Remains of existence in the outskirts of Chronos
Lee Seon Young | Art critic
Following her previous exhibition in 2011, “Maps Encapulating Time” in which she presented documentation of Gangnam over four years, Jeong Heewoo came back this year with “Damjido (Maps of the Wall)” (exhibition title). Whereas Jeong attempted to recreate the spectacle of buildings along Gangnam-daero in the previous show, she has now turned her eye to more concrete and microscopic details of Gangnam by tracing vestiges of time etched along old bricks of Gangnam apartments. Her tenacious attention to detail is still overwhelming though, to the point of not dropping even a tiny bit of existence on the map. Unveiled in the show are a few of glimpses of 80 works she collected from various old apartments in Gangnam by employing a rubbing technique, through which microscopic changes over a long time such as cracks found in rocks would leave their traces on soft papers. If the buildings parading along Gangnam-daero constructed a space that unfolds along the time axis, Damjido is a cross-sectional examination of the time at a given moment. Jeong had previously been producing rubbings of road signs, manholes and other elements found on the pavement in Gangnam; however, she turned her eyes to vertical surfaces for this exhibition. Horizontal or vertical, her artistic method of looking deep down beneath the surface remains unchanged.
In Damjido, compressed times can be clearly seen along otherworldly architectural designs that are nowhere to be found in Gangnam today as well as in various traces and cracks large and small. In her work “Daechi – Sunkyung”, rows of bricks stacked up along alternating directions and the mortar between them have become fuzzier, losing their original shape. Just as lanes on the pavement are being disintegrated into amorphous jumbles over time, losing their original clarity, time increases the entropy of space. Producing a rubbing of a wall and wall structure with full-size paper and an ink stick is a process of copying the original object just like an archaeologist’s work; however, the artist still insisted on using the term “map” even though maps are representation of reality with map symbols. In contrast to her earlier works on Gangnam-daero in which she created scale models by combining what she saw and what she knew, Jeong now seems to be trying to match the reality with corresponding symbols. The works containing the true nature of space show that reality can be as bizarre as imagination.
The walls in Jeong’s rubbings were copied from apartments that were built in the 1970s and 1980s. They were built less than a half a century ago but would still be considered living artifacts or archaeological sites given the country’s unique history that saw rapid destruction and construction. By some archaeological excavation processes designed to decipher old inscriptions on rocks, the objects here are transformed to pieces of riddles. Compared to the fortress-like walls of the latest apartments equipped with airtight modern security devices or hidden behind cleverly-designed landscaping, the walls collected in the rubbings retain simple and rudimentary forms along with memories they possess. For Jeong, who has lived in one of those apartments for more than 30 years since his childhood relocation from Gangbuk to Gangnam, the apartments and the residential environment represented by apartments are almost like landscapes jumping out from her hometown. As a living eyewitness of the history of Gangnam, which had gone through a marvelous transformation within a single generation, Jeong has recorded the remarkable changes in the urban environment in her works.
However, somewhat simple and realistic images of the reality are miles apart from her emotional expression of the changes. The childhood memory of the stark images of Gangnam – the artificial array of trees and apartments she found in 1984 when her family moved to the area – still remains. However, her attitude about the changes of Gangnam transcends a simple state of love it or hate it; instead, she retains the eyes of an insider on Gangnam. As long as she retains eyes of an insider on Gangnam, she can no more denounce the area simply as an inhumane pocket of urbanity; her attitude is that “I don’t necessarily like it, but it is already a part of my personal memory”. Having lived in an old town in Gangbuk for about half a century, I still consider those apartment houses to be brutal concrete boxes. Still, I understand that the new generation of people who have grown up in those concrete boxes would have their own layers of memories tucked deep inside the space and time of apartments just as residents of old rural towns would have their own. Jeong’s elaborate works on the walls are an attempt at recovering those layers delicately as they contain sediments that were accumulated over time.
