Silence, please: 한지석
An Unseeable Exhibition
I once described Lahore as a mix of ruins and a ghost city, a transformation standing on a blurred line between “not finished yet” and “already collapsing again” (Juli Zeh, 『Nullzeit』, 2012). Can a life without settlement be called a floating life? No matter how loudly one shouts toward the horizon, not even a final echo returns. It is a place where unfocused gazes remain. Han Jisoc speaks of this place, where echoes have vanished, in an unheard voice. Paintings and printed images are scattered throughout the gallery. Lights fixed to pillars flicker like dry coughing. In the dim space, images have no power. Yet no one can deny that the images are there. Darkness hides many things. It swallows fine details of life, traces of living, human greed and desire that cannot stay hidden, and even the proud wrinkles and bare faces shaped by social values.
The biggest contradiction of this exhibition is that it makes proper viewing impossible. Painting is usually an object of focused lighting. Most images in galleries share this fate. Abstract or figurative, narrative or graphic, images are introduced to the world with a reason to exist. Han Jisoc’s experiment, however, puts more effort into hiding than showing. In his early works, he painted forms and then covered them with layers of drawn lines, like curtains, hiding what he wanted to point to between the surfaces. From a distance, the works look abstract or like psychological landscapes, but closer viewing reveals hidden clues. Later, he installed large paintings in a gallery kept in total darkness, with sensors that reacted to sound. Only by shouting or singing loudly could viewers see the work for a moment. This was a refusal of the rule that paintings must always be fully exposed, and it created a paradoxical relationship between the viewer and the work.
Our time allows us to see objects of desire in almost any way we want. Obstacles still exist, but seeing has become far easier than before. We can access information and images anytime, anywhere. Rarity, waiting, and the intensity of decisive encounters are fading. In a network society where even joy and pain lose density, the world becomes transparent and the boundary between inside and outside collapses. While visual boundaries weaken, differences shaped by social order and hierarchy do not disappear so easily. This is why the philosopher Byung Chul Han calls ourtime an exhibition society. He writes that exhibition is exploitation, that the demand to display destroys dwelling. When the world itself becomes an exhibition space, dwelling becomes impossible, replaced by advertising that grows attention capital. Dwelling once meant satisfaction and calm. Constant pressure to display and perform threatens this peace. Along with this, Heidegger’s idea of the thing disappears. His thing cannot be exhibited because it is filled only with ritual value (Byung Chul Han, 『The Transparency Society』, 2014)
An exhibition that exists but cannot be fully seen, especially one of paintings and images in darkness, is clearly absurd. We live in a world overflowing with exhibitions, images, sounds, products, buildings, and machines. Mass-produced objects and images are born not for decisive encounters but to appear and vanish. In a time where the fact of having seen matters more than the will to see, Han Jisoc’s exhibition, which begins with the idea of “not being able to see,” seems to reject the exhibition value of capitalism that Walter Benjamin foresaw. The exhibition was triggered by ongoing global disasters. Disaster here does not mean only environmental issues or accidents, but also the dominant ideology that forces humanity to move forward blindly. Printed materials of unknown origin are placed throughout the space. They are taken from media images repeatedly reproduced from disaster scenes. Instead of narrating disaster, Han cuts and enlarges parts of images until only dots remain. I would call these images objects that are both close and far from images. They erase the signs created by media society that packages grief and mourning in excess. Media competition dulls pain and sorrow and turns disaster into spectacle. “Not being able to see” expresses the artist’s concern about an age flooded with images.
As image production becomes easier, pain such as loss and fading memory seems to be replaced by reproduced images. Grief and suffering are recorded as images and displayed on Facebook or Twitter. Connected people respond with a light click of “like”, even to pain. It is hard to observe, reflect, and stay with thought slowly. Benjamin saw the overlap of ritual loss and exhibition as a shift in social paradigm. The issue is not just the ritual value changed into exhibition value, but how exhibition value became a tool of capitalist power. We must also question the ethics of producing discourse about disaster in literature, art, film, and the humanities, since such discourse often turns into political tools or ways to mislead the public.
Disaster appears when the scale and number of grief cannot be measured. Because such loss is hard to represent, artistic representation carries responsibility. Han Jisoc limits the possibility of full visibility. The exhibition is designed so that dim light appears only in response to the viewer’s sound. Instead of representing immeasurable pain and sorrow, he presents a place growing darker, with thinning air, hard even to imagine. People there might briefly create light together, but it cannot last long. We try to see the whole, yet we struggle to truly see and connect with even small things around us. Words like fragment or debris are often used too casually and intellectually. Applying them to Han Jisoc’s work is not helpful. Without realising it, viewers make sounds that trigger light, and only then do they faintly recognise the presence of images and objects that can be seen.
Words like fragment and debris appear often because there is a belief that a decentralised society, where countless points of contact exist between individuals and societies, offers an escape from uniform, totalising structures. Uncertainty, however, leads to obsession with systems. Our time feels as if it has lost the space to dream of the future. Modern people seem to desire safety more than ideas. Disaster is not something to confirm through representation. It already lies within daily life. Many aspects of life are filled with things meant to remove anxiety and fear. Insurance, hospitals, schools, safety facilities, and countless products labelled eco-friendly.
In the quiet, dark space of 《Silence, Please》, viewers must reveal their presence through sound in order to see. Instead of obeying command and order, they must refuse them. Only then can they see for themselves how blind their lives are. One tip for viewing this exhibition is not to force meaning, but to form relations with the hard-to-name things in the space: paintings, images, lights, structures. This exhibition does not claim to be difficult contemporary art. What is truly difficult is abandoning habits and attitudes shaped by familiar forms.
Jung Hyun
(Translated by Gallery Chosun)