Mr. High

That catalogue was wanted. Only a limited number had been distributed at the venue, and the small allotment that reached bookstores had already sold out, so it had remained unattainable: the catalogue for the group exhibition Silky Navy Skin, printed on art paper, in a relatively wide format, saddle-stitched. A few copies were still in the artist’s possession, but none would be released anymore. Asked why, the artist answered that the curator who had written the catalogue’s foreword had been implicated in widespread sexual violence, sending shockwaves through the art world. Even so, the desire for that catalogue did not subside. When the sentence was left hanging, “But I really want it, and I couldn’t get it at the exhibition or at the bookstore…,” the artist waited a moment, then wordlessly retrieved a copy from the corner and handed it over. Shame flushed hot across the face, and the studio was exited as if fleeing.

Rather than waiting for the free shuttle bus that ran during the open-studio period, Sky Park was crossed on foot, straight through its center, the ground covered with dried, shriveled grass. The bare branches of the trees that loosely ringed the park’s edge pierced a dull sky. Air of that kind, in which neither height nor time can be gauged, resembles a nightmare in one particular respect: it has no volume. In such a nightmare, nodes do not fan out radially across a screen before the eyes. They condense instead into a three-dimensional, boundless sea, and the body drifts within it, unable to adjust the distance between far and near, until sleep paralysis arrives.

At the center of the studio stood a modular angle rack holding relatively small canvases, perhaps in the range of size No. 5 to No. 15. These belonged to the series “Weather Paintings,” produced between 2013 and 2016. Because the canvases were stacked and displayed in overlap, only the colors painted along their edges could be seen, offering a partial inference of each piece’s atmosphere. The “Weather Paintings” register environmental states, shifts, and conditions occurring in the studio and the artist’s lived space, recorded with an improvisational immediacy. Traditional instruments of painting, brush and pigment applied to a frontal plane, are refused. Instead, paint is sprayed along the canvas’s side. What matters, then, is not an image deposited by a controlled hand, but the way aerosolized pigment, conditioned by the day’s air, migrates and intrudes upon the face. Viewed from the front, the emphasis on the perimeter can recall hard-edge monochrome painting. Yet where monochrome historically polices an ascetic, spiritual surface, “Weather Paintings” leave the surface in a deliberately unresolved condition. What appears is the residue of atmosphere, failing to settle on volume, on side, on thickness, and seeping out onto the front, as if the air itself had missed its assigned place.

A canvas that captures the unstable drift of weather and arrests it as an accumulated trace takes on an archival function beyond painting. Considered as a medium, however, it is conspicuously inefficient: thick, heavy, and easily combustible as a device for keeping weather records. Yet a record enacted by hand is less a matter of efficiency than of play. That is acceptable. Work proceeds one by one. A different archive suggests itself, one lighter, portable, readable anywhere, and not vulnerable to fire. Nodes are entered first. Then events. The nodes contained within an event are identified and added as new nodes. Another event containing that node is entered, and the procedure repeats. As the data set grows, notations for the same node diverge, and events with uncertain node lists multiply. Because events without nodes cannot be visualized, a provisional guess fills the gap. “Needs verification later,” “pending confirmation.” Events deemed more significant receive separate parameter values. Interruption, blank period, repetition, error discovered, standardizing the notation of identical nodes, proposal, convergence, loss of existing links. Common Center becomes Mr. High Coco Medicen Plus. Deletion, repetition, error, out of control, swallowing the unpleasantness of nodes, provisional suspension. Blank, resumption, a mass loss of links that had once been valid. What, exactly, took place?

The website of the art space Common Center, which opened near the end of 2013 on Gyeongin-ro in Yeongdeungpo-gu and closed after two years and three months of operation, has, like many project websites, fallen into link rot. It now redirects to an advertisement page for a product called “Mr. High Coco Medic & Medicen Plus,” described as a “cavernosal artery” blood-flow inflator, an unfamiliar category of device marketed as an aid for male sexual dysfunction. At the bottom, copy explains that by repeatedly expanding and contracting the “corpora cavernosa,” the blood-storing space in the penis, using strong vacuum pressure, the device can enlarge it “far bigger and heavier than ‘human will.’” Above this description stands the actor Yu Tong, fist clenched in a show of fortitude.

Yu Tong studied fine art at Daegu Arts University, yet public recognition came primarily through television. In the 1980s, appearances in widely watched dramas such as Country Diaries and Three Families Under One Roof established his name, and his imposing physique often placed him in supporting roles associated with physical force.