The achromatic space copied from the walls by rubbing an ink stick on them doesn’t look that different from the old walls it was copied from. On one hand, Jeong’s works are like paintings as they project three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional plane. They would even be considered archaeological artifacts since those works have characteristics of an index such as photographs with their explicit link to real-life objects. However, they are clearly different from painting or photographic recreation: in the case of a wall with a “No Parking” sign in the work “Jamwon Hanshin Town”, for instance, the letters were not copied with the rubbing technique, leaving empty blobs in their place. And the tactile surface with images that were copied accurately from real objects and therefore faithful to frontal shape of the objects is different from the contemporary visual conventions. Damjido embodies the face or body of objects. In the contemporary world dominated by diverse interfaces, things move from point A to a point B; for those artists who wish to express chronological changes, however, human perspective is much more important than geometrical considerations. Old walls rising gently up to eye level were usually flanked by neighboring pathways. In other words, old walls correspond exactly with the ups and downs of human life.
However, pathways are faced with existential crisis just as old walls are. Pathways have become such an abstract entity now that one cannot find his/her way comfortably without GPS guidance from satellites in the sky. Today the flow of human traffic is defined by maps on the interface which is crisscrossed by various politico-economic intentions of people. And the brand of one’s apartment as well as the number and floor space of each apartment home implies a resident’s social status. Unlike the old walls the artist collected from nooks and crannies of the city with an archaeologist’s eyes, the walls located in those places with weighty significance are highly variable in their nature with periodically changing graphics enabled by colorful wrapping applications or constantly transforming interfaces. As has been frequently pointed out by urbanologists, the modern metropolis is one giant screen that mixes and consumes everything. Those dumb material entities without any degree of variability that is flexible enough to digest an increasingly accelerating capital consumption cycle have lost their place or significance in the city. Walls are standing in the city like archaic tombstones, which are nothing more than “letters written on rocks (Aleida Assmann)”.
The artist has now completely assimilated herself to the shocking images of strange apartments in Gangnam which were built in a time when no concept of landscaping existed. Now that those apartments are disappearing beyond the historical silver screen, they are oozing with fond memories now. Constructed as an upscale residential town in the 1970s and 1980s when the modern urban environment was fast becoming a norm in the country, the apartments in Gangnam were at the forefront of the country’s dizzying urban transformation. Consequently, Jeong’s works reflecting her childhood memories as well as her experience as a grownup have not only artistic merit but also social and historical significance. Unlike her childhood town located in Gangbuk, the apartments in Gangnam evolved to accommodate both horizontal and vertical movements of people via automobiles and elevators. The feeling walking on Gangnam-daero is completely different from a lazy stroll along narrow alleyways snaking along Samcheong-dong, for instance. Such urban rearrangements dissuade pedestrians from staying or gathering on the streets; such acts are now allowed only in commercial complexes.
In the transformed urban environment, those old structures are not easily discovered by consumers or pedestrians. Jeong shows the hidden side of the fast-changing reality by accurately recreating physical entities that are hardly noticeable to ordinary eyes. The old walls with traces of time are like indices that alert us to bodily experiences and traces of unconsciousness. The nondescript walls with no significant presence to which the artist pays close attention are not necessarily the typical attachment of apartments but vestigial organs of living creatures just as urban compromises materialized in the form of roof tiles on top of modern buildings. The branded apartments in Gangnam gleaming under floodlights are not necessarily homes but commercial products. As long as they are products, their residents are not free from the endless cycle of greedy consumption. On the contrary, Damjido (Maps of the Wall) collected by Jeong via the rubbing method almost seems to belong to another space and time. Unlike the modern age, which was a ruthless developer, the balance between impermanency and eternity had been stressed in the early modern age when the great poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire was actively writing his poems.
In Jeong’s Damjido, the importance of eternity, which is one wing of modernity, has been constantly stressed. The eternity in this case is a place sidestepped or delayed from the ruthless onslaught of the development cycle, and it will keep its place like a rock until being ravaged at the hands of developers. Over time, however, the impermanency will keep increasing its heft in the city. Postmodernism theorists have analyzed trends of the post modern world that were characterized for an increasing dominance of impermanency in both aspects of modernity. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his book “Liquid Modernity”, the modernity means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to stop or stand still; change has become a permanent precondition of the modern world. However, Jeong’s old walls seem to ask if such changes are sustainable. Now that Korean society has finally gone through the age of hyper growth, people are increasingly skeptical about unconditional development that obliterates the past and present at the same time. The Gangnam area, which had pioneered the urban transformation, now even looks antique. Jeong excavates some archaic sites or ruins in the place seemingly filled with all that glitters.
