The Automatic Message: Dongwan Kook
Critique of 《A Ferry》
The German philosopher Adorno declared that after Auschwitz, no further poems were possible, and that all culture after the Auschwitz massacre, including its critique, was garbage. This statement returns us to a basic question. What is art? All existing art is made by humans to express being human. In other words, art shows our understanding of human existence and dignity. If we restate Adorno’s idea, the existence of Auschwitz, a camp that defined some people as disposable and slaughtered them, cancel the very ground on which art that claims human dignity can exist. Auschwitz was not an accident but an incident. It existed in reality, yet its reality could not truly be grasped. The truth of art that restores humanity was erased, and art itself could no longer exist.
We witnessed an event like Auschwitz, unreal yet real. The Sewol ferry disaster was something we all saw. We were all there, yet it was impossible to believe. It was a reality beyond reality. After Sewol, where humanity was denied, where is art? Can all art be called trash, as Adorno claimed? Faced with this urgent question, Kook Dongwan responds by reworking Sewol through its unreal and hyperreal nature.
For the same reason as Adorno, the artist could no longer simply enjoy art making. No matter what she intended, her works kept returning to the image of a huge overturned ship. The ship was not drawn as a passive description shaped by outside forces, nor as the result of the artist’s active control. It appeared as a kind of chosen passivity, shaped by the direction of her conscious and unconscious impulses. Through an automatic method she calls 회광반조 Hoegwangbanjo, the artist followed herself, her pre-conscious and unconscious, and drew automatically. Over a year and a half, countless events and political issues surrounding the ship passed through her daily life and became embedded in it.
《A Ferry》 sits at the centre of Kook Dongwan’s artistic lineage. During several years in the UK, she worked on turning the unconscious into art and bringing it into awareness. Inspired by Freud’s idea that a dream is a letter sent by the unconscious self to the conscious self, she used her own dreams as material, turning them into text and images. Freud’s shadow also falls over 《A Ferry》. The work seems to trace the artist’s path from tragic depression, caused by the loss of the passengers, toward mourning.
But this is only a partial understanding of 《A Ferry》. The work directly challenges Freud’s view that mourning allows the subject to understand loss and overcome grief. By deliberately refusing to complete mourning, the artist lets Sewol enter herself and exist in a state where subject and object are twisted together, the state of melancholy. Turning the work into melancholy was a clear choice. Rather than overcoming melancholy, the artist traps herself within depression, keeping herself in a melancholic state so that Sewol will not be forgotten.
To move beyond Freud, the artist turns to Julia Kristeva, who interprets the unconscious and the other in a more radical way. Freud saw the other as something completely different from the self. Kristeva criticized this by introducing the idea of abjection, something that is inside one yet also outside. If a Freudian understanding places Sewol inside the artist in a melancholic state, Kristeva’s approach places Sewol both inside the artist and on a boundary, like skin. Through 《A Ferry》 the Sewol disaster shifts from the capital Other to the lowercase other. It moves from the outside the artist’s unconscious structure to inside it, and then is objectified again as something external. Through this double movement, the artist twists himself and the Sewol other into a Möbius trip, creating an abject form. 《A Ferry》 is inside Kook, Kook is inside 《A Ferry》. As a melancholic subject, Kook is 《A Ferry》, and at the same time, she is not.
Lee Kyunghee (Cultural Sociology)