Moon Junghyun

If it is possible to speak from a difference of time within the same space, then such a thing is possible not through the utterance of language, but through a record of images. As Barthes observed, a sheet of photographic paper becomes a letter of memories that never disappears. To be sure, even when the image of the remaining photograph is firmly fixed, there is no way of seeing those who existed there as vagabonds. Within this unconscious structure, the photography subtly upends the parallax and enunciation of memory. For example, if snapshots taken successively at one-minute intervals engender the interference of memories that differ from before, they are recorded as a sequence that cannot be guaranteed in a linear sense.

Like a quick scan of the first page of Chapter 5 where Psyche and Cupid appear in Part Two (“Stories of Love and Adventure”) of Mythology, Edith Hamilton’s treatment of Greek and Roman myth, the Natural Gene book opens fire with a skewed left-right symmetry, edited as though to achieve the contradictory result of two irreversible images being exchanged back and forth like mail. Within the narrative system of two seemingly identical images, the slight alterations in focus and composition amply denote how everyday fragments stripped of their aesthetic efficacy have been staged as artificial indicators. This is true in the sense that the previously inscribed single image attests to its being reality and guaranteed memory, while the other picture taken shortly thereafter becomes deferred through the discord as it paradoxically underscores how the initially encountered reality cannot be the reality. In other words, when one seeks to represent temporal change through images, the realistic object of denotation becomes alienated into a vain idea—a “butterfly dream.” At a temporal and spatial junction where the presence of the image becomes oneirically intermingled, the viewer is plunged into a “limbo.”¹⁾ Overlaid and chafed as a “new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time,”²⁾ the two images endlessly reflect each other like a double-sided mirror. In a setting purified of the cold air imbued in the image, the clamorous noise surrounding it, the sunlight obscured by a sight, and the dampness, all that is perceived is tired cliché.

《Natural Gene》 2020. Exhibition view. Image provided by MMCA Goyang residency.

In this way, the act of publishing an image through a book possessing material substance may be seen as tied to a noema of time, as seen in the activities of the group CO/EX and their index categorization and printing with a large multifunction printer. What is present in Chorong An’s photographs is interpreted not as elements such as power, memory, and preservation, but as form in terms of the appropriation of time’s “plating.” It is a method in which two similar photographs are presented and mixed within the architecture of time not as pure “receipt of reality,”³⁾ but from a landscape where that reality is sensitized as a kind of material.⁴⁾ What is fascinating here is that the photographs capturing the same object two successive times are read as a compulsion regarding time.⁵⁾ For instance, one may observe a sort of staining with marks of acquiring the subtle circumstances of a time difference recorded as an “event.” What can be inferred from this differentiation is that it is not a mediation act of photographing the reality so that it can be transferred to some archive along the lines of Flickr, and that it is also distinct from the layer of technological reproduction, given that the division into two copies minutely separated in time makes it impossible to infer the original scene. This can be attributed to the way it uses the compulsive act of attempting to record two sensitized images on actual photographic paper to discuss the characteristic of photography in terms of the presence or absence of speculation as to how landscapes and recording of life can be juxtaposed.

〈in the Air (1st try) 2016〉, 〈in the Air (2nd try) 2016〉, 2020, archival pigment print, cherry wood frame, glass, 40 × 30 cm each. image provided by MMCA Goyang residency.

This method, in which the variability of actual time disrupts the viewer’s perceptual system as it alternates between dream and reality, reminds us of the fact that Chorong An studied sculpture before shifting over the photographic medium. The forms achieved from the compulsive act of photographing the same object in succession, and their distinctness from replication, are also inextricably entwined with the ideas of sculpture and its intricate crafting of a single time. For example, the vast shore that has been horizontally cut and pasted in the Koh Tao Thailand postcard reveals the place to be originally an axis of constructed time, like an architect’s model. The individual frames placed before the shore of before Sunset from Dew 2011(Ultra Wide Screen Ver.), which is designed like a panorama with the entire wall as its backdrop, serve as supports that contribute a sense of physical volume to the unconscious as it floats in the void. Not only is the image from the two successive photographs not claimed as a letter including whole content, but it is sustained as an attempt to disrupt memory and produce multiple parallaxes. The images contained in the individual frames—ranging from a postcard of the Himalayas sealed into a round lidded pendant to a zebra pressing its head up against a coin-operated locker that resembles a grating—are extracted from this sort of nonlinear array of memories.⁶⁾

The whereabouts of memories slowly asphyxiated by optical illusion remind us once again that we are trapped in a labyrinth. Yet every labyrinth ultimately has a hidden exit somewhere. As we all know, the topography of the image is delineated as a driving force consistently instilling the need to escape from a limbo frozen within the passage of time. In that sense, the implicit function of the lyrics from Sade’s song “Maureen” printed on the final page of Natural Gene seem to represent another clue intended to “kick” us out of our dream, much like the role of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” in Inception. In other words, it is necessary to stimulate the senses at the right moment with gentle song lyrics to help An escape the floating labyrinth, where reality has been designed as a kind of lucid dream through the two “alibis” of Psyche and Cupid. If this supposition is correct, then the published book may be seen as serving as a totem measuring the artist’s direction. It could also be said to represent a fairytale newsstand—a sculpture designed to allow access to the same dream.