The genuine hallmark of modern cities is that buildings start to age as soon as they are built, well before their history or memories find their place in people’s minds. Those walls may have drawn various boundaries in Korean society but will be left behind with the introduction of a more effective system of walls. However their true face can be discovered by examining what is fading away fast. Graeme Gilloch said in his book “Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City” that the key to understanding modernity is decadence. Outdated objects trigger reification and demythification of products as well as manufacturing, exchange and consumption cycle of products in the city. Just as outdated objects expose the reality of trends, the true nature of object becomes evident when it becomes extinct. The utopian aspects of products and collective desire of Korean society realized in the form of apartments will, therefore, be revealed with the decadence of products. The old walls with crumbling surfaces symbolize the modernity that is fast becoming antiquated. The objects recreated through Jeong’s rubbing works will provide clues to future anthropologists as to how to understand the modernity.
Damjido will have to be decoded inevitability because it is a collection of traces of human lives. Instead of integrating collected fragments, Jeong simply keeps accumulating them as if they are a collection of images. They jumble together like pieces of mosaic to present a panoramic view of the city via a dimension that is totally different from the one shown in the previous exhibition ‘‘Maps Encapsulating Time – Records of Gangnamdaero for four years”. Just like epigraphs in the archaeological study, Jeong’s rubbed images become a target of semiotic analysis. Jeong’s Damjido shows that the relationship between signifier and signified is not arbitrary unlike general language such as map. There is a detailed city map with a price tag (KRW 2,000) in Jeong’s studio. As her reference material shows well, Damjido has its own model map. It may be recreations of certain areas but they are different from perspective or photographs, which are traditional means of artistic representation. If a typical recreation method contains a lopsided view without bodily experience, Jeong’s works embody physical movements that flow over time.
Her works require a premise of movement that is not from point A to point B but the one made by “Lonely Flaneure-Archaeologist in the City (Benjamin)”, and involve temporality as they are completed via rubbing, and through which they are differentiated from the ideational and geometric space implied by the fixed single eye. Whereas the construction of large-scale apartments requires a transcendental and universal perspective implied in perspective or photographs, Jeong’s model of artistic approach to fragments of the reality that have become objects of archaeological study is a map faithful to parts. Jeong’s works conveying specific locations in their titles point to certain geographic areas but their exact significance is not at all clear, forcing people to face up to speechless signs just like artifacts from a prehistoric age. The vestiges on the surface that were copied to paper imply the existence of earlier life and behavioral patterns. The face of objects copied to a flat surface such as a map retains rich texture. The map is not scaled but retains their original size, which can be likened to maps that Jean Baudrillard introduced in the preface of “Simulacra and Simulation”, quoting a fable of Jorge Luis Borges.
The best figure of speech on simulation, the fable introduces an extremely accurate map that is created by map makers of an empire but large enough to cover the entire territory of the empire at an almost 1:1 scale. But the empire decays over time to witness the gradual ruining of the map until a few remaining pieces of the map roll on the ruins. According to Baudrillard, unlike the example as depicted in the old fable, the modern simulation is not territory or a certain object or entity signified by images or signs. Simulation today is a process of creating outputs with some existence even without corresponding reality; in other words, it is derivative existence. Now maps precede the territory, sometimes even creating territory itself. Ruins of actual existence, instead of those of maps, are scattered here and there, finally arriving at the ruins of the existence. This is no more an issue of map or territory: the difference between the two different objects that has begotten the attractiveness of abstraction has finally disappeared.
