The memory of space, the memory of the body
Yun Donghee
Man is closely associated with space. Our daily life is subordinate to the city. For contemporary humans, the city is the result of collective imagination, space closely connected with social life, and a desire to construct space vertically or horizontally. According to architect Jean Nouvel, architecture in urban space experiments with limitations within its own standard, purposiveness, use, mode, others that can be its own purpose, or others that can move beyond its own purpose. A statement of desire to reach the limitations ---- a city is made by this, and is still changing at this moment.
Architectural aesthetics is not the only element captivating urbanites in a city. As Jean Baudrillard argues, architecture is more explicitly represented what it expresses in reality. We undergo urban space through architecture, which means we accept the world with our sense and perception. Regrettably however, architecture today is often considered nothing but a material with no any connection with humans or human minds. Less buildings filing an urban space than before bring about a liberal sense of space. Architecture confined to fixed time and budget rather than ‘non-material’ architecture with rich emotions makes us feel terrible.
Jeong Hee-woo encapsulating the space of Gangnamdaero between the Gangnam and Yangjae subway stations has unusual talents replacing material space with non-material space. Jeong depicts another world situated beyond the recognition system the specific space of Gangnam with unique narratives brings about in Korea pervasive with post-capitalism. Space in her painting with an Oriental feel is jam-packed with Westernized high-rising buildings. Her painting is very interesting because its colors and lines accurately represent the realistic world of Gangnam although these fail in recalling real objects. As a scholar of English Kim Woo-chang stated “The organizing principles and features of visual experience is eventually deduced from the principles of life.”, Jeong’s first-hand experience of this space she had while walking the street and breathing its air continues to her sensuous experience.
Film director Yu Ha depicted Gangnam with ‘violence’ in his film Maljukgeori janhoksa. This area was originally an outskirt of Seoul with many fields and paddies, but dramatically turned to the wealthiest part of Seoul in a brief time. When she was in fifth grade, Jeong moved to an apartment in Daechi-dong where all houses rise vertically from a village where all houses are arranged horizontally. For 25 years she has lived there, Gangnam has been always a provisional space. Unlike other spaces that change through a few generations, Gangnam has attained its rapid growth for the period when the artist has stayed. As a result, in Korea of the 21st century Gangnam has been a criterion in contrast to other regions of Seoul. People living in Gangnam are able to live as they have wanted, or in disregard of their will.
Jeong depicts Gangnam scenes as documentary recordings of ‘here and now of Gangnam’. A series of works - Maps Encapsulating Time – Records of Gangnamdaero for Four Years - measured by the physical are tenacious maps. These are not mere representations of landscapes but chronicles of the interior and exterior of the city where she lives. The artist says she recorded the city scenes by walking along stretches of Gangnamdaero. She observed buildings on both sides of the street; took photographs of streets from rooftops; and measured the distance between buildings with her strides. Even though doors to buildings and rooftops were closed, and buildings appeared blacken when the sun set so the city appeared vague. However, she was successful in reviving the meaning of the place through realistic arrangements of these buildings, to make Gangnam reveal its true nature, using her own distinctive color and form. That is why her Gangnamdaero is called ‘21st century genre painting’ using her body, beyond a painting sketched with head and hand.
Jeong’s painting is the product of artistic memories of urban space. As awakened by the Gyeongin Line (Gyeonginseon), a railway mainline in Korea connecting Jemulpo, Incheon and Noryangjin, Seoul on September 18, 1899, architecture works as an index of change in time and ideology. We address memories changing with time when a building is erected, transformed, and destroyed. This associates with the extinction of memories and establishment of identity. My house, my village, my room, and the school I graduated from enter immaterial space, constructed and manipulated within memory. Architecture infiltrates the sphere of the image. Jeong’s Gangnamdaero can thus expand from general to artistic memories, and historical memories. (A matter requiring attention is the dichotomy considering historical memories public and justifiable, and artistic memories private and uncertified.)
Memory in art is “an individual’s specific memory relying on imagination beyond a collective, cultural memory,” according to Byun Hak-soo. Most of what is experienced in life derives from our memory or heart, although “We understand or embrace things directly through the body without relying on writing and words,” according to Kim Hoon. Artistic memories are often considered private because we think them only with our hearts or heads and without the body. For philosopher François Jullien, who stressed the importance of a tasteless quality in Eloge de la fadeur, the fundamental of art is the aesthetics of serenity or composedness like water and air. In the today’s world of spectacles, moderation without excess, neutrality and equilibrium, serenity and naturalness have to be more praised. The value of this tasteless quality remains only in an artist’s heart, beyond a mental landscape, and the arena of private memories. A true mental landscape derives from a scene remaining in the body of an artist beyond his mind.
There is a new wave of Western painting-like Oriental painting; Oriental painting-like Western painting, according to Lee Kun-soo. Through Andre Malraux, this wave expresses painting free of values and a need to praise and represent; painting free of form; and painting in the true nature of painting. Jeong’s painting breaks down fixed principles of man and landscape and blurs the boundaries between Eastern and Western landscape. In the era when space is dominated by filling, not emptying; architecture is defined with the material, not the non-material; and art is replaced with something daily, Jeong has viewers reflect on ‘the meaning of an act of seeing’ through subjective experience and objective observation.
Her painting shows something beyond our prejudiced visual experience to organize the specific space of Gangnam. With this we listen to the diverse narratives of the place. Jeong’s empirical observation questions the source of space in a reality where space and time are copied. It is always agreeable to meet an artist who remains positive to herself in the age when forms and genres are of no significance, and the question, “What belongs to art or not?” is of no use.
