An Inverted World

Exhibition Review of Kim Hye-yeon & Choi Hee-jung's join exhibition <Let’s Find the Light by Doing OO!>
 Gallery 175, January 31–February 11, 2020


Let us imagine a world in which the mad are the sane, and the sane are the mad. In such a world, the sick are imprisoned for failing to conceal their illness, while swindlers are revered as virtuous figures of great moral standing. When the intentional killing of livestock for meat consumption is prohibited, those who crave meat falsely report that pigs, cows, and chickens have committed suicide. This is the fictional civilization imagined by Samuel Butler: Erewhon, a society in which citizens have voluntarily dismantled machine civilization and live according to the categorical imperative of absurdity.¹ This world is sustained by a multitude of nonsensical prohibitions. For example, “In Erewhon it is strictly forbidden for any person to endure, even for a few minutes, without filling their lungs with air.”² From this sentence alone, it is unclear whether the prohibition is against accidentally drowning after losing one’s footing, or against deliberately choosing to drown oneself. What, then, does this ban presume about human autonomy? And does the ability to choose between two options truly constitute freedom?

Let us return to another absurd world overflowing with strange prohibitions. This is a world governed by the rules of Kim Hye-yeon’s Air Cake.³ Air is a limited resource that everyone needs but not everyone can possess, and thus the rule dictates that only one person may breathe at a time. One might call this an extremely mild version of a claustrophobic survival horror film, in which a group of people pushed to extreme conditions meet death in different ways: the selfish due to their selfishness, the altruistic due to their altruism. Fortunately, Air Cake remains a fiction, merely one scenario for TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we know it. It is a place where frantic, self-absorbed inhalations are expelled by warm, considerate exhalations. By contrast, The Room Where One Only Breathes is not fiction but reality, or perhaps a fiction that has become reality. Its title, derived from real estate advertisements for “rooms only for sleeping,” is therefore paradoxical. It is a suffocating place, one where life cannot be sustained after fully exhaling one’s allotted share. This is not the imagined utopia of a cake on which people take turns breathing, but a site where even one’s own share must be surrendered in advance to compensate for exchange value that was never fully produced. The octopus-like flyers scattered everywhere in search of “someone who will only sleep” remain silent about this fact.

At the same time, The Room Where One Only Breathes functions as an allegory of nunchi, the embodied practice of reading the room internalized by daughters of patriarchy, while The Room Where One Only Sleeps tells a story of women disciplining themselves to hold their breath in order not to fall out of favor with the owner. These descriptions eventually seal their joints neatly, functioning as closed circuits through which meaning circulates stably. Within such circuits, vividly enumerating concrete examples is always both liberating and traumatic. Speech bursts forth only to be depleted. One might maintain sanity by reframing ambiguous memories through the concept of repression, but this is a painful labor akin to a feat of brute force. Above all, those memories exist as a tangled skein of feelings of love, contradiction, and defeat that are repeatedly updated without consent under the pretext of knowing someone well, feelings that have nonetheless, or precisely because of this, been raised again and again. Their complexity becomes the greatest obstacle. The skein is not large, but extraordinarily varied, containing hardened knots alongside soft indentations, rough segments next to smooth surfaces. That language can only partially capture this complexity by typologizing it is both its strength and its limitation.

For this reason, The Room Where One Only Breathes introduces specific agents, the artist’s mother and grandmother, yet, as in Kim Hye-yeon’s previous performance works, it takes words away from them. This time, they are given paper and asked to tear it into shapes corresponding to what they wish to say. It is difficult to extract clear instructions from the choreography of their hands as they follow long sections to produce thin bundles, or tear outward from the center to create polymorphic fragments. As if folktales lose description and content through repeated oral transmission, leaving only form behind, the concrete syntax of the figures in the video has evaporated, or perhaps been torn away. The same applies to the three totem works. The drawings titled I Will Try My Best and I Will Do My Utmost function as emergency manuals taken out precisely when one can neither try nor do one’s utmost. Stuffing various desperate wishes and unresolved problems together and offering a collective prayer to the decaying face of a totem is also an act of relying on abstraction, that is, formalization, as a last bastion.