Damjido that contains the trace of random episodes embodies an attractiveness of the existence that has disappeared or is about to disappear. Unlike the modern method of identical proliferation from code to code, Jeong’s works still embraces the attractiveness of existence that is the difference. However, a signal generator that is stable enough to make it impossible to detect the change would hinder all those actual processes. The imagined recreated world that both culminated and faded in the crazy scheme of map makers who had strived to match the map with the territory as accurately as possible finally disappears in simulations. According to Baudrillard, the existence is simply operational. Increasing the share of operative reality only highlights the simplicity of Damjido. Here are contained time and memories. Aleida Assmann starts her book “Erinnerungsräume” by quoting Cicero: “The power of memories implied in places is great.” Unlike the ancient world when Cicero lived, however, the fluid modern world escaped from the spells that are correlated with locations.
According to Assmann, modernity digs deep into the memory related with the land. Rationalization of civilization encouraged the fluidity that was liberated from the bounds of location, hence thereby promoting advancement. The efforts to preserve traces and marks of a place in memory started to appear with the movement of post modernity. “Memory and Space” stresses that the memory is not only an artificial alternative to what has long been gone or lost but also a strength that helps people assert themselves against oblivion and suppression. Just as people remember places with their respective tradition and history, the places themselves redefine the form of life along with the experience of people. The images contained in “The Shape of Time (George Kubler)” are time that has been shaped to space. The topological map of history is being created piece by piece in that place. While the majority of contemporary people are still living in the present time, Jeong attempts to resurrect the past. She tries to help locations to speak as silent witness while giving back lost voices to such places.
Just as romanticists saw a combination of art and nature in the ruins, the old walls that appear as historical sites are artificial objects but retain the characteristics of nature. The more people start to forget, the greater the aura the places and relics silently emit. Jeong’s artistic methodology creates the aura of places that cannot be recreated otherwise via other media. The medium of memory presents the invisible past and keeps contact with it. Rubbing, which is the most direct method, brings something that is located in a far-off location to a nearer place. Or, it can send something that is located in a very near location to some far-off places. The combination of things both far and near makes this an interesting place that is imbued with aura. The place of memory created in those works is a “special fabric woven with space and time” (Benjamin). Jeong’s Damjido, which triggers the contact with the place in the memory, has some unique aura. It is somewhat different from the modern space that is built based on the fear of contact with others (Richard Senet) but shows a vision of heteropia as opposed to utopia in modern history.
Lee Seon Young | Art critic
Following her previous exhibition in 2011, “Maps Encapulating Time” in which she presented documentation of Gangnam over four years, Jeong Heewoo came back this year with “Damjido (Maps of the Wall)” (exhibition title). Whereas Jeong attempted to recreate the spectacle of buildings along Gangnam-daero in the previous show, she has now turned her eye to more concrete and microscopic details of Gangnam by tracing vestiges of time etched along old bricks of Gangnam apartments. Her tenacious attention to detail is still overwhelming though, to the point of not dropping even a tiny bit of existence on the map. Unveiled in the show are a few of glimpses of 80 works she collected from various old apartments in Gangnam by employing a rubbing technique, through which microscopic changes over a long time such as cracks found in rocks would leave their traces on soft papers. If the buildings parading along Gangnam-daero constructed a space that unfolds along the time axis, Damjido is a cross-sectional examination of the time at a given moment. Jeong had previously been producing rubbings of road signs, manholes and other elements found on the pavement in Gangnam; however, she turned her eyes to vertical surfaces for this exhibition. Horizontal or vertical, her artistic method of looking deep down beneath the surface remains unchanged.
In Damjido, compressed times can be clearly seen along otherworldly architectural designs that are nowhere to be found in Gangnam today as well as in various traces and cracks large and small. In her work “Daechi – Sunkyung”, rows of bricks stacked up along alternating directions and the mortar between them have become fuzzier, losing their original shape. Just as lanes on the pavement are being disintegrated into amorphous jumbles over time, losing their original clarity, time increases the entropy of space. Producing a rubbing of a wall and wall structure with full-size paper and an ink stick is a process of copying the original object just like an archaeologist’s work; however, the artist still insisted on using the term “map” even though maps are representation of reality with map symbols. In contrast to her earlier works on Gangnam-daero in which she created scale models by combining what she saw and what she knew, Jeong now seems to be trying to match the reality with corresponding symbols. The works containing the true nature of space show that reality can be as bizarre as imagination.
