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A Single Point of View

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

NANG Magazine


I began reviewing my personal data (deactivated emails, old Facebook posts, Instagram, etc.) that are currently online going back roughly 12 years. I was amused that most of my data and posts seemed meaningless to me now, no matter how important I thought they were at the time they were being created. The nostalgia of the photograph Roland Barthes talks about seems to be irrelevant for my digital images, now that they exist in the cloud for instant access. Images seem to be forever in sync with the current time but I would not notice them even if they were gone. With each upload I make, their own insignificance is reconfirmed within the infinite data online. If my personal archive lacks meaning even at the point of retrieval, then what is its value, if any? Could meaning require a point of view with a value judgment that is more impersonal yet intimate? Questions regarding the new perspective must align with my own suspicion of subjectivity and my practice as an artist. In order to make my archive meaningful, I must reverse engineer subjectivity, a kind of acting, as if my images have meaning. As an artist, my challenge is contextualizing my own life in real time.

I was born in Seoul, but grew up moving around the world. While spending a year in the US in primary school, I found myself unable to answer my American teacher’s simple questions. “Kelvin, what do you think?” she went on. “How do you feel about it?” I was unable to answer because I was not used to thinking: I mean, thinking about what I thought, let alone what I felt. When I came back to the US for grad school, while I was an excellent consumer (speaking out in classes, being able to understand contemporary theories to explain and analyze works), I was not a producer. Even at a “post-modern” art school, I was not a self-aware, “modern” student, but an international student. I wanted to be a contemporary artist but it seemed like I did not have a voice of my own compared to others because I did not know what I wanted to express through my work. Understanding and practice were two different universes.

My work is often viewed as reflecting the tumultuous industrial and political history of post-war Korea because a good body of my works are filmed in shipyards, factories, and military bases. I often utilize archival footage from the recent history of Korea. History as an attractive epic K-drama: an agricultural society transforming itself into an industrial one in less than a generation. Like most places in Asia, South Korea was a relatively poor country in the 1980s. My father is the second of eight children of a poor farmer from a remote village that didn’t have electricity until the 1970s. Like my father used to say, “I am a son of a poor farmer, you are a son of a diplomat. We do not speak the same language.”

Within the limits of my own bodily senses and emotions, I was observing the world around me in order to understand the past, present, and future through my work. Growing up in South Korea, parents and teachers unequivocally told me, “Don’t do what you want to do.” One day after arguing with my father about the path of my education, he asked, “Do you think your life is your life?” While I pondered his question, oblivious to its rhetorical nature, he frustratingly shouted, “It is not!” I was not only myself, but I was also his oldest son. The family was not the place of growth, of subtle and nuanced communication necessary for self-awareness. Self-development meant accepting the responsibility of being the oldest son. Therefore, I can say that I was hardly brought up as an individual. Though I live in a “modern” time, conformity is considered a virtue in a Confucian society where relational ethics is prioritized over an individual’s morality.

For my work Cheonggyecheon Medley, I spent two years in a now demolished industrial area, Cheonggyecheon, located in the heart of Seoul. Cheonggyecheon played a key role in the rapid industrial development of post-war Korea. Global companies like LG and Samsung owe their success to Cheonggyecheon. People of Cheonggyecheon salvaged the industrial machines the Japanese and Americans left behind, taking apart every single piece of the machine and copying them exactly or creating modified mutant machines for their own purposes. I was a part of a local artist group, “Flying City,” who were documenting and archiving the small factories of Cheonggyecheon and their production network in the context of urbanism and critiquing capitalist gentrification. I was drawn to rediscovering the city of my childhood, but found myself straying from the group’s direction to create my own work. The methodology of the group was an interpretation of European situationist theory, which argues that human actions are factors of the situation rather than the character of a person. I enjoyed working as part of the team, but I felt that perhaps we were interlocking pieces from the opposite side of the puzzle, where the contours of the piece seemed to fit perfectly while the overall image contained multiple blank pieces. For example, workers in shabby work clothes that I filmed were not victimized proletariats but ambitious capitalists themselves, some of them owning huge properties in Gangnam. Workers in Cheonggyecheon were not a labor class but in fact middle class or entrepreneurs in the Korean context. The given narrative structure needed much more customization.

