무게와 두께: Jung Sang-hyun
The Boundary Between Reality and Imgaination Extended Through Games
Yi Won-kon (Professor of Media Art Theories at Dankuk University)
In Jung Sang-hyun’s work there is the spirit of jeering games at the border between reality and imagination. In his work confrontation between reality and imagination is weakened, like video images within a frame. In his work the gaze at an imaginary world beyond the frame, voluntary immersion in this imaginary world, and a link to a fictitious world through media devices becomes the material of games. His video work is digital, but we have to understand handmade playthings, optical equipment of the 19th century, the distance in image culture between the 19th century and the present, and the artist’s subtle composition to be able to appreciate Jung’s work.
In <Numbers> and <One> a rotating plate looks like a structure from a film set or a rotating signboard, and is reminiscent of a thaumatrope that was popular in the 19th century Europe. It also exudes a vacant atmosphere of ‘fake reality for banal fantasies’ found at an abandoned amusement park.
A thaumatrope is a toy that has a disk with a picture on each side. When the disk twirls, the two pictures appear to combine into a single image. Thromatropes are displayed in a cinema museum in Paris to show how popular they were in the 19th century. Because they were cheap and simple to carry, thaumatropes could be found in many homes. In an age before videos existed, these images seemed like magic to people. It is well known that the principle of apparent movement developed into the kinetiscope and the zotrope, and finally resulted in the birth of the movie and cinematography.
Jung sets a rotating plate consecutively showing different images against the background of a beautiful landscape like the background images of a computer or calendar. While only two images intersect with a thaumatrope, in his work dozens of images create a new scene when combined with the background images. The images swift appearance and disappearance recall the cycles of storytelling. This is not dynamic like montages of Sergei Eisenstein who saw the montage as a chain of meaning produced through a dialectic clash, but is a machine producing situations through a combination of images, as the way commodities are produced in a factory, and TV simply composes new scenes, which asserted by Vsevolod Pudovkin in his brick theory.
A matrix of endlessly replaced, repeated scenes symbolizes the production and combination of images that contemporary society has evolved into an industry. This awkward encounter is often made throughout the world where civilization is predominant. Clashes between heterogeneous cultures and civilizations occur everywhere in the world due to peoples’ easy movements to other culture zones. The place where these clashes break out enters into a new context. Unlike the age of myths, in modern times these combined images are produced and consumed daily.
Jung’s work is also reshuffles of a variety of realities in modern cities. A modern city is like a jungle brimming with innumerable signs, symbols, and spectacles produced through visual media. New encounters and clashes between meaning and context, and appearance and disappearance of new contexts are common here. His work metaphorically represents contemporary urban culture producing fantasies like fairytales. However, the scenes he illustrates are like the false reality of a theme park. Displayed at the exhibition is <One> in which images he consumed as a child appear one by one. These images once used in picture books look like commercials set up at the entrance of a market street. These images appear vacant but were consumed with childlike innocence and imagination.
These images do not conceal the fact that they are fake, but rather stress this fact. These images are not well polished computer graphics, but are roughly finished analog scenes reminiscent of mechanical devices. This is why the images look somewhat bleak. Unlike digital images, these feel neither transparent nor coldhearted. They are continuously replaced with other images, but remain empty as if in a fake reality. As the device is hand-made or too old, it is like an old musical box (orgel) generating a squeaking sound.
Jung’s other pieces such as <Intruder at Dawn>, <I suggest a tour of the Gallery>, and <A Travel of Instant Mobility> emphasize the spirit of games in which he is immersed, manipulating the device. This spirit and immersion allowed people of the 19th century to entertain themselves with a simple plaything. In the 19th century when commercial and industrial development was made, a wide variety of optical devices were pervasive not only in Europe but also in China, Korea, and Japan. Devices such as toy theaters, stereo scopes, tunnel views, kaleidoscopes, and peep show boxes were found in the latter era of the Joseon Dynasty. These devices were slightly different in function, but were all considered ‘equipment generating magic-like illusions’.
However, media is a political tool in the age of mass consumption. In Europe simple optical tools expanded to panorama (its antithetic form is the ‘Panopticon’), film and TV, and concerns for them spread to politics of suppression and liberation. Jung Sang-hyun’s work seems to be an attempt to return to a fairy world under an advanced information-oriented society. This attempt is basically backed up by the spirit of games, jeering at the boundary between reality and fiction.
If Jung is confined to his personal experience, these boxes can be said to be closed rooms, but the artist and viewer are not in the closed spaces. In his work realities inside and outside the boxes meet by incident, releasing viewer eyes from a limited field: a truck crushes into the boxes; a welding machine pierces a ceiling; and vibration from hammering shakes the boxes. The viewer gazes at the closed rooms in the work, but eventually produces narratives linking the world of his work to the external real world. This is another thaumatrope.
As seen in <I am an Image>, the protagonist playing hide-and-seek with a banner with a picture is not pretending to be naïve but to awaken the consciousness of those joining the game, or those on the border between reality and illusion in the contemporary media environment. He seems to claim that fabrication of images is a game to be absorbed in and enhance life, not to be hostile to humans.
Two rocks are particularly eye-catching in the show: one is a colossal thaumatrope 3.5 meters high and the other is an object 60 cm thick made by an overlap of paper printed with digital images. Familiar to viewers, the former is an enlarged rotating plaything. Witnessing this may be a magic-like experience. However, when it rotates one time within a digital video, it could not bring about a new image. As the whole venue is used as the background for the work, this illusion of the plaything expands as in a fairytale, and viewers become small soldiers before the plaything. The digital image, escaped from the physical characteristics involves viewers’ consciousness in a chaos between fairytale and reality, illusion and reality.
The latter is made of thousands of pieces of paper on which a rock image is printed and made into a mass. This image picks on the commonsense of ‘digital image immateriality’, rotating in opposition to the huge <Rock>. This weird contrast seems to be an attempt to draw out a digital image floating immaterially within space, and to push the image out to the border of an imaginary world from the real space.
Jung is a trailblazer between real and fictitious images, intersecting their traits. His work appears as an optical tool producing kaleidoscopic scenes; an attempt to overturn space. In his work reality and imagination can be viewed through perspective, as subject matter for illusion consumed in self-immersion. Without the spirit of games between real and fake worlds, his work would be a stage for pessimists.