The walls in Jeong’s rubbings were copied from apartments that were built in the 1970s and 1980s. They were built less than a half a century ago but would still be considered living artifacts or archaeological sites given the country’s unique history that saw rapid destruction and construction. By some archaeological excavation processes designed to decipher old inscriptions on rocks, the objects here are transformed to pieces of riddles. Compared to the fortress-like walls of the latest apartments equipped with airtight modern security devices or hidden behind cleverly-designed landscaping, the walls collected in the rubbings retain simple and rudimentary forms along with memories they possess. For Jeong, who has lived in one of those apartments for more than 30 years since his childhood relocation from Gangbuk to Gangnam, the apartments and the residential environment represented by apartments are almost like landscapes jumping out from her hometown. As a living eyewitness of the history of Gangnam, which had gone through a marvelous transformation within a single generation, Jeong has recorded the remarkable changes in the urban environment in her works.
However, somewhat simple and realistic images of the reality are miles apart from her emotional expression of the changes. The childhood memory of the stark images of Gangnam – the artificial array of trees and apartments she found in 1984 when her family moved to the area – still remains. However, her attitude about the changes of Gangnam transcends a simple state of love it or hate it; instead, she retains the eyes of an insider on Gangnam. As long as she retains eyes of an insider on Gangnam, she can no more denounce the area simply as an inhumane pocket of urbanity; her attitude is that “I don’t necessarily like it, but it is already a part of my personal memory”. Having lived in an old town in Gangbuk for about half a century, I still consider those apartment houses to be brutal concrete boxes. Still, I understand that the new generation of people who have grown up in those concrete boxes would have their own layers of memories tucked deep inside the space and time of apartments just as residents of old rural towns would have their own. Jeong’s elaborate works on the walls are an attempt at recovering those layers delicately as they contain sediments that were accumulated over time.
The achromatic space copied from the walls by rubbing an ink stick on them doesn’t look that different from the old walls it was copied from. On one hand, Jeong’s works are like paintings as they project three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional plane. They would even be considered archaeological artifacts since those works have characteristics of an index such as photographs with their explicit link to real-life objects. However, they are clearly different from painting or photographic recreation: in the case of a wall with a “No Parking” sign in the work “Jamwon Hanshin Town”, for instance, the letters were not copied with the rubbing technique, leaving empty blobs in their place. And the tactile surface with images that were copied accurately from real objects and therefore faithful to frontal shape of the objects is different from the contemporary visual conventions. Damjido embodies the face or body of objects. In the contemporary world dominated by diverse interfaces, things move from point A to a point B; for those artists who wish to express chronological changes, however, human perspective is much more important than geometrical considerations. Old walls rising gently up to eye level were usually flanked by neighboring pathways. In other words, old walls correspond exactly with the ups and downs of human life.
However, pathways are faced with existential crisis just as old walls are. Pathways have become such an abstract entity now that one cannot find his/her way comfortably without GPS guidance from satellites in the sky. Today the flow of human traffic is defined by maps on the interface which is crisscrossed by various politico-economic intentions of people. And the brand of one’s apartment as well as the number and floor space of each apartment home implies a resident’s social status. Unlike the old walls the artist collected from nooks and crannies of the city with an archaeologist’s eyes, the walls located in those places with weighty significance are highly variable in their nature with periodically changing graphics enabled by colorful wrapping applications or constantly transforming interfaces. As has been frequently pointed out by urbanologists, the modern metropolis is one giant screen that mixes and consumes everything. Those dumb material entities without any degree of variability that is flexible enough to digest an increasingly accelerating capital consumption cycle have lost their place or significance in the city. Walls are standing in the city like archaic tombstones, which are nothing more than “letters written on rocks (Aleida Assmann)”.