A story that circulated incessantly in the public sphere attaches itself to 1995, when Yu Tong was thirty-eight. It claims that in order to court the beautiful Buddhist nun Haeseon, who was seventeen years his junior, he stayed for days at a mountain temple, persuading her with the words, “If you break your vows and come to me, I will grant you the true nirvana of liberation,” and that within three days she accepted, placing prayer beads around his neck as a sign of assent. His most recent marriage, as of 2017, was to a Mongolian woman thirty-three years younger, Ink-Amultang Munkhjargal, and was presented as a settling into family life. The course was not smooth. In 2013, on the day before their first wedding ceremony in Mongolia, an aunt of Munkhjargal, previously absent from their dealings, appeared and demanded gifts for the extended family, at which point Yu Tong’s bank account was reportedly already at minus one hundred million won. Munkhjargal is said to have responded, “You have many women, so go. There is no tomorrow again.” Recalling that moment, Yu Tong reportedly pronounced, “The breakup was a kind of happening.” A happening for which, as the line insists, “there is no tomorrow again.”

At what point did “happening” become a casual label for gossip and mishap? One origin can be traced to the conventions of weekly magazines covering the behavior of the Korean avant-garde collective The Fourth Group, formed on June 20, 1970, at Sorim Coffeehouse in Euljiro. In 1968, at the Second Hangang Bridge, Kang Gukjin, Jung Kangja, and Jung Chanseung staged A Murder on the Han Riverbank, burning vinyl outfits emblazoned with accusations aimed at the established art world: “cultural swindler” (pseudo-artist), “cultural blind person” (civilization-phobic), “cultural avoider” (idealist, a nineteenth-century modern), “cultural denier-accumulator” (false master), “cultural bundle peddler” (political artist), “cultural acrobat” (an opportunist riding the era’s aesthetics, shuttling between abstraction and fact). In its radicality alone, the work merits consideration as a major instance in the history of Korean happenings. Yet at the time, weeklies such as Sunday Seoul and Weekly Korea, then mass entertainment magazines, treated happenings less as social articulation than as spectacle, flattening their inner logic into mockery and diversion.

The comparatively rich record of photographs and recollections surrounding A Murder on the Han Riverbank owes much to the crowd that gathered, drawn by the rumor that Jung Kangja, recently branded in the press as an “avant-garde young lady,” would perform the expected “nude show.” One spectator is recorded as complaining, “They said a woman would take her clothes off, but she doesn’t, and it’s just cold, so it’s no fun,” then turning away. A younger spectator who overheard reportedly pointed and remarked that such a person was precisely a “cultural blind person.”

Interest-driven journalism ridiculed The Fourth Group’s “incorporealism” with subheadings that sneered, in effect, “They bind up the human body and call it incorporeal, what kind of talk is that?” It also persistently sexualized Jung Kangja, writing, for example, that “Ms. Jung Kangja, an avant-garde painter more famous for ‘taking her clothes off well’ than for her work, has prepared a ‘hearty’ happening show after a long time.” In the art world, happenings were dismissed as “pseudo-art disguised as avant-garde,” and by the 1970s they fell under state crackdowns following Interior Ministry measures framed as the elimination of decadent social trends.

In their place, experimental practices began to be named as “events.” Works such as Kim Yongmin’s Drawing a Line, Painting, and Pulling a Rope, or Lee Kun-yong’s Walking, Eating Snacks, Five Steps, Eating Hardtack, Ten Round Trips, Counting Age, Five Meetings, Drinking Water, Lighting a Match, Pouring Water circulated under this new designation. Even “avant-garde art” was rhetorically replaced by “experimental art.” According to period theorists, the distinction was that a happening was improvisational and shocking, while an event was planned and logical. In painting, too, movements emerged that sought to displace overheated lyricism with a rigor of geometric structure through the anti-Informel movement, proposed as a way out of the era’s inertia and confusion. The 1970s Korean art scene welcomed boundary-obsessed events, along with formalism such as hard-edge painting that clarified the picture plane’s range and limits. Within self-imposed thresholds, freedom was finite.

A darkly comic anecdote is sometimes told: at Changgyeongwon, then a zoo, Korea’s first elephants, Giant and Taesan, lived behind fences; Giant, a male, was violent, while Taesan, a female, was comparatively gentle yet attempted escape nightly, and when escape proved impossible, she traced the fence in repetitive circles, displaying stereotyped behavior; an experimental artist visiting the zoo supposedly discovered the source of formalism there and followed the elephant along the fence until closing time. Naturally, the story is not true.

With the glamour of an acting career and a long wandering in love set behind him, Yu Tong, rough-edged and tenacious, turned toward painting in earnest, alongside an ambition to found an art museum. In 2009, he purchased roughly 3,500 pyeong of wooded hillside in Jeju and began construction on a hybrid project combining earthen rooms with Mongolian-style architecture, variously referred to as Yu Tong’s makeshift republic and “Yu Tong Art World.” The project stalled for lack of funds. Perhaps prompted by the foreboding that the museum might never be completed within his lifetime, he began to consider artistic forms that would endure without change.

