The Meticulous Time Repairman: Summoning, Overlapping, Combining, and Regressing
Nathalie Boseul Shin (Chief Curator, Total Museum of Contemporary Art)
Tick, tick. I’m not sure why, but when I first stood before the artwork of Inseong Park and heard it quietly explained, this “tick, tick” sound kept going around in my heard. I could hear the ticking of a clock. The image I got from him was something like a time repairman, editing time here and there. Perhaps this came from the sense that his different works, undefinable as they are in terms of any one form – changing wind into colors, cutting and pasting old film, interviewing people – seemed similar to cogwheels of different shapes and sizes turning two clock hands.
Inseong Park’s works are not easy to explain in simple terms. Not only does he employ a wide range of media, but the ways in which he understands and uses media also transform through his own unique analyses. In that sense, the process behind the production of his work is as important in understanding it as the finished product presented before us – even if that process might not be clearly visible to the viewer.
His early work Picked Wind (2013) offers an excellent illustration of this. Using wind speed measurements to provide data that are then expressed in images and sound, the resulting video installation by itself offers no indication of the process behind its production. Generously enough, he also shares the references assembled during his working process, letting viewers see how the work began, what sort of questioning process he went through, what techniques were used, the kind of music in the sounds heard in the work, and even the score. Some might argue that such incidental data get in the way of concentrating on the work itself, or that the space appears disordered as an installation. From the viewer’s standpoint, however, this information certainly can offer an aid in approaching the work more closely. When asked whether he really needed to be so generous, Park replied as follows:
“I don’t make artwork for art world experts. I make it for ordinary viewers. And so I think it ought to have at least some kind of device for communicating with them.”
I do agree with him completely, but I also have some lingering questions about how that “at least” should be decided. As a result, this essay may be needlessly lengthy in its discussion of his working process.
If sharing the work’s production process represents an important aspect of communication with the viewer encountering the artwork, what theme could be said to run through the work itself? That topic was not so easy to pinpoint – perhaps because of the formal differences when alternating among media of photography, installation, and video, or the artist’s own reluctance to make clear statements when dealing with theme. I recorded his explanations of his artwork, listened again, went through his portfolio several times – and ultimately I came across the concept of “time.”
To be sure, Inseong Park himself does not declare his own work to be about time. He has used the terms “connected time, broken image” in explaining his work Be Documentary (2014), which was produced by re-editing old documentary films he had come across. But rather than interrogating time per se, it seems more accurate to say that he is skeptical of general beliefs regarding the “documentary” medium. In his artist’s notes, Park notes that the documentary format requires the least intervention and editing, and that the resulting content is consequently seen often as “factual” – but he then questions the true nature of the facts related in documentary works. As a result of the narrative structure established within documentaries, he explained in a 2014 memo, “time is sacrificed, and the viewer encounters ‘false time’ without being cognizant of it.”
If Be Documentary attempted to address the false time revealed through artistic intervention or artistic truth, then Park’s 2015 work Dreams could be seen as about past time summoned into the present. Park asks people who are aging what they dreamed about when they were children (what kind of people they wanted to be). For the response process, he states two rules: they should not start their answers with “when I was young,” and their answers should be only in the present or future tense, not the past. It seems simple, but as the answers go on, those simple rules keep getting in the way of the story. The participants are constantly encountering their past self in the present, and meeting simultaneously the future self they dreamed of in the past and the present self. Isn’t time said to flow from past to present and on to the future? Yet this is not the case with the times seen in Inseong Park’s work. Filmed in long takes, his interview footage is shown more or less intact, without any editing to speak of. As it records the present, it keeps summoning the past, and as the past’s future and the present mix together, different times coexist and intersect, meeting each other in moments of “nows.”
As its title suggests, Tone Color (2016), which could be seen as a continuation of the early Picked Wind, may be a product of the period during which the artist’s interest in color truly flowered. Park’s interest in color stems from prejudices due to skin color that he often encountered while living as an alien overseas. He has described this in terms of a “first impression,” explaining that he wanted to express in visual/acoustic terms his curiosity as to whether the impression conveyed by skin color in meetings between one person and other is truly powerful, or if a person’s aura is important.
