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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Severed from geographical representation, the map has become a modern symbol of the authority and production of social systems. Designed in 1931, Harry BECK (1902–1974)’s Tube map was created to reduce the labor class’ commute time by making their travel more efficient. Only the location of the Thames River crossing London town in the map slightly showed that this was a representation of reality. BECK ’s map strayed from the traditional pursuit of distance-to-scale and geographic likeness in order to emphasize the most efficient route for workers. In other words, in the Tube map, the desired system of modernism was overlaid on daily life. This map became the origin of the modern map because it completely ignored the real geographical factors of places that it represented. More recently, in the wake of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, what I looked at day and night was also a map. The so-called ‘Corona Map’ marked all the places where COVID-positive people had been, representing them in a line. As the number of cases grew, colorful lines were increasingly overlaid on the map. Regardless of the physical conditions of a location, once featured on the map, a place became marked as a danger zone, to be avoided for logical reasons. As individual places rapidly grew in their number of confirmed, sites such as Daegu, Itaewon, Gwanghwamun, etc. Took on new meaning within the interpretive context of COVID, revealing power structures and interests that had nothing to do with the actual geographical places. Like BECK’s map, the ‘Corona Map’ reveals that ‘we are living in a world transferred to a map’ on the surface. Where both of these stories of the map overlap with LEE Byungsu’s work is the fact that it is ‘just a map after all.’ This is revealed in two parts of his single-channel video work, Temporary Fiction (2020). The first part refers to a place that does not exist and the second part features the media of 3D computer graphics–the material support for contemporary maps.

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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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The main subject of Temporary Fiction is Panmunjom. Panmunjom is not a blue box building as is known generally, but the name of the Joint Security Area (JSA) where Panmun Pavillion, Freedom House, and other similar sites are located. The official names of the blue buildings are T1, T2, and T3, with the ‘T’ standing for ‘Temporary’. It is possible to visit Panmunjom, but there are not many people who have actually visited there, despite the familiarity of (the image of) the place to many. Setting aside the real problem that it is difficult to visit the actual place, the reason that Panmunjom becomes a non-existing place is because of the overlapping of the many projected images. In the scenes of PARK Chan-wook’s movie Joint Security Area (2000), tourist photos taken at the movie set at KOFIC Namyangju Studios and the scene of the Inter-Korean Summit of 2018 are overlaid without order or context, making the place vague. For example, at the Inter-Korean Summit, there is a scene when the two leaders walked along the midway of T2 and T3 and went across the Military Demarcation Line, however, it was later said that the scene might have been filmed at studios and digitally created afterward. As this shows, Panmunjom symbolizes the place where the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ or ‘altered’ are collapsed.

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Through this strong symbolism, Panmunjom seduces the audience to misinterpret Temporary Fiction as a political message. Contributing to this misinterpretation is the repeating announcement, “When the war breaks out, Seoul becomes a sea of fire” in Act 1 (T1), as well as the car that cannot cross over the military demarcation line Act 2 (T2), and the dancing military police officer at the conference room Act 3 (T3) who appears to be pointing his finger or trying to balance himself on a balance beam during the intermissions. However, all of these symbols should be read not as a political message but as the footnotes of the indistinct place. The artist is directing these likely situations at Panmunjom with realistic 3D graphics, which upon closer look do not align with the actual background as he intentionally overlays the scenes with images. Thus, Temporary Fiction makes Panmunjom a vague and chaotic place.

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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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This kind of approach to a place has been tried in his previous works Made in Antarctica (2013–2014), Ode to our Communities (2018), and One After Another (2018). The places featured in the previous works were Antarctica, a place that is generally difficult for people to get to, and Baekdu Mountain, which is represented through someone else’s recordings. Like Panmunjom, these places that are difficult to visit are typically made known through images from mass media. Though, he leaps onto his next interest while still holding onto a central axis and safety hook of his question regarding places that have been displayed.