In 2017, a tile mural produced by Yu Tong as donated labor in Busan’s Gamcheon Village, titled Haekkum (“A Hill Where the Sun Rises, A Village That Dreams”), was completed through the careful placement of precisely cut tile fragments, each color weighed as a unit, attached by Yu Tong himself without assistance. His admiration for an art that might last “a hundred years,” unlike murals that must be repainted, also surfaces in the Eastern Europe art travel report he wrote in 2016 at the request of the monthly magazine Art World. Recalling Gaudí’s architecture, the report praises it as “a pollution-free tourism industry that feeds descendants,” built over decades or centuries through the total investment of artisans’ lives. Yu Tong’s report, titled “7 Nights 9 Days in Eastern Europe with Art World,” appeared in Art World, issue no. 385. The issue’s special feature, “Beyond Emerging Spaces / The Next Story,” offered a belated roundup of alternative art spaces that had been conveniently grouped under the label “emerging.” On the posthumous and slightly inaccurate map of Seoul’s emerging spaces included there, Common Center, already closed for nearly a year, still appeared as a symbolic node.

Late one summer, after undergraduate graduation, life was being sustained through weekend serving shifts at an Italian restaurant. Around then, a mural job for a day was taken alongside Jang Seung-eop, who was sharing, almost to bursting, a small house near Jisu and the Sangsu area. Only upon arriving at the site in Yeongdeungpo did it become clear that this was not an ordinary mural but a tile mural. The labor was simple: stick fragments of colored tile onto a residential wall and form a rough tree shape. For a public art project that paid for the breaking of perfectly intact tiles purchased in pairs, then cementing them to the wall in their broken state, Jang Seung-eop spent an entire summer smashing tile with a hammer. As the work progressed deeper into the alley from its entrance, the piles of tile had to be moved along in step with the direction of assembly. After lunch, when late-summer sunlight began to fall at a sharp angle, even bearable heat became irritating. By dusk, the strain was such that tears threatened.

After work, arrival at Jisu and Jang Seung-eop’s Sangsu studio came in Suzuki workwear, followed by a shower and a cigarette while perched in the entry corridor. Jang Seung-eop emerged as well, slicking wet hair back with gel, then lifted a Starbucks takeaway cup that looked half-finished and returned to the studio refrigerator, and stepped outside. Jisu expressed dissatisfaction that Jang Seung-eop left the studio so often for cafés, and expensive ones at that, places like Swallow Coffeehouse or Starbucks. Perhaps coffee spending, too, had quietly increased.

At the time, Jisu was being lent a room for a month. The reason offered was that commuting between his home in Incheon and his studio in Seoul was too far ahead of a solo exhibition in Gunsan. As a gesture of courtesy, he insisted on buying a meal. At a franchise buffet restaurant, seasonal shrimp specials were on offer. Jang Seung-eop said he had been in Jeju helping a cousin with interior work and had come up to Seoul briefly for the mural; since he was up anyway, a few small works had also been submitted to a young-artist art fair at a Gangnam gallery. After three years of living in Jeju, the shrimp at a cheap Seoul buffet could hardly satisfy, and he ate as if barely eating.

Outside, under a black sky still holding a trace of dusk, a bleak autumn wind was blowing. Jisu and Jang Seung-eop returned to the studio; the route home was taken on foot. Thoughts gathered around attempts to make something and indeed making it, only for meaning to vanish until only will remained. Breaking tiles designed for function so that they lose their original function, for instance.

Owon Jang Seung-eop, born in 1843, vanished abruptly around the age of fifty. He was known for loving alcohol with a devotion close to that of life itself, drinking until his nose went crooked, at times failing to sober for a month. Heavy drinking while painting sometimes resulted in works of uneven finish. He also lacked literacy in Chinese characters and was clumsy with writing, conditions that contributed to an abundance of forgeries from the early twentieth century onward. In that logic, among the paintings attributed to Owon, those in which image and text harmonize as if drawn and written by the same hand are, paradoxically, the forgeries. A swindler prefers vagueness to clarity.