Yun Donghee
Man is closely associated with space. Our daily life is subordinate to the city. For contemporary humans, the city is the result of collective imagination, space closely connected with social life, and a desire to construct space vertically or horizontally. According to architect Jean Nouvel, architecture in urban space experiments with limitations within its own standard, purposiveness, use, mode, others that can be its own purpose, or others that can move beyond its own purpose. A statement of desire to reach the limitations ---- a city is made by this, and is still changing at this moment.
Architectural aesthetics is not the only element captivating urbanites in a city. As Jean Baudrillard argues, architecture is more explicitly represented what it expresses in reality. We undergo urban space through architecture, which means we accept the world with our sense and perception. Regrettably however, architecture today is often considered nothing but a material with no any connection with humans or human minds. Less buildings filing an urban space than before bring about a liberal sense of space. Architecture confined to fixed time and budget rather than ‘non-material’ architecture with rich emotions makes us feel terrible.
Jeong Hee-woo encapsulating the space of Gangnamdaero between the Gangnam and Yangjae subway stations has unusual talents replacing material space with non-material space. Jeong depicts another world situated beyond the recognition system the specific space of Gangnam with unique narratives brings about in Korea pervasive with post-capitalism. Space in her painting with an Oriental feel is jam-packed with Westernized high-rising buildings. Her painting is very interesting because its colors and lines accurately represent the realistic world of Gangnam although these fail in recalling real objects. As a scholar of English Kim Woo-chang stated “The organizing principles and features of visual experience is eventually deduced from the principles of life.”, Jeong’s first-hand experience of this space she had while walking the street and breathing its air continues to her sensuous experience.
Film director Yu Ha depicted Gangnam with ‘violence’ in his film Maljukgeori janhoksa. This area was originally an outskirt of Seoul with many fields and paddies, but dramatically turned to the wealthiest part of Seoul in a brief time. When she was in fifth grade, Jeong moved to an apartment in Daechi-dong where all houses rise vertically from a village where all houses are arranged horizontally. For 25 years she has lived there, Gangnam has been always a provisional space. Unlike other spaces that change through a few generations, Gangnam has attained its rapid growth for the period when the artist has stayed. As a result, in Korea of the 21st century Gangnam has been a criterion in contrast to other regions of Seoul. People living in Gangnam are able to live as they have wanted, or in disregard of their will.
Jeong depicts Gangnam scenes as documentary recordings of ‘here and now of Gangnam’. A series of works - Maps Encapsulating Time – Records of Gangnamdaero for Four Years - measured by the physical are tenacious maps. These are not mere representations of landscapes but chronicles of the interior and exterior of the city where she lives. The artist says she recorded the city scenes by walking along stretches of Gangnamdaero. She observed buildings on both sides of the street; took photographs of streets from rooftops; and measured the distance between buildings with her strides. Even though doors to buildings and rooftops were closed, and buildings appeared blacken when the sun set so the city appeared vague. However, she was successful in reviving the meaning of the place through realistic arrangements of these buildings, to make Gangnam reveal its true nature, using her own distinctive color and form. That is why her Gangnamdaero is called ‘21st century genre painting’ using her body, beyond a painting sketched with head and hand.
Jeong’s painting is the product of artistic memories of urban space. As awakened by the Gyeongin Line (Gyeonginseon), a railway mainline in Korea connecting Jemulpo, Incheon and Noryangjin, Seoul on September 18, 1899, architecture works as an index of change in time and ideology. We address memories changing with time when a building is erected, transformed, and destroyed. This associates with the extinction of memories and establishment of identity. My house, my village, my room, and the school I graduated from enter immaterial space, constructed and manipulated within memory. Architecture infiltrates the sphere of the image. Jeong’s Gangnamdaero can thus expand from general to artistic memories, and historical memories. (A matter requiring attention is the dichotomy considering historical memories public and justifiable, and artistic memories private and uncertified.)
Memory in art is “an individual’s specific memory relying on imagination beyond a collective, cultural memory,” according to Byun Hak-soo. Most of what is experienced in life derives from our memory or heart, although “We understand or embrace things directly through the body without relying on writing and words,” according to Kim Hoon. Artistic memories are often considered private because we think them only with our hearts or heads and without the body. For philosopher François Jullien, who stressed the importance of a tasteless quality in Eloge de la fadeur, the fundamental of art is the aesthetics of serenity or composedness like water and air. In the today’s world of spectacles, moderation without excess, neutrality and equilibrium, serenity and naturalness have to be more praised. The value of this tasteless quality remains only in an artist’s heart, beyond a mental landscape, and the arena of private memories. A true mental landscape derives from a scene remaining in the body of an artist beyond his mind.
There is a new wave of Western painting-like Oriental painting; Oriental painting-like Western painting, according to Lee Kun-soo. Through Andre Malraux, this wave expresses painting free of values and a need to praise and represent; painting free of form; and painting in the true nature of painting. Jeong’s painting breaks down fixed principles of man and landscape and blurs the boundaries between Eastern and Western landscape. In the era when space is dominated by filling, not emptying; architecture is defined with the material, not the non-material; and art is replaced with something daily, Jeong has viewers reflect on ‘the meaning of an act of seeing’ through subjective experience and objective observation.
Her painting shows something beyond our prejudiced visual experience to organize the specific space of Gangnam. With this we listen to the diverse narratives of the place. Jeong’s empirical observation questions the source of space in a reality where space and time are copied. It is always agreeable to meet an artist who remains positive to herself in the age when forms and genres are of no significance, and the question, “What belongs to art or not?” is of no use.