Coming back to the editing table, I was frustrated by the fact that almost all of my footage looked exactly like the German expressionist and avant-garde films that I had seen in art school. My compositions, angles, and camera decisions lacked a distinct point of view because my thoughts were dominated by what I had been taught in school. There was no satisfactory local reference or aesthetic heritage associated with South Korean industry or modernity. The meaning of Cheonggyecheon could not be captured because my perspective was too incomplete. I could not describe the “other” because I already was the “other.” Just like the workers in Cheonggyecheon who had to reverse engineer American and Japanese industrial machines to produce their own, I had to reverse engineer Western discourse in order to describe Cheonggyecheon because the historical trajectories of the discourse and where I was living were not only different, but also came from opposite directions.

The method of overcoming what I was taught in school was to focus keenly on my senses. This naturally required me to be critical of my emotions that arose from what I had sensed. I had spent over a year merely observing and cultivating relationships with people without my camera and without any goal of creating a certain narrative or a film. It was toward the end of two years of shooting, when I had emotionally internalized Cheonggyecheon, that anything remotely unique came out. Filming and talking with the old men of Cheonggyecheon gave me a structural understanding of the frictions that I had with my own father. I realized my footage was paying close attention to the tactile image. Tight close-up shots were not only applied to people and machines, but to narrow alleyways and workshop interiors as well. Space was captured in a two-dimensional way rather than three-dimensional. Editing was done by making collages of variations in texture of people, machines, and streets. A close-up shot of cold rusted metal machines edited into a wider shot of the sun peeking through soft, gloomy clouds created a pleasurable balance. My dissatisfaction with the use of images as signs led me to use images to create a sensorial experience.

The inspiration for my following work, A Dream of Iron (2013), came from the Bangudae petroglyph, estimated to have been carved during the Bronze Age. Considered the oldest image in the Korean peninsula, the ten-meter-wide petroglyph consists of epic images of whales, animals, and people hunting them. In the far left is a figure of a shaman blowing a horn to call out a group of whales in the middle of the ocean, who are then chased by spear-wielding hunters on boats. On the right, land animals like tigers and deer are chased, also by hunters. I saw a semblance between the serpentine images of whales and those of giant ships that are currently built in the same town. Scholars hypothesize that the Bangudae petroglyph was a result of multiple generations of carvers during the dawn of the agricultural age. It was not during the hunter-and-gatherer period that the act of hunting was depicted, but rather after people had settled as an agricultural civilization, when hunting was no longer a necessary mode of survival. Carvers of the petroglyph needed a temporal or psychological break from the fears their ancestors lived with, in order to make images that documented the zeitgeist of the previous era, or even to proclaim that era’s death. Perhaps the image served as an agitprop of the tribal collective. I imagine them gathered around the fire, people dancing along to drum beats, their flickering shadows projected onto carvings of whales and animals that are activating the origin of art.

I look at the ink paintings of the Chosun Dynasty (1392–1897) to find hints of how we viewed the world on this side of the planet. When I stand in front of ink paintings, the experience is compressed into a single immediate moment. Paradoxically, emotion is delayed, revealing only in the traces of that first moment of visual imprint. Utilizing the three-distance method, formulated by the Chinese painter Guo Xi during the Northern Song Dynasty era (960–1127), the painter is often portrayed as standing within the landscape they are painting. For example, in a painting of a mountain, the painter would depict it from three angles or distances. High distance looks upward at the peak of the mountain from the bottom, creating grandeur. Deep distance looks at the mountain from the front to the back, penetrating it to create profoundness of depth. Level distance looks to mountains far from the current mountain to create a sense of width through contrast.

Eastern painting’s corresponding genre of landscape is literally called Mountain River Painting, with Mountain representing space, and River representing time. Essentially, a painter describes a system of symbols surrounding them within space and time from the three different angles rather than being bound by a single-point perspective. An ideal Mountain River Painting aims to be free of any subjective interventions, the painter losing himself in the overwhelming emotion of “Hung”—the feeling of connecting with the “energy of heaven and earth.” According to Kant, the sublime is reached only after overcoming the fear of nature when a safe distance between nature and the viewer is created. The fundamental difference between a Western landscape painting and a Mountain River Painting is inevitably associated with the difference between the idea of “Hung” and “sublime.” The Eastern method is formulated within the Confucian or Taoist value of the selfless self, where the definition of “I” becomes relative. Rather than “I” being defined as an individual differentiated from my collective, “I” am defined in terms of my relation with it.