Vagueness is inexhaustible in phrases such as “social enterprise,” framed as simultaneously creating jobs and producing public understanding and community contribution; “creative and innovative Seoul-style low-utilization urban space innovation citizen ideas,” framed as maximizing the activation and use of idle urban land; the persona of “youth” and upcycling fantasy; village community comprehensive support centers and “village activists”; outsourcing social innovation to the private sector; local culture and arts revitalization support projects that comply with grant execution standards for private nonprofits. Then comes the repeated task: under the premise that funding has been received, submit future plans and expected outcomes while “considering youthfulness, networkability, locality, and planning capability.” At times, becoming one of the old labels sounds preferable: “cultural blind person,” “cultural avoider,” “cultural denier-accumulator,” “cultural bundle peddler,” “cultural acrobat.”

Yet to receive even a meager activity stipend for a local youth group, a catchphrase must be cited, “Mother, I will earn my living by helping others,” and then it must be argued that small but steady gatherings read books, eat meals, worry about the future, and serve as one another’s emotional safety net and fence, thereby pursuing sustainability. Administration appears to want what is “clear.” Gather regularly for something like workshop activities. Photograph the scene, at least two shots, with everyone who received meal expenses visible. Write an activity report. Present “outcomes” produced during the project period in the form of an “exhibition” or a “performance.” Record that presentation. Write a final report. Submit. Nonsense tries to form itself: Kafkaesque bureaucracy without a central exchange bureau in a nanny state functioning as the libido of market Stalinism. The point is simpler: disgust arrived before competence did.

It is easy to sneer that swindler-like rhetoric is the dead-end reached when neither this path nor that can be taken. Yet the earnest activists within it cannot simply be insulted. Making reality into a joke risks unknown costs, so the joke is displaced: photos imitating Tony Erdmann’s grin with fake front teeth become messenger stickers; the scenes in Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon in which Owon Jang Seung-eop berates his disciples are proposed, laughing, to be re-shot at Homi Art Supplies; soju is poured into soda and swallowed.

Reality that cannot be mocked looks like this. When passing near Yeonsinnae, phone-shop hawkers line both sides of the street and aggressively solicit passersby, judging whom to target. “Hey!” “Just a second!” “Ah, wait a moment!” Even when the intention is understood, the shout triggers a reflexive hesitation, and the hawkers seize it, locking eyes, pressing speech. That phone-sales work resembles a new form of loan-sharking was not previously known. Nor that if bills are overdue for more than three months, telecommunications debt is transferred to a mysterious golden building near Gongdeok Station, under the name “Credit Guarantee Fund,” and that frightening, threatening text messages are sent on the pretext, “believe it or not,” that the authority exists to lower a debtor’s credit limits within the primary banking system. Nor that teenagers with weak literacy and weak reality-perception are frightened into loan schemes or online secondhand-sale scams. Such knowledge arrived while teaching GED prep to kids who had been caught in those traps, and having never lived that life, there was nothing that could truly be done to help. People who try anyway, who strain to help lives they have never lived, are remarkable.

In the field, what the kids needed was not museum visits or a complete set of youth literature and a book club. They needed someone to accompany them to an OB-GYN. They needed to stop self-harming. When art intervenes, it is often instrumentalized under the banner of healing or stress relief. With no capacity to help, help could not be given; from close range, misfortune and curses were absorbed like silica gel, and strength ebbed.

Sleep paralysis, as if a hand were choking the neck, began around then. A studio had been rented, a rooftop unit in the shopping block near home, paid for with wages from teaching. In dreams, the empty studio appeared exactly as it was. Someone twisted open the cap of a half-finished bottle of sparkling water with a sharp hiss. A presence sat beside the prone body and wrapped a hand around the throat. The strange part lay elsewhere: even while pinned, the thought persisted that coexistence with that choking spirit, and with the spirit stealing sips of the drink, ought to be managed somehow. Perhaps small portions of food should be set aside, an offering, “gosure,” was that the term.

When the choking was mentioned, a mother advised chanting the “Shinjyojanggu Daedharani Sutra” three times a day. A coworker advised playing Tibetan chants. All such practices were said to drive spirits away or block them. Yet telling those spirits to leave felt odd. They had likely been there long before arrival. Where would they go? In any case, that was the first and last time a spirit threatened directly. Afterward, their presence was only sensed intermittently, deeper in the building, in a buzzing conversation that echoed as if from inside a cave.

There is something ambiguous about directing rage at phone-shop hawkers who seize weakness, meet the eyes, and solicit without missing a beat. The sentence “I saw you.” The sentence as a saw, buzzing. Seeing as a cutting that splits a person, reveals a cross-section, measures thickness, leads abstraction into fact, into figuration, into matter.

When the choking story was told, others would calmly produce their own accounts of eerie spirits encountered while sleeping in their own spaces. One spirit sits on the waist and glares. Another always perches on top of the refrigerator. It was something everyone experienced. Everyone lived with eyes wide open, calmly accepting that what saves life is not art. / 2019.2