Black Ice: Han Jin
Text by Kim Hyeonjoo (Art Critic)
(Translated by Gallery Chosun)
Names of distant countries come to mind. Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo. Spread across the world map as neighbouring states, these names emerged through independence from the former Yugoslavia.
The mention of Yugoslavia brings to mind an Olympic gymnast rubbing magnesium powder into both hands and sprinting toward the vault, twisting in midair, then landing with a sharp thud before lifting both arms. Though the gymnast is running, the sound of the footsteps carries a sense of desperation.
Anri Sala’s 《1395 Days Without Red》(2011) captures the breath forced from the throat of those who have run from somewhere beyond, and the charged exchange of glances with those arriving, about to run again. The work depicts Sarajevo, Bosnia, occupied by Serbia, a former Yugoslav state, for 1,395 days from 1992 to 1995.
In Sarajevo, where snipers and bomb attacks caused countless deaths and injuries and destroyed buildings and infrastructure, crossing an intersection was close to a contest between survival and a bullet that could arrive at any moment from the other side. Breathing, footsteps, exchanged glances, and running bodies give away to a zoomed-out view of a white cloth fluttering across the road ahead. Not a wall, just a piece of fabric waving in the street.
Scenes of life-risking runs through Sarajevo’s streets are intercut with performances by the Sarajevo Philharmonic. Sound becomes more than sound. It turns into an inscription. To inscribe something is never casual. It is as deep and urgent as a gravestone, at times firm and unyielding.
This long detour through the former Yugoslavia, from image and sound to sound pressed into inscription, is taken to speak of touch shaped by habit. With Han Jin’s 《Black Ice》, writings that once addressed sound through hearing are shifted toward the sense of touch.
For someone like me, unfamiliar with music and sound and inclined instead toward white noise, her 2016 solo exhibition served as a fitting stepping stone. The artist still holds on to ritual through sound, but her longing for memory and duration now shifts toward touch, reached through processes of layering and scraping.
Touch is a persuasive word. It means contact, but also illumination and carving. What once felt light and scattered, like a single quilt about to drift apart, has grown thick and heavy. The air carries weight and moisture. What once moved sideways now settles vertically, shaped by rising and falling currents.
One work restructured through a vertical viewpoint is 해안선 #2, one of my favourites. No matter how many times I see it, looking is never enough. I always feel the urge to run my hands across it. It depicts the view of looking down at one’s feet while standing on a shore where waves advance and retreat.
Waves should not feel this way, yet I imagine that if there were such a thing as an animal-like painting, it might carry the lush texture of suede or velvet. By animal-like, I do not mean something crude or bloody, but an unavoidable warmth that comes from living beings with circulating blood, rather than from plant sap or resin.
In truth, even if this shift in her work is my misunderstanding, I want to welcome it. This sense of animal presence may also come from the tools I saw in her studio. Pencil drawings on paper are accompanied by erasers, but in paintings made with oil or charcoal on canvas, the tool used to cut into the surface is a metal chisel.
The tools her father recommended to her in Euljiro alley form a set, ranging from sharp to blunt tips. Perhaps because I witnessed the middle stages of her process, where layers are repeatedly added before the final surface is resolved, I see why the finished works, calm at first glance, hold thick surfaces where earlier tensions have been buried and erased.
Thinking of the scraping and craving sounds in the physical acts behind this painting feels painful even in imagination. While this body of work centers on touch, it also prepares a shift toward pain as an expanded sense.
The artist recently mentioned that she has been travelling back and forth to Gangneung to prepare a project on lagoons. A lagoon is a body of water formed when a bay is cut off from the sea by the growth of sandbars. What, then, has she sensed in the lagoon.
Rather than the clear brightness of Gyeongpo Lake, perhaps it is the tangled density of reed wetlands, the sense of distance held at bay, the depth of thickets, and a spatial darkness closer to night than day. Looking back at her earlier works, which feel more aligned with night than day, it seems possible that this affinity is also tied to the habits of living.
To probe deeply is usually understood as careful study, but it is also an act of gouging and breaking through, a total of time and attitude, surface and underside. Depth gained through such probing suggests maturity, but it also carries the sense of slow fermentation.
Maturity and ripening cross only for a moment, so as we grow older, we quietly hope that such moments of full bloom remain a little farther ahead in life. It is not hard to imagine the path she has taken to reach this point. I know how fiercely she has struggled for her work.
Still, I hope for vitality rather than sorrow, for contact rather than distant reflection. Instead of letting a sharp cry born of touch settle like fate, why not bring out more of the animal vitality and the foreign elements, like the metallic smell of steel. These are already present, and they are not as far off as they may seem.
While anticipating Black Ice, I think of Lake Baikal in midwinter, where the cold drops below minus forty degrees and cracking ice sounds like the cries of dolphins. The temperature difference between day and night splits the frozen lake, and slabs of ice nearly one meter thick tear apart at night, the sound carrying all the way to nearby villages.
The sound fades, but the shattered ice remains heavy and sharp, leaving dangerous ridges across the lake. When spring finally comes, it is not until April, long after winter has ended elsewhere, that the ice melts and the lake opens into dark blue and green water.
I never asked what black ice is, but to me this ice is a foreign place etched in sound. Black ice is said to form when fallen snow freezes into a thin sheet, yet her black ice feels thick and dense.
What once existed and then vanished has turned from sight into sound, and has been engraved. I saw sea foam and reeds by the lagoon. What was once seen began to be heard, and is now pressed deeply into the surface, leaving an awkward, painful trace.
There is pain like an infant’s growing pains, real yet impossible to remember. As a late poet once wrote, cure and symptoms do not always coincide. With that in mind, I add a quiet wish that this pain does not linger too long, but moves on, lightly, to another pain.