Being Ghost, Scrolling the World: Sung Rok Choi

Text by WonJoon Yoo (Art Critic)

Translated by Gallery Chosun 

#1 A Fixed Object, a Changing Reality

A small car appears at the centre of the screen. The camera rapidly follows its movement. Everything shifts at a breathless pace, yet the car and the frame remain fixed. Even as familiar scenes rush past, the car stays anchored at the centre. Only the trail of smoke reveals its motion, hinting that it is racing toward somewhere unseen. Sung Rok Choi’s new work presents a changing reality through a fixed object. It is not the object that changes, but reality itself that moves and gives chase around it. 

For a long time, the real world was treated as a fixed constant. What changed was the “self within the world,” and we grew used to seeing movement from the viewpoint of a moving subject. Many media forms reflected and focused on reality, but the entity that had to move to achieve a clear image was always the medium itself, illuminating the world. This logic stems from a projected viewpoint of being-in-the-world(In-der-Welt-sein), yet we also imagined a surrounding world that would respond to shifts in the subject’s gaze. This desire appeared more naturally in virtual game spaces that assume distance from the real world. By positing another world that points back to reality, simulated game environments overturned the structure of being-in-the-word. This is why Choi’s work resembles a game screen. The landscapes shown are based on real scenery rendered through computer animation, yet it is hard to find clear traces of that reality. The screen presents a fully constructed artificial world, directly and on its own terms. 

#2 The Dialectic of Dizziness and Scrolling

If we assume that the world around us moves while the self remains fixed at its center, the question becomes whether such a world can truly be perceived. The fixed subject on screen may feel stabilizing to viewers, making the rapid shafts of scenery seem secondary, but this sense of ease exists only from the position of an outside observer. What needs closer attention is the gaze of the subject who remains fixed while change unfolds. 

The ability to move the world and secure a desired view can be understood, metaphorically, as gaining an all-seeing perspective that allows the entire world to be scrolled. Yet as environmental change accelerates, vision is pushed back into the task of choosing viewpoints that remain within the limits of perception. If such a world were to appear directly before us, we would inevitably be exposed to a kind of dizziness beyond our control. 

As we grow accustomed to this dizziness, the car on screen slips away from the centre. What is striking is that other entities appear to take the place of the departing subject. A large airplane fills the frame in place of the car and lands at an airport, briefly restoring an earlier viewpoint distinct from an object-centred gaze. Yet the plane soon disappears from the screen. 

The figure that deserves attention comes next: a surveillance aircraft that quietly emerges with the car’s return. This aircraft supplements two modes of vision while also acting as a mediator that blinds the real and virtual worlds together. The closing scene reminds us that this scrolled world, a virtual plane, is nothing more than a thin and superficial surface. As the surveillance aircraft, the mediating agent, vanishes beyond the screen, the car that once guided the frame as its central gaze leaves the thin plane behind and falls into endless darkness. With this, the scrolling of a subject-centred virtual world comes to an end. 

#3 Becoming a Ghost as a Visual Assemblage

The expansion of human vision through media has long been a fundamental theme. The ideas of McLuhan and the Canadian school were later challenged or reworked by other media theorists, yet they still shaped a common framework for thinking about media. Media helped overcome the limits of the human body, and perception once tied to a single sense gave way to an awareness of mediated embodiment as a composite of senses. 

The visual expansion offered by artificial eyes and mediated vision, however, rested largely on the spread of vision across space. Media combined their own properties with the limits of the human body to produce eyes that seem to exist everywhere. As a result, we gained the ability to shift between viewpoints, at times assuming a godlike position, and to experience a gaze from outside the frame itself. 

Yet another kind of gaze must be added to this account, It is a ghostlike vision that emerges in the in-between space generated by the essential properties of media themselves. 

These works, including the series, can be understood as offering a new way of seeing in this sense. The ghost, as a mediating being that exists between worlds, occupies an ambiguous position. It is neither the omniscient viewpoint of the past nor a human-centred gaze that resolves from first person to third person, but something suspended in between. At the same time, it is strongly marked by the pervasive nature of media. 

Because of this, it is characterized by an aerial view, akin to a floating surveillance craft, yet it is not a controlling gaze like that of a security camera. It is always nearby, but not directly synchronized with the world we inhabit. It assumes a certain distance, and for that reason, it differs from binary systems that think from inside to outside or from outside to inside. 

The frame remains fixed, and the objects move within it. The frame does not shift in response to their movement. These works, which use aerial filming techniques with drones, rely on the drone’s paradoxical quality of giving a clear position to what is conceptually indeterminate. As autonomous floating bodies in the air, they continue to move independently of us. 

Ultimately, the point at which we are recognised as extensions of vision lies in a mediating gaze understood as an integrated whole that surpasses the split between human subject and media. It is a projection at a ghostlike height, beyond our existence, yet never truly separate from us.