The artist has now completely assimilated herself to the shocking images of strange apartments in Gangnam which were built in a time when no concept of landscaping existed. Now that those apartments are disappearing beyond the historical silver screen, they are oozing with fond memories now. Constructed as an upscale residential town in the 1970s and 1980s when the modern urban environment was fast becoming a norm in the country, the apartments in Gangnam were at the forefront of the country’s dizzying urban transformation. Consequently, Jeong’s works reflecting her childhood memories as well as her experience as a grownup have not only artistic merit but also social and historical significance. Unlike her childhood town located in Gangbuk, the apartments in Gangnam evolved to accommodate both horizontal and vertical movements of people via automobiles and elevators. The feeling walking on Gangnam-daero is completely different from a lazy stroll along narrow alleyways snaking along Samcheong-dong, for instance. Such urban rearrangements dissuade pedestrians from staying or gathering on the streets; such acts are now allowed only in commercial complexes.
In the transformed urban environment, those old structures are not easily discovered by consumers or pedestrians. Jeong shows the hidden side of the fast-changing reality by accurately recreating physical entities that are hardly noticeable to ordinary eyes. The old walls with traces of time are like indices that alert us to bodily experiences and traces of unconsciousness. The nondescript walls with no significant presence to which the artist pays close attention are not necessarily the typical attachment of apartments but vestigial organs of living creatures just as urban compromises materialized in the form of roof tiles on top of modern buildings. The branded apartments in Gangnam gleaming under floodlights are not necessarily homes but commercial products. As long as they are products, their residents are not free from the endless cycle of greedy consumption. On the contrary, Damjido (Maps of the Wall) collected by Jeong via the rubbing method almost seems to belong to another space and time. Unlike the modern age, which was a ruthless developer, the balance between impermanency and eternity had been stressed in the early modern age when the great poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire was actively writing his poems.
In Jeong’s Damjido, the importance of eternity, which is one wing of modernity, has been constantly stressed. The eternity in this case is a place sidestepped or delayed from the ruthless onslaught of the development cycle, and it will keep its place like a rock until being ravaged at the hands of developers. Over time, however, the impermanency will keep increasing its heft in the city. Postmodernism theorists have analyzed trends of the post modern world that were characterized for an increasing dominance of impermanency in both aspects of modernity. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his book “Liquid Modernity”, the modernity means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to stop or stand still; change has become a permanent precondition of the modern world. However, Jeong’s old walls seem to ask if such changes are sustainable. Now that Korean society has finally gone through the age of hyper growth, people are increasingly skeptical about unconditional development that obliterates the past and present at the same time. The Gangnam area, which had pioneered the urban transformation, now even looks antique. Jeong excavates some archaic sites or ruins in the place seemingly filled with all that glitters.
The genuine hallmark of modern cities is that buildings start to age as soon as they are built, well before their history or memories find their place in people’s minds. Those walls may have drawn various boundaries in Korean society but will be left behind with the introduction of a more effective system of walls. However their true face can be discovered by examining what is fading away fast. Graeme Gilloch said in his book “Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City” that the key to understanding modernity is decadence. Outdated objects trigger reification and demythification of products as well as manufacturing, exchange and consumption cycle of products in the city. Just as outdated objects expose the reality of trends, the true nature of object becomes evident when it becomes extinct. The utopian aspects of products and collective desire of Korean society realized in the form of apartments will, therefore, be revealed with the decadence of products. The old walls with crumbling surfaces symbolize the modernity that is fast becoming antiquated. The objects recreated through Jeong’s rubbing works will provide clues to future anthropologists as to how to understand the modernity.
Damjido will have to be decoded inevitability because it is a collection of traces of human lives. Instead of integrating collected fragments, Jeong simply keeps accumulating them as if they are a collection of images. They jumble together like pieces of mosaic to present a panoramic view of the city via a dimension that is totally different from the one shown in the previous exhibition ‘‘Maps Encapsulating Time – Records of Gangnamdaero for four years”. Just like epigraphs in the archaeological study, Jeong’s rubbed images become a target of semiotic analysis. Jeong’s Damjido shows that the relationship between signifier and signified is not arbitrary unlike general language such as map. There is a detailed city map with a price tag (KRW 2,000) in Jeong’s studio. As her reference material shows well, Damjido has its own model map. It may be recreations of certain areas but they are different from perspective or photographs, which are traditional means of artistic representation. If a typical recreation method contains a lopsided view without bodily experience, Jeong’s works embody physical movements that flow over time.