For this work, Park contacted models directly, visiting their day-to-day spaces and filming them so that they were lit, naked, in the most familiar of spaces. He developed an algorithm to gather 25 figures per second on changes in the skin color under lighting, based on changes in the weather and conditions that day – a number chosen to match a 25 frame-per-second video. The data thus assembled were used as a basis to compose music. Instrument values were also chosen according to the data values: a middle tone piano for a Caucasian with a tan, a cello for a Korean model with full body tattoos (due to the darkness and few color changes), and a violin for another foreign model who had a light skin tone but did not exhibit much in the way of color changes because of tattoos. Music was created for each video and presented in a three-channel video installation with three monitors organized in a triangular arrangement.
Interestingly, even as it touches upon the seemingly quite objective theme of “color,” Tone Color exhibits an odd duality, assuming a subjective character as it proceeds to the theme of skin color changing according to lighting conditions. Park has referred to this as a characteristic of color, noting that while it seems to exist objectively, the colors perceived by each person are actually different. This coexistence of dual or differing natures surrounding color is similar to the way that Dreams, with its two simple present-tense rules, simultaneously summoned the past, present, and future, thus invoking a coexistence of different times. If Dreams was about summoning different times, then Tone Color visualizes the flow of time, with the light and music intervening more actively as the color appears in the foreground. The theme of “time” is not emphasized as much as in previous works, but the flows of time revealed within more complex and varied structures were certainly more sophisticated and beautiful than in Park’s past work.
How does it appear, this time that Park presents in his photographs? In images that capture moments from events or phenomena, time is stopped; this is why we often talk about “capturing” a photograph. The interesting thing about Park’s photographs is that rather than trapping and seizing time, they “detect” flows of time through expansions of perspective. When I first encountered his work in the studio, it seemed like some kind of geometric abstraction piece. But the reason I could not tear my eyes from even the small props was not because the photographic image was that new or fresh. It was because of the constant movement and natural flow of the gaze to a space layered in terms of color sense within the composition formed by the figures. Perhaps the chief characteristic was that the colors he used were not pigments affixed to paper or canvas, but colors that harbored light and underwent a cognitive expansion – colors that “contained” time.
That characteristic is clearly in evidence in the photographic works shown in this exhibition. Rectangles formed by the overlaying of very different intensities of blue on a blue background. Greens that are richly filled with black. And the grids between the light-harboring rectangles and the black rectangular plane. I found myself asking: if photography is about capturing subjects, what was Inseong Park now capturing with his film series? Were his pictures of fragmented film? Or was it a composition produced by strewing fragmented film about and then piecing it back together? Perhaps it was the color sense revealed through that composition? Could be it all of these things or none of them? The fascinating thing was that while I cannot exactly put my finger on why, I find myself endlessly staring at the images in the work – even though there is no “climax” or emotional story to speak of.
What is it, then, to stare endlessly at an image? Here arose another question without a definite answer. If the artist had attempted to capture and show fragmented film, perhaps the viewers would have focused on perceiving the object, and their interest in the image would evaporate the moment they did. For that reason, the works of photography sometimes employ strategies to make the original object appear more beautiful, or incorporate new methods that make the object difficult to recognize. But Inseong Park’s work is not about showing fragmented film in beautiful ways; it is not focused on the color sense revealed through light. Instead, the image is formed as different things – the physical subject (film), the light passing through it, and the colors revealed through that light – come together. In his generosity, the artist shows us the label on the film’s edge and the brand name. This may be the kind of “at least some kind of device” he has referred to. The attentive viewer can detect that the image in the work was created with camera film. At the same time, images shown only in two dimensions form layers with the overlapping of film, while a different spatial sense is created as the once-fixed perspective recedes. In these ways, Inseong Park’s artwork captures moments in time rather than incidents, placing color on film rather than objects – and thus creates layers of life through the overlapping of spaces. Time within his photographs is revealed through color as it spreads with the light amid the layers of space.
Tick, tock. The sound continued in my head as I reflected on Inseong Park’s artwork. The artist works with different media, forms, and themes – video, photography, installation/color, first impressions light/documentation, interviews/truth, incidents, and phenomena. Would it be too simplistic to say in the final analysis that it all operates around the keyword of “time”? Yet in his works, I see different times visualized in different ways. In him, I see a “time repairman.” A time repairman, of course, is not someone who fixes broken time. He is someone who crafts different times: times in which past, present, and future are summoned, edited, and combined at random in both photography and media. Times configured in different ways in individual artwork, like different cogwheels becoming interlocked. Times we cannot see in daily life; times that flash past us. And so he remains a time repairman.