Today doesn’t seem much different from yesterday. Tomorrow will soon be today and then yesterday. Those moments when the future melts into the past are the moments of the present. As Henri Bergson observed, there is no real distinction among past, present, and future; they exist only within flows of internal experience. The units through which we divide our time—the quantified days, hours, minutes, and sections—are mere mechanisms of desire, an attempt to apply units of time to measure and control the linear flows throughout our life. We simply pass through a series of repeated “todays,” an experience that exists between an accumulating past and a continually arising future. In this way, our daily life is filled with unassuming narratives and events. In a time when even the “everyday-ness” that has taken over for the vanishing grand discourses has come to operate as a discourse of its own, the exhibition Counting air focuses on new discoveries of life and narratives that slide away from the everyday-ness as a discourse to hover around its periphery. These may be characterized as fragments of life that are smaller in scale, more intimate, more personal.

The chance moments that we sometimes encounter in the repetition of our lives become inscribed like “incidents,” establishing themselves like models that amass in layers to shape our mode of living and attitude. YO Daham focuses on evidence he happened upon in his immediate radius: the marks of flyers indiscriminately pasted on roadside walls, torn, overlapping, and layered. As part of a very familiar cityscape, they are unlikely to draw much interest—but another look shows a landscape bearing a certain “wildness” that does not fit with the neatness and orderliness of the city. In a process of erasing and adding, obscuring and layering, the information disappears and the image comes to exist solely as evidence of what was. Like seeds of unknown provenance setting down roots to form an ecosystem, they permeate deeply into the places where we live, in an endless process of perishing and propagation. Violating the city’s order and left to indiscriminate neglect, these traces are like a form of chaos. The thinly layered images assume meaning in a relationship of “filling” and “emptying” as they are haphazardly torn and left behind. The incomplete flyers are given form as opaquely accumulating layers of the past, while unrelated images and information manifest in the present through their collisions as they poke through the cracks. In the past, the artist discovered the forms of life and posed questions about these attitudes through analogies with witnesses and dust. In Friction (2023), he becomes like a lumberjack—collecting, cataloging, and categorizing these things to separate them from the environments where they are found and extract patterns through processes of repetition and variation. This can be described as discovering rules in chaos, and the patterns that YO extracts rear their heads amid a certain heedlessness rather than being arranged in tidy and obvious ways. Transferred onto translucent paper, the patterns themselves alternate between order and disorder, but what makes them even more fascinating lies in the grids that sustain them. The grids cut across empty space in vertical and horizontal dimensions, situated on the front and back of translucent membranes. Sometimes, they deconstruct or expand the order (patterns) obtained through the shadow (image); other times, they re-define the shape by adding different rules and conditions to a phenomenon (pattern) in which the meaning is not easily detectable. The shredded scars found along the road imbue rhythm to a daily experience with an undefined narrative, becoming a new “event” from moment to moment depending on the gaze. It can be seen as a matter of using chance encounters as a starting point to capture binary oppositions—nature/city, disorder/order, systematic/random, chance/necessity, ordinary/extraordinary—or the moments of friction that arise on the contact surfaces of heterogeneous elements.

Consisting of six sequence-photographs and one text, At dawn a hare wakes (2023) is based on a dream the artist had. But YO does not attempt to convey the dream’s content in a dramatic way or “consume” it at the level of appreciation. Rather, he focuses on the sensory potential of the dream as something somewhat unrealistic/surrealistic, something that starts where a day’s activity ends and leads into the activity of the next day, something that exists as an extension of daily life but also deviates from it. Starting with an event before leading into different forms of imagination, his story is juxtaposed with photographs of clouds, in which the forms dissipate with the passage of time. The key thing here is not the actual subject at the center of the event, but the phenomenon of six different characters seeing and remembering in different ways. Grafting an illogical world made possible through dreams onto a reality that is represented through reason, YO Daham evokes associations with a feeling of cycling, like the links between the different properties of gases, liquids, and solids. Through this approach, he encourages us to adopt a new perception of the environment and world that surround us, along with the conditions that underlie them.