To be sure, this labyrinth hypothesis is pursued in the form of a pleasant journey involving various postcards and photo albums, obstructing the viewer throughout at the intersection between the two strands. By that standard, the critique that interprets the book’s role as being one of several supports developing the data may be said to lead to a somewhat narrow point. One difference between Chorong An’s work and discourse of technological reproduction is the fact that while the individual photographs may both be attributed the character of an “original,” they are presented in a context of rejection. This is also the reason that space and time without surface meaning are presented as a more important clue than discourse concerning the photographic object or medium. Indeed, it may be a device to temporarily fix individual scenes that have lost the elements of time and space. If we consider that the lyrics to “Maureen” express longing for a dead friend who can no longer be encountered in this world, the function and role of photography may be said to suit the position of transferring the reality upon the empty space of photographic paper, which is bereft of time, space, subject, object, protagonist, or anything else—for the dry photograph, with the participants’ memories erased from the suffocating sense of absent volume, may finally be inferred as a rational alibi.
In an era where the digital camera has completely supplanted photographic film, Chorong An’s actions—her willingness to sling a small 35mm analog camera over her shoulder and go through the efforts of developing film—amount to a subplot, an attempt to transfer time into a physical medium. The supports, which go beyond the preservation of time to temporarily capture contemplation of the phenomena within that time, are in place simply as a stratum of each dream. The rule that people must abide by when trapped in limbo is that there must first be a perception of how to symbolize as molded evidence the momentary memories that arise in the causal chain as spatial texture is pared, overlaid, and grafted. As the artist’s history as a sculpture major vaguely suggests, the surly duplicate designer may simply be walking through meaningless non-places and beholding unrelated objects, continually gauging the camera’s axis as she observes how time is molded and memories packaged within the fetters of history. The vacuum top spinning wildly from the two deviating photos may appear precarious, but it will never stop turning—for the colors of the photographs that stop time will someday fade and seek out a different master.

1)Described in Dante’s Divine Company as the place where the souls of the unbaptized righteous and infants remain, “limbo” is presented as an intermediate afterlife between heaven and hell. In Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, it refers to a hallucinatory state in which one has died in a dream and is unable to return to reality. Etymologically, the root of the word “limbo” comes from limbus, a Latin word meaning “boundary” or “edge.”

2)Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 115.
3)Rosalind Krauss, Le Photographique, Korean trans. Bongrim Choi (Kungree Press, 2003), 243.
4)For examine, if there were no need to leave the space of Honey and Tip, which was constructed as a kind of interior material, the need to actively seek an exit is impressed on the viewer as the compulsive treatment of the gaze in the Natural Gene photographs plunges them into limbo. For a discussion on the former exhibition, see Siwoo Kwon, “Spatial Interface: The Examples of CO/EX and Donghee Kim,” AVP Quarterly (Winter 2017): 75–78.
5)While there are examples consisting of three attempts such as Treelined Landscape, most of the works displayed in the Natural Gene exhibition were photographed twice. One may of course infer naturally that the works in question would also not have been exhibited had it not been for Tastehouse’s distinctive spatial characteristics with two intermediately positioned walls

6)In addition to the pendant, the round cut-out image in The Lake of Milk from Dew 2011 (Frame Ver.) was also produced as a large sheet measuring 875 x 500 cm, which was affixed to the floor of Art Sonje Center’s gallery during the exhibition Night Turns to Day. It may have been during this time that the artist began contemplating “limbo” as a means of plunging the viewer into optical unconsciousness—a form of aesthetic practice with postcards standing on feet that would derange perceptions and slide the viewer into a pit beyond the image.

※ This content was first published in 『2020 MMCA Residency Goyang: A Collection of Critical Reviews』, and re-published here with the consent of MMCA Goyang Residency

Moon Junghyun

Art critic. MOON was awarded the 2nd SeMA-HANA Art Criticism Award for 2017, with his ‘Analysis of Sulki & Min’s Ephemera: This is not a Poster.’ He was one of three shortlisted candidates for the 2014 New Vision Art Critic Award by the ‘Art in Culture’ magazine. He worked as a reporter for ‘Kyunghyang Article’ and was an appointed researcher at the Korea Culture & Tourism Institute.