In contemporary times, the Asian method of art runs into trouble. From the late 19th century, Korean artists and academics debated tirelessly and unsuccessfully whether to accept Western methods or to preserve the traditional ways. When it comes to suggesting a vision of looking at the world in a unique way, contemporary Asian artists, including myself, seem to run into a wall. The Relational Aesthetic that art critic Nicolas Bourriaud made fashionable in the late 1990s defined artists’ work as stemming from human relations and their social context, rather than from an independent and private space. From the standpoint of a Confucian society where all social and cultural infrastructure functions in a relational way, relation can become a living hell of nepotism and corruption because the concept of “self” is not only underdeveloped and misunderstood but constantly undermined even in contemporary times. From the point of view of Asian artists, focusing on relational and social context excuses laziness of thought and is sometimes prone to commercial Orientalism.

Perhaps we are still trying to describe hunters and gatherers from within the hunting and gathering age, unable to yield the distance and depth necessary for a new vision. In order to overcome the trauma that the 20th century inflicted on the East, we must confront and prioritize the problem of individual interiority over blaming Western colonialism. Harmony of the collective was always placed above the identity of the individual. The hierarchical structure was never questioned. The seemingly oppressive system ran effectively for thousands of years until the “infiltration” of scientific thoughts and technology toward the end of the 19th century. After about a hundred years of chaos, the East Asian value system survived because, combined with technology, the system allowed us to dramatically improve the basic quality of life, pull ourselves out of poverty, and even efficiently contain a global pandemic without internalization of individual liberty, freedom of expression, or even human rights.

The medium of film was almost simultaneously introduced to both East and West. Therefore unlike Asian art that relied on or repelled Western theories and discourse, Asian films had a chance to develop their own aesthetic and artistic achievements. I find similarities in moving digital images with ink paintings; both mediums are multiperspective, temporal, two-dimensional, and even black and white. I allocate priority to the textural element of images over the visual when editing. In digital images, my retinas are mediated by the abstraction of code before appearing on relatively low frequency screens and projectors. I am denied the full spectrum and continuity of natural light and temporality of colors. Images produced from the chemical process of light hitting the film were physical. Even in analogue videos, velocity of electric frequencies determining colors and form was essentially a material process. In digital images, the physicality of light that determines contrast and colors is abstracted into the language of code and that respecified abstraction is what we see.

One of my experiments with synchronous viewing of the analogue and the digital is my work “Stairway to Heaven.” Just like in live rock concerts or sports cast, viewers saw actions of performers simultaneously, with the live video feed being edited live in a gallery space. Performers were asked to act for multiple cameras that captured and exaggerated their subtle and intricate expressions. I wanted to formalize the effect of not looking through a camera but with it, just like how we see things today when we pull out our phones to take pictures to observe. I enjoyed the tension between two simultaneous ways of looking. Observation resembles breathing. Screen images make their way into my eyes while beauty cools my eyes as if it is being released into the air.

The technological medium makes use of myself in order to negotiate a boundary between the collective and I. The medium reflects my biological and existential limitations between birth and death, creating the illusion of the perspective that is mine. I am fundamentally relative to the collective because there is no individual without the collective and there is no collective without the individual. The acceptance of the self-illusion becomes critical for me to compensate for the years of my non-self-reflexive childhood. Even the most subtle sensations that feel utterly intimate are retrieved from archived values culminated through generations. While the illusion of the ego tricks our consciousness into a belief of the self, the truth is that we are beings in the context of the history of our genes. The cliche of the East vs. West can only have meaning if we pay attention to our different trajectories in history. While there is no monolithic God watching over us or the guilt of Eve’s apple in the East, there are extremely complicated social networks that appear to be inherently undetachable from us. Guilt is replaced with shame because our emotions live externally in relation to each of ourselves rather than originating from within us. There were no counter parts of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in the East. During the entire 20th century, nobody proclaimed the death of our collective ancestral ghosts in Asia. My distinct point of view can emerge through rigorously confronting the family, the collective, the nation that shaped my unconscious. The act of perceiving the world from my own perspective that is irreplaceably mine can create strength to overcome the burden of the past and to communicate with each other in a meaningful way. Only then, perhaps, can we even imagine how to amend the fragmented archive of modern Asia. Or contend with the digital ephemera that haunts our own archives.

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, 😍😍 2020