Earlier, I spoke of maintaining sanity. In an inverted world like Erewhon, the mad would be sane and the sane would be mad. And this, too, is the condition of living in present-day South Korea. Each morning, yet another “new but not new” article in which “the deaths of women are consumed like entertainment” conveys the persistent message that while killing someone is prohibited, allowing someone to die is acceptable. For someone who begins the day with such news, sanity can only mean having one’s screw completely loose. This is why Choi Hee-jung’s Mad Woman’s Drawing Message is, in fact, the message of a sane woman. The situation is as follows. Into a woman whose screw has come loose, the command “Smile” is input. Originally, this phrase appeared faintly on a black wool thread curtain, smooth and draped. More precisely, it was not written but woven by entangling threads according to the shape of the letters “Smile.”⁴ It was likely a sentence once painfully caught while combing through long, flowing hair.

At the crossroads between gently taming this tangled skein of multiple crises with a heated comb or striking it down with a blade, Goodbye to a Past Without Glory, composed of disheveled black threads and discarded barber capes, chooses the latter. The artist likens this to choosing the pill that goes all the way, between the blue pill and the red pill, because choosing the pill that allows one to stay is no different from “learning the socially constructed value of femininity and internalizing it as one’s own taste and preference.”⁵ Yet here, the question of choice resurfaces. Let us recall Audre Lorde’s well-known dictum: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”⁶ If it is self-evident that the master’s house must be dismantled, but all one has are the master’s tools, what is to be done? One accelerationist proposes “cunning craft” as an “improvised and timely guide” within such inescapable complexity.⁷ Here, complexity simply means a situation in which one does not want to smile, yet must smile.

That smiling can at times be directly linked to livelihood or safety sounds absurd, but in an inverted world it is common for someone’s mood to decide matters of life and death. This inverted world is also an old world, the irrational world to which the people of Erewhon deliberately returned after smashing the machines of reason. In a situation with no exit, where one can neither comfortably enjoy what is considered common sense nor escape beyond the system, Choi Hee-jung creates, as a temporary measure and a cunning tool, a rational machine-face that minimizes the waste of resources. By casually attaching a conditional clause (if) before a command, the dazzling “^^” that appears only upon approach becomes a “cushion face for safety.” Somewhere within this “^^,” accompanied by the parenthetical note “forced smile,” one hears “an auditory hallucination that sounds like teeth being ground.”⁸ Paradoxically, Shield delivers a message of “do not touch” to those who understand its operating principle. Fakes!, embroidered with black nylon thread, functions as a comment written after two slashes (//)⁹ appended to the operation code, not intervening in the machine’s function but offering the viewer a reference for better understanding the statement.

By this point, one can roughly infer the word that fills the blank in the exhibition title Let’s Find the Light by Doing OO. (Embroidery, 탈코, ^^, and so on.) Yet the two artists know well that both doing OO and not doing OO are equally difficult. In such predicaments, temporary and improvised survival strategies protect the subject from paralysis and erosion. What is required for this is a sensitivity to softness. Kim Hye-yeon previously explored tactile imagery of softness and fluffiness through Pillow Talk (2016) and Soft Soft Warm-Up (2018), while Choi Hee-jung did so through The Silky Person (2019) and Walkers (2018). These images concern a layered zone that does not collapse into either private or public, communication or misrecognition, understanding or misunderstanding, but exists somewhere in between. For instance, it is impossible to determine whether using “cushion words” is a strategy to protect oneself from a position of lesser power or a desire to be seen as lovable,¹⁰ and at times that distinction proves meaningless. Or like the Gender Equality Committee that cannot relinquish “binary” equality, yet whose very existence unexpectedly shifts outdated perceptions at certain moments. As one way of exploring this indeterminate zone, there is a demand for work that, before exposing fiction, closely examines the ways in which it has already infiltrated reality. Let us read the works of Kim Hye-yeon and Choi Hee-jung as processes of such work. / March 2020


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