There are times when repetition of shapes awakens a sense of reflection, adding unparalleled depth and fissure to a daily experience that would otherwise busily pass us by. As an artist, CHOI Yoonsuk has adopted an approach of “self-exposure through repetition.” At first glance, there seems to be no sense of distance between viewer and work, as the landscapes that are captured seem so exceedingly ordinary. But at some point in this process of repetition, something is propelled out of the work and latches onto the viewer: a rumination on the self, achieving enlightenment through repetition. An example of this is All Apologies (2023), a collection of over 200 photographs of the fried eggs that CHOI cooked to feed himself in the mornings between May 2020 and September 2023. These are connected with intermittently added text about eggs, including nutritional information, sayings/proverbs, and quotes from famous people. The result elicits a sense of non-linear misalignment within linear structure. In the endless repetition, the symbolic shape of the fried egg is reduced to meaninglessness. At times, it comes together with language to regain meaning, and this dry repetition creates a trancelike state that soon engenders both difference and distance. A self-admission originating from the artist’s daily routine alternates between a voyeuristic look into intimate life on one side and identification with the artist on the other, before evoking individual moments and personal narratives that cannot be discussed in universal terms.

The series Echo 2, 3, 4 (2023) is a case where CHOI’s self-referential qualities are particularly pronounced. Featuring the artist himself at moments when he is separated from others—late at night, around daybreak, or when he is briefly smoking a cigarette—the work more dramatically elicits the emotions associated with the act of waiting. But CHOI’s video works do not adopt the kind of narrative structure where we can define causes and effects—and since they lack even the moments of affect that stem from sensory misalignment or sliding, they cannot establish themselves as “event-like” either. They end up seeming like foreshadowing, but as videos where nothing really happens, they become like MacGuffins, spinning their wheels with emotions of unknowable origins and feelings of unresolved tension. In the case of videos from which cause and effect have been removed, with no particular events and no climax, waiting soon turns to boredom. But if we adopt the perspective of Walter Benjamin, who attempted to interpret boredom as a realm of contemplation, this boredom can actually be seen as enabling profound reflection and meditation, within which certain possibilities can be discovered. Meanwhile, the sounds on the headset provided with the video focus the listener’s ears on the characters’ breathing and heartbeat, quickly putting the viewer’s gaze inside the work and away from its contemplation of another person’s everyday environment—recalibrating the psychological distance between viewer and object.

This sort of attempt to urge the viewer toward enlightenment between self-referencing and repetitive forms is continued in a somewhat different vein in Souvenir (2023). The sticker fragments and dummies that the artist has assembled are objects that have permeated his life, but any sort of symbolic value has been erased. The act of collecting and affixing stickers may be a means of self-expression and a hobby reflecting personal tastes, but once the stickers have been peeled away, the remaining scraps hold no real value, whether they exist in aggregate or individually. Resembling the humble residues left behind after an action, they are imbued by CHOI Yoonsuk with movement. They are dependent on space or naturally assembled within it, constituting the environment (space) that surrounds us as well as the objects that fill it and evidence of someone’s presence. The unstable image evoked by their tiny vibrations could be viewed as a gesture of rousing out of unconsciousness.

As has always been the case, the universal experience of life is that of a continuum of passing events. These could be described as events not of appearing but of disappearing, situated in a continued series of fleeting moments. In that sense, it may represent a different form of contradiction when different language is used to depict forms of like that are more intimate than the discursive “everyday.” It may be that when it comes to how we exist throughout our lives and experiences, the original nature can be approximated more closely through the kinds of forms and expression that only art can provide, rather than anything that language can represent. This exhibition could therefore be seen as reflecting life that has been translated into forms of patterns of repetition: cause and effect have been erased, events have not yet been established, and the repetition continues. Natural, unnarrativized narratives and personal or trivial incidents can sometimes, through the rules and forms of repetition, awaken our perceptions of the current moment. This is not the world that is described and portrayed in grand and weighty language, nor is it an imaginary world that leaves reality behind. Whether it is about discovering the order of disorder (YO Daham) or contemplating the relations of a daily experience from which “events” have been erased (CHOI Yoonsuk), this artwork affords us a way of slowly, delicately perceiving—not a new world, but our own place situated deeper within life.

Credit

Participating artists : CHOI Yoonsuk, YO Daham
Curated by KIM Sung woo
Text by KIM Sung woo
Design by GANG Moonsick
Installation technician : Mujindongsa
Photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)