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The main spot where the difference is made in this work is the supporter of the map, namely the approach to the media. In his last solo exhibition Welcome to the Seamless World (The Reference, Seoul, 2019), LEE altered a general VR device and proposed VR as ‘the only media that operates the artwork’, which is not a ‘device that composes the artwork’. For instance, the artist removed methods which have been perceived as fundamental to VR, such as requiring two people instead of one, to view the work Double Bind (2019). In his other work, Before Your Very Eyes (2019), the artist removed the HMD strap mods. By doing so, an intensified immersion was generated that was different from the experiential dimension which has become common in media art exhibitions.

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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Leaving the VR experiment for the moment, in Temporary Fiction, the artist questions the nature of the video created with 3D computer graphics. There is a scene before Act 1 of Temporary Fiction begins, in which the Windows error page drops, like a curtain as in a theater after an act finishes, and announces that everything was made with a computer and that the video is no different. The frame zooms out from the place where the events appear to have taken place to the scene of a temporary structure. A blue screen stating “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart” prompts the audience to shake their deception and challenges the prior appearance of the events as being political in nature. In this sense, the video appears as if it regards the fundamental nature of 3D graphics, however the artist maintains that he is unconcerned about the ‘thin flatness’ which has been relentlessly talked about in regards to the media in general. Rather, he brings in the uneven world the work is depending on in Temporary Fiction.

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For example, in between Act 2 and 3, there is a military police officer, who staggers with his arms outstretched, trying to stabilize himself on the balance beam. The scene depicts the act of balancing in a world without gravity, where all movements cannot be made using 3D graphics, revealing the general method of overlaying the image the person filmed onto the source where it is purported to have been recorded. The appearances of both natural and unnatural movements of the police officer are the result of the digital mixing of the actor’s actual movements and the movements that have been digitally produced. At this point, Temporary Fiction operates as a ‘map’. Not as flat skin, but rather a representation of reality. The work narrowly reveals itself as reality, while unsettling the hidden and ignored foundation of its materiality.

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Temporary Fiction, 2020, 4K Computer-generated video, 11min 5sec. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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However, the artist does not stop here and tries to find the aesthetic impulse inherent in the media. In Act 3 (T3), there is a scene where the modeling of the building is spun recklessly and, when the structure of the modeling gets smaller after spinning, the audience realizes that the events in Act 1 and 2 are not going to be represented (or never were represented). To summarize, it is an attempt to discover the aesthetic possibility of the unrepresented ‘just a map after all’ although it is not a representation of it. It reveals the possibility of 3D graphics as an efficient and functional visual thing like Harry BECK’s tube map.

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Psychiatrist and psychologist Alfred KORZYBSKI (1879–1950) famously proposed, “the map is not the territory.” The sentence referred to the condition of schizophrenia and was once read along the lines of MAGRITTE’s “this is not a pipe” and MCLUHAN’s “the medium is the message” according to the times. In these interpretations, the problem of not taking the intimate and fragile relationship between the territory and the map occurs.

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Nonetheless, Temporary Fiction was an attempt to read the nature of the two-axes of “(irreproducible) territory and (uneven) surface body” as functioning as a map. In other words, the exploration of places, representation, and media throughout in LEE Byungsu’s works is not an attempt to transfer the world into a map, but a consideration of what occurs when the map is all that we are offered.

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[Footnote]

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¹⁾ Janin HADLAW, “The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space,” Design Issues Vol.19, No.1 (Winter, 2003), trans. PARK Haecheon in Design Anthology (Seoul: Sigongsa, 2004), p.41
²⁾ Artist LEE Byungsu conceived the idea from the names T1, T2, and T3, and composed Temporary Fiction as a three-act play. Each act is set as T1, T2, and T3, and they are appropriated as the stages in which certain temporary events happen.

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※ This content was first published in 『2020 Incheon Art Platform Residency Program Catalogue』, and re-published here with the consent of Incheon Art Platform