War. Throughout human history, human beings have recovered their lost cities and rebuilt new landscapes.

The themes of reconstruction and rebirth are addressed by many of the artists in the (Im)Possible Landscape exhibition, but there is an ever-present skepticism about the developer and his or her idea of “progress.”

Hong-gu KANG’s photograph shows a house being demolished for a redevelopment project, but its expression - digitalized and colored - comes across to the viewer as something ambiguous and dreamlike.

Dong-Yeon KIM uses thin sheets of plywood in his work, which bears names like Holy City and Interchange. These elaborate installations- Kim has said that he wants “to express the histories of construction sites, which symbolize both war-time destruction and urban development, and bygone industrial areas” - seem at once like ruins and the scene of urban redevelopment projects.

Sea-hyun LEE is another artist who trains his focus on lost landscapes. His paintings use a single color, red, to evoke a dramatic mood that is impressive yet disturbing. In the process, they capture memories of Korea’s old farming villages, now lost to industrialization and development. The persistent motif of the traditional mountain image creates an odd sense of nostalgia, and evokes a sense of the tragedy of a divided nation referred by the symbolized image of the red color.

There are the wittier mountain images of Beom KIM. In minimal looking paintings with names like Entrance Key and Car Key (these are in fact the “keys” to unlock the mystery), he playfully presents us with a connection between the shape of the key and the mountain. Another work, Landscape #1, includes messages on the canvas that bluntly direct us to “Look at this blue sky,” “Stare at these trees,” and “Look at the flowing river here.” The landscape here is understood to be a message about something conceptual, an act of imagining rather than seeing, but Kim also seems to be mocking the hoary tropes of the genre of landscape.

Sora KIM is another artist who makes use of unseen landscapes. Blending sounds with innumerable streams of silver tape dangling down from the high ceiling of the gallery’s entrance hall, her installation overwhelms the viewer, seducing them into a world of poetic imagination. This work, which is titled Landscape: A diffusing movement gradually distancing from a single point, was inspired by the theme of hunting, and the constant process of change created by the distance between the hunter and hunted. The landscape she captures is a vanishing entity.

The landscape slipping out of the hunter’s hands is repeated eternally in Without Ending, a video work by Yong-seok OH. A collection of film climaxes repeated over and over, it seems at first like some kind of bad joke, but those who stay with it soon begin to feel an ineffable sense of unpleasantness. It is a ritual of “ending,” created through zoom-outs from plausible landscapes and the use of dramatic music, breaking the framework of preestablished harmony of film achieving an infinite continuation.

Unpleasantness is also a feature of the fog-shrouded landscapes of Ki-bong RHEE. Snow and books piled on the other side of a foggy window, burning books - these images blur the backdrop of time, place, and story, giving us instead an ominous shadow inside of a delusion.

What landscape, after all, do the artists in this exhibition present us with Lost cities, construction site without ties to either past or future, the empty concept of the “landscape,” constantly shifting visions, endless journeys, unsolved riddles - in short, impossible landscapes. So why is it that these images feel so real? It is because they expose the deception, the glorified “landscape,” through a process of careful observation of the real world. And this is the none-too-simple reality we must confront: that which remains permanently lost, unrecoverable to us for all the propaganda of “reconstruction” and “rebirth,” an unseen fear that will not be resolved in any happy ending. This is the least respect we can show to what has been lost, and our first true step toward the future.

We humans have always had this desire to complete our rebirth quickly, to waste no time in forging our new landscapes. But it is something that requires deeper thought from us. For, as Nayoungim and Gregory Maass scoffed, there is no such thing as a “perfect” landscape.