Keyword: Nostalgia Allegory Quotes, a child “Ah” (ENG/KOR)
Hyosil Yang (Art Critic)
JeeMin Kim's 2023 solo exhibition 《Prototype Temple: In Defiance of Fond Adversaries》 at Sahng-up Gallery (Yongsan) was her third exhibition under the title "Prototype Temple”, this time consisting of the installation work "Moving Chandelier", and the painting series "Line of Silence".
Upon entering the hall, you are greeted with a wall that recreates a steep cliff or narrow mountain pass, and you have to squint through a dark passageway to reach the temple - the stage-venue - which appears immediately before the main exhibit. Although the time and space in which temples performed their daily functions have already disappeared into history, temples that one suddenly encounters in large cities become (post-)modern buildings due to their discontinuity or incongruity with the present and their anachronism. Temples represent ‘the other’ in modern civilization, signifying the beyond within the modern. Thus, the temple's (anti-)historicity, which embodies physical temporality to the extent of the building's grandeur or decay, is adjacent to post modern melancholy or cynicism. Those who fear time (change) will gather there, and for those who live through modernity with apocalyptic melancholy, a temple will be regarded as a kind of ruin where God is absent.
A temple will be a sanctuary for those of counter-historical faith who wish to enter, sit, and worship, and a rubble of modernity for those-artists who decipher modernity as an object of allegorical reading. The temple that unexpectedly enters the field of vision, while losing all its contextual meaning and remaining isolated, resembles the image of ruins that Walter Benjamin equated with the "Allegorical Archetype." In The Allegorical Impulse, Owens writes, "A conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present-these are its two most fundamental impulses."[i] JeeMin Kim’s temple is feeble and unremarkable. The ‘holy objects’ of the artist's temple are a chandelier that looks like it was purchased from an antique shop, and the paintings hanging on the walls pretending to be oriental paintings. The moving chandelier is a violation/subversion of Temple's chandelier. Its up-and-down motion is manipulated by pulleys on the other side of the room, the creaking of the unlubricated metal-cartilage signifies death on the iron, and the chandelier ascending again after tapping its 'foot' in the 'black' pond, manifests as an object moving in an uncanny way. Moreover, elements such as the colorless paintings that seem to have replaced the stained glass in the temple, along with the salt on the floor with the effect of sand as a loss of body-murderous intent, also read as semiotic-modern metaphors. It is a young female artist who has just turned thirty who has constructed this stage, where God is absent, transposed into a few allegorical and symbolic elements, and fragments.
Furthermore, based on what I read on the artist's website, as well as the exhibition information, the composition of the "Prototype Temple" is based on the texts of quite a few writers, painters, philosophers, and religious men who, with the exception of Pascal Quignard, are now dead. The chandelier is a direct quote from Baudelaire, the author writes.[ii] For Baudelaire, a poet-allegorist who obviously could not see properly, the chandelier is the centerpiece of a temple or theater. The chandelier, which has witnessed the appearance and disappearance of countless human beings, is an object-symbol that stares at the finitude of life and death from above. By pulling such a chandelier down from the top and giving it creaky joints, the artist gives it finitude/physicality. Therefore, it deviates a little or a lot from the original Baudelaire. The “Line of Silence" series is a visualization of the "Oriental" that the artist has been fascinated with lately, borrowing from the "soak stain" technique created in the 1950s by the abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, which involves placing the canvas on the ground and applying pale and thin layers of paint on it to achieve a watercolor-like smearing and seeping effect. Helen's paintings move between oil and watercolor, while JeeMin Kim's paintings move between oriental painting and oil on canvas based on ink(墨)‘s spread, and light and shade. Part of the title, "Silence," is a metaphorical reference to Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" mixed with the fact that silence(黙) and ink(墨) have the same intonation in Chinese, and the traditional saying: "silence is gold." Thus the artist’s "Line of Silence" series are all gold-lined, which is equivalent to silence, painted with ink, and colorless, almost stripped of anything that can be said (color as painting). Like Frankenstein's monster, the artist's paintings and installations are pieced together from bits and pieces. JeeMin Kim seems to be a descendant of Barthes' visual arts counterpart, who proclaimed that new art after ”the death of the author," where "the author, his person, his life, his tastes, and his passions" can no longer be the "origin" of art, is therefore "a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.“ Barthes says, "the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate;"[iii] Kim JeeMin’s quotations, connections, and apparently not-at-all-collages seem to embody Barthes’ post-modern argument in the visual arts, using literary chapters as examples. So I read this girl from the "third world" was able to have allegorical gaze, the text-writing. The girl went abroad at her parents’ decision (a stretch of authority), read classics and scriptures alone (at random, without genealogy) in an isolated dormitory, free from the frightening intervention of change and historicity from the outside, imprinted herself physically on her body, which is receptivity in itself. Instead of "growing up" in a mother tongue with friends in a contemporary cultural environment, the artist could have been a semiologist, or what Barthes calls a scriptor, weaving with artifacts, letters of the dead, their pathos, confessions, and reflections. Therefore, in this child, in this short story/fiction written by a child who has not been taught the artist-author trope in the traditional sense of expressing her story (inner world) or recreating this world, I see the artist. The story of a soldier, a priest, and a child[iv] ends abruptly, and events are not explained.