Her works require a premise of movement that is not from point A to point B but the one made by “Lonely Flaneure-Archaeologist in the City (Benjamin)”, and involve temporality as they are completed via rubbing, and through which they are differentiated from the ideational and geometric space implied by the fixed single eye. Whereas the construction of large-scale apartments requires a transcendental and universal perspective implied in perspective or photographs, Jeong’s model of artistic approach to fragments of the reality that have become objects of archaeological study is a map faithful to parts. Jeong’s works conveying specific locations in their titles point to certain geographic areas but their exact significance is not at all clear, forcing people to face up to speechless signs just like artifacts from a prehistoric age. The vestiges on the surface that were copied to paper imply the existence of earlier life and behavioral patterns. The face of objects copied to a flat surface such as a map retains rich texture. The map is not scaled but retains their original size, which can be likened to maps that Jean Baudrillard introduced in the preface of “Simulacra and Simulation”, quoting a fable of Jorge Luis Borges.
The best figure of speech on simulation, the fable introduces an extremely accurate map that is created by map makers of an empire but large enough to cover the entire territory of the empire at an almost 1:1 scale. But the empire decays over time to witness the gradual ruining of the map until a few remaining pieces of the map roll on the ruins. According to Baudrillard, unlike the example as depicted in the old fable, the modern simulation is not territory or a certain object or entity signified by images or signs. Simulation today is a process of creating outputs with some existence even without corresponding reality; in other words, it is derivative existence. Now maps precede the territory, sometimes even creating territory itself. Ruins of actual existence, instead of those of maps, are scattered here and there, finally arriving at the ruins of the existence. This is no more an issue of map or territory: the difference between the two different objects that has begotten the attractiveness of abstraction has finally disappeared.
Damjido that contains the trace of random episodes embodies an attractiveness of the existence that has disappeared or is about to disappear. Unlike the modern method of identical proliferation from code to code, Jeong’s works still embraces the attractiveness of existence that is the difference. However, a signal generator that is stable enough to make it impossible to detect the change would hinder all those actual processes. The imagined recreated world that both culminated and faded in the crazy scheme of map makers who had strived to match the map with the territory as accurately as possible finally disappears in simulations. According to Baudrillard, the existence is simply operational. Increasing the share of operative reality only highlights the simplicity of Damjido. Here are contained time and memories. Aleida Assmann starts her book “Erinnerungsräume” by quoting Cicero: “The power of memories implied in places is great.” Unlike the ancient world when Cicero lived, however, the fluid modern world escaped from the spells that are correlated with locations.
According to Assmann, modernity digs deep into the memory related with the land. Rationalization of civilization encouraged the fluidity that was liberated from the bounds of location, hence thereby promoting advancement. The efforts to preserve traces and marks of a place in memory started to appear with the movement of post modernity. “Memory and Space” stresses that the memory is not only an artificial alternative to what has long been gone or lost but also a strength that helps people assert themselves against oblivion and suppression. Just as people remember places with their respective tradition and history, the places themselves redefine the form of life along with the experience of people. The images contained in “The Shape of Time (George Kubler)” are time that has been shaped to space. The topological map of history is being created piece by piece in that place. While the majority of contemporary people are still living in the present time, Jeong attempts to resurrect the past. She tries to help locations to speak as silent witness while giving back lost voices to such places.
Just as romanticists saw a combination of art and nature in the ruins, the old walls that appear as historical sites are artificial objects but retain the characteristics of nature. The more people start to forget, the greater the aura the places and relics silently emit. Jeong’s artistic methodology creates the aura of places that cannot be recreated otherwise via other media. The medium of memory presents the invisible past and keeps contact with it. Rubbing, which is the most direct method, brings something that is located in a far-off location to a nearer place. Or, it can send something that is located in a very near location to some far-off places. The combination of things both far and near makes this an interesting place that is imbued with aura. The place of memory created in those works is a “special fabric woven with space and time” (Benjamin). Jeong’s Damjido, which triggers the contact with the place in the memory, has some unique aura. It is somewhat different from the modern space that is built based on the fear of contact with others (Richard Senet) but shows a vision of heteropia as opposed to utopia in modern history.
