Regarding the Changes and Painting of Mental Images Depicted by the “Scangraphy” of PARK Inseong
Jeong Binna (Doctor of Philosophy & Lecturer, Department of Oriental Philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University)
The work of artist PARK Inseong (hereinafter referred to as PARK Inseong) begins with the analog film he discovered in Germany, as he himself clarifies. The analog Nazi propaganda film he found was replete with images in which the truth and lies remained reversed under the name “documentary.” What was the thing that PARK Inseong realized from his encounter with this analog film? Although a documentary is made claiming to be an objective record of an event, what it shows is a mere part of a fixed phenomenon according to the intention and subjectivity of the person who films it, and it fails to demonstrate deeper things. At other times, some who film it purposely cut and paste the phenomenon into pieces to evoke the will of fight in the viewers. The phenomenon manifested in the documentary is not only remote from how it really was when the incident happened, but also fragmentary. At the same time, those who see the image believe that the feelings aroused while watching the fragments of the incident are fairly equivalent to the whole incident.
For example, in <Triumph des willens (Triumph of the will)>, a documentary produced by the Nazi-era film director Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) under the theme of superiority of Germanic people waking up under a great leader, focuses on the unilateral propaganda and blind zeal but fails to address what is actually happening at the same time in the Dachau concentration camp. The crowds who were fervent about <Triumph des willens> soon started to burn up the books of literary figures representing their culture with the same enthusiasm, and also provoked the incident of “Kristallnacht” or “the Night of Broken Glass,” under the same degree of eagerness, which was a large-scale pogrom (a Russian word referring to an organized plunder and injury against Jews) in opposition to Jews. After a certain period, when their fervor faded, innumerable documentaries portraying the years of misleading enthusiasm were produced under the name, “reflection on history.” However, the aftereffects of documentaries that had already colored an era with insanity remained indelible.
If a documentary that claims to illustrate facts can transform into a colossal falsehood that simply blocks the truth, what work is the artist who had seen the documentary supposed to undertake? PARK Inseong started the work of cutting and pasting the medium called the film, which expresses documentaries created after having fragmented and pasted a phenomenon. First, he photographs with an analog camera, while creating pictures whose shape is not identifiable, or pictures that can only be recognized by enlarging what they truly represent. Afterwards, he places the developed photos on a flatbed scanner, pastes the cut pieces of films with contrasting images or sprays an acidic solution on the film. After 10 to 12 minutes, the film begins to melt due to the chemical reaction between the acidic solution and the film. During the process of melting, coincidence upon coincidence is added to create images with ceaseless changes. Among the images created after undergoing this process, the artist scans them repeatedly until a desired image finally comes into being.
In the result obtained in this way, the aspect or aura of the original form at the beginning of the work is erased (by the way, I am not sure if this work is based on any prerequisite of an original form though), and new images that are created as they move away from the original form recurrently emerge. The images that appear during this process are reminiscent of the meaning of “A form is nothing other than emptiness and emptiness is nothing other than a form” understood in Buddhism. The form, which is the visible world, is empty because it does not have its own invariable character but depends solely on the relationship with other things while repeating its appearance and disappearance. For example, when ice melts, it becomes water, and when water is boiled, it is evaporated to turn into vapor. However, the bonds of the molecule H2O are not fixed and undergo constant changes. Since the shapes of ice, water, and vapor all disappear, they are emptiness. Since they reappear while uninterruptedly changing the shapes, they are the form as well. Likewise, the images created through the work of PARK Inseong lack fixed images (the fixedness in a documentary film), and repeat their appearance and disappearance only in the middle of chemical reactions between the film and the solution.
On the film of PARK Inseong where the form become emptiness and vice versa, the belief of a documentary that reality can be fixed and arranged becomes meaningless. Referring to his work, PARK Inseong calls it “scangraphy,” which differs from “scanography” that is preexistent in the art world. “Scanography” is not different from a documentary in nature because it is only interested in manipulation of the phenomenon already fixed through the medium called photography to derive a secondary screen. On the contrary, “scangraphy” creates unfixed and unfixable changes in the film, to capture the changes again by scanning. Beyond this, PARK Inseong continues to try changes one after another. It is because planarization through the process of printing is unavoidable no matter how many changes and images are created through the film, despite the fact that the result of “scangraphy” captures the unfixed changes. According to his belief, the image displayed on a flat surface, no matter how ever-changing it may be, is nothing but a visual plane and a virtual one, unable to bear the weight of three-dimensionality and concreteness of life that can be grabbed and perceived through the manual touch.
Therefore, just like Picasso, PARK Inseong tries to embody three-dimensionality and concreteness on a flat surface. Simultaneously, he seeks to maintain the “non-fixedness” that lies at the core of his work. To this end, he puts materials together such as epoxy resin and acrylic paint. In particular, resin is a material to which we need to pay attention. In fact, resin is the material used for the monitors and mobile phone screens. The artist’s intention is to make even the resin that is used for the screens go beyond fixedness and crystallinity. This is because the screen works as a sort of shield that prevents us from reaching the truth. When it comes to any video, including a documentary, we do not see the objects and events expressed in the video per se, but only the images reflected onto the screen made of resin. PARK Inseong emphasizes that humanity of the current time has entered an era depending excessively on media, and pays more attention to the images and sounds transmitted from the screen of the video media, that is, the back of the resin (like “Sound of Silence sung by Simon & Garfunkel), instead of hearing directly from people. The more the viewers are obsessed with the video in the resin, the more videos YouTube brings trying to suite their taste. At the same time, the more videos suiting their taste they watch, the more viewers are likely to be completely fixed to the world they have created according to their taste, inclined to some autistic features, impeding their ability to go outside the frame of their own world.
In order to overcome the stubborn fixedness of this kind of screen, PARK Inseong combines materials such as epoxy resin and acrylic paint for his scangraphy work. He produces layers composed of epoxy resin and acrylic paint on top of a new photo with distorted images, which had been created by attaching fragmented photos and spraying solution. When pouring resin on the film combination and spraying acrylic paint or attaching dust on the film, it gives rise to a thickness of about 0.1 to 0.3 millimeters as well as a gap with the original one underneath. The gap created by the resin and paint overlapped on the printed scan generates an effect leading to dissimilar colors and hues depending on the lighting, position of the work, and shadow.
Regarding the effect created by resin and paint, PARK Inseong adds the description borrowing the terms such as “event” and “interpretation.” This also has to do with the nature of the documentaries mentioned earlier. Our trust in documentaries starts to collapse when they are not able to guarantee the fact or truth. Even though we believe that we see the truth through documentaries, in fact, documentaries fail to capture them all. It is because documentaries are filtered out when undergoing the processes of various intentions and tasks, including the camerapeople and producers. Consequently, what we see through the documentaries is nothing but an event that fell apart from the fragments, and it is each person's responsibility to find a way to interpret such fragments. In light of this, the nature of his works seems clearer. Like this, his works are characterized by the features destroying all kinds of fixedness, to show incessantly continuous events that are not fixed at the same time. The scope of the event can extend to infinity, when adding the unpredictable events that occur through the combination of various materials such as film, solution, scan, resin, and acrylic to the changes that take place by including the viewer's mental images and discernment along with the exhibition position, lighting, and shadow.
Likewise, works performed by PARK Inseong such as “scangraphy” are a kind of mockery of documentary films that tend to mislead viewers by displaying only fragments as if they were an entirety. At the same time, they are the works nihilating the gap that