<'An old monk, returning to his monastery from a winter retreat, comes in carrying a child (with black hair and dark eyes) abandoned in the snow. The child lives in isolation, walled off from the world, with an elderly monk who is considered desireless, "deep in the mountains where no man has ever set foot," or "a long walk up the mountain after getting off at the last stop." The song the child hums is a hymn (聖歌), and the child is ignorant and infinite in this isolated time and space, where the only other person-mirror essential to social identity is the elderly. The child reads the classics, learns the classics, and composes. The child plucks the "blue flower" without realizing what he is doing, and the old man becomes angry at the child for killing a life. The allegorical image of the "picked flower" taken from Pascal Quignard (the artist's temple is a picked flower; if the temple is an oxymoron in modern times, so is the "picked flower") is an "event" to be understood through Quignard's description of it as "a kind of extreme flowering, a sudden and awe-inspiring sensation, something that penetrates the heart," and thus has long since moved past the monk's (customary/conceptual) reading of it as "possessiveness". The monk doesn't really understand that kind of reading, that kind of aesthetic sublimity. The child-artist's fascination with some impossible event - a tragedy that "brings death at the same time as life, pain at the same time as pleasure" - separates the child from the old man. Then a colorfully dressed, bleeding soldier enters the sacred space asking for help. The old monk fears a meeting between the child and the soldier. In the eyes of the limping (ostensibly male, but castrated?) soldier on crutches, the child is read as a "shell-less, naked lump of flesh that has never faced rationality and dignity," a "pale blob of blood," and a "lowly animal“(these sentences would be JeeMin Kim's description of "herself"). A soldier who has taken a child's side (taking the child away from an old man) by telling him about the outside-war, one day slaps the child on the cheek. The child bleeds (the child plucks the flower and now the soldier is violating the child). The child hides this unprovoked violence from the old monk. The soldier gives the child a name. The monk does not give the child a name, but the soldier does, marking the child's entry into the society/symbolic. The name "Ah" is a combination of the first letter of the alphabet A, child ér(兒), I Wǒ(我), and the exclamation ah! Which of these will become the child's "identity" will be determined by the society the child enters. The soldier kills the old man and limps back to where he came from. The child returns to a world that is a "sea of fire," a "battlefield," a world where everyone is an enemy to everyone else. In the child's innocent eyes is the world of Wǔ yù qī qíng(五欲七情). The soldier and the child meet once. The soldier kisses the child's tiny feet. The child speaks of the many deaths he has seen with his own eyes. Therefore, ‘Ah’ is not a noun, but an exclamation, a rumbling in the throat. "Those who suffer, those who weep for joy, those who mourn, those who love" call out to Ah, and Ah is thus identified as an external, auditory signifier who answers the call of others. Ah is now a repository of "thirst" and "bitterness." Ah‘s heart is hot, throbbing with joy and sorrow at every turn. The soldier says to him, "It's heavy, isn't it? That's the heart of a man", then the story ends.>
JeeMin Kim is self-aware that her taste is for the "classics" and that "only old things make her heart beat.” This artist asks herself what is the reason for her "wistful nostalgia for the civilization of those who have already gone." “Old nostalgia for an unexperienced time” remains unexplained, which is an “extreme emotion” that lives in the artist’s senses-body, and there is no doubt that the temple should have been the appropriate place to release it. A temple on the battlefield, a temple where the gods are absent, and therefore an abandoned place, is poorly and shamefully constructed in the exhibition hall. There is also a perception that the artist's history of singing in London cathedrals and performing classical music while studying abroad, and of living with classics by her side, were all "Western, classical, and high culture". If studying abroad in an advanced Europe, the origin of ‘painting’, was the intention of serious/fearful parents to prevent contamination by third-world culture, the artist has now come to reflect on which culture dominated her growing up. In this way, the author has moved beyond the anxiety and disgust of elite third-world parents. The artist is aware of the arrival of the temporality of difference, of the horizontal juxtaposition only for specials not universal and the particular. Therefore, whether by reading or feeling, the artist is aware of the advent of the temporality of difference and the age of the textual citations are requested. Therefore, "In Defiance of Fond Adversaries", which is also the subtitle of the exhibition, may be the Ah's answer/encounter to parents’(fear) distinction between the West (superior) and the East (inferior), and to the sermons(’s anger) the artist heard from adults in school and church. It may be reflecting the artist question, "all religions teach us to love our enemies, but what is a man to do who already loves his enemies?" (Ah is old even before growth. Ah is already beyond worldly structures. What can Ah 'do'? There is not much to 'do'.) Now, as an artist who enjoys juxtaposing and hierarchizing in a world of enemies, JeeMin Kim seems to have already moved on to the "next" work, mixing Helen's abstract expressionism with Orientalism, and going beyond her own Western tastes, as evidenced by the sentence, "the distorted nostalgia we have for imperialist cultures.“ I get the impression that the artist is trying to weave the text within a broader frame, making her own regional and historical limitations visible with the phrase "modern women in the third world".
Svetlana Boym(1959-2015), who came to the United States as a refugee from Russia at the age of 19 and lived there as a cultural theorist, visual artist, playwright, and novelist, distinguished between reflective and restorative nostalgia in her article 「Nostalgia and Its Discontents」.[v]Nostalgia as "a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed," is "a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress," an anti-historical, regressive, reactionary movement that seeks to move toward the past/lost instead of toward a utopian future. Wary of restorative nostalgia, which seeks to rebuild the nation, people, or imaginary communities, Svetlana appeals to the movement of reflective nostalgia, which "explores how to inhabit many places at once and imagine different times," or "to take time out of time and hold on to the fleeing present.“Under the conditions of the 21st century, when millions of people are segregated and isolated from the places of their birth, and are living in exile voluntarily or involuntarily, it seems self-evident how reflective nostalgia is an attitude imprinted on "refugee," "diaspora," and artists who wander the world with an allegorical gaze, if we keep in mind that restorative nostalgia is the very ideology of ethno-nationalism that is complicit in war and violence, The (post-)historical sense faces the anxiety or depression that 'history' has run into its own limits, that there is no safety, attribution, or arrival other than retreat, fall, and wandering. And then, as always, we try to deflect such anxiety and depression with narratives of extermination, of finding, naming, and eliminating the ‘enemy’. Reflective nostalgia will guide our tenuous survival as we endure post-historical melancholy, confront historical violence, and unite with the post-human movement.
What does being 30 years old indicates? What does the biological age mean to Ah-artist, as it does to Ah? Ah and JeeMin Kim as a body-place where the world, the outside, and human emotions are embedded, written, and recorded will be the same and different. Is JeeMin Kim going to walk away from Ah now? How could she? A difference that JeeMin Kim has recently been gradually embracing. I will consider her responsibility for the historical/regional name "Third World Modern Woman" as an extension or a variation of Ah. Personal fate or misfortune is only an alibi for a difference to the artist. I don't know where the text-weaving made up of JeeMin Kim's quotes is going right now, my heart is pounding to see as if I'm already watching it.
[i] Craig Owens, “The allegorical impulse: Toward a theory of Postmodernism,” October, no 12(1980).
[ii] Since I wrote my dissertation on Baudelaire, I confirmed through investigation that the Baudelaire text quoted by the artist JeeMin Kim was indeed sourced from 『Journaux Intimes』. In this posthumously published "diary," Baudelaire fervently criticises the utopian fantasies of progress and liberation based on a sense of imminent collapse. In the diary, he expresses his views on theatre, stating, "What I’ve always found most beautiful in a theatre… is the chandelier – a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complicated, circular and symmetrical […] After all, the chandelier has always appeared to me as the principal actor, seen through the large end or the small end of the lorgnette." Charles Baudelaire, "Journaux Intimes", translated by Lee Kun Soo, Moonji Publishing, 2001, p. 87.
[iii] Roland Barthes, “The Death of Author”,
[iv] Baudelaire argues in the preceding text that “There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. Other men are taxable and exploitable, made for the stable, that is to say, to exercise so called professions.“ preceding book, p. 94.
[v] Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review 9.2 (Summer 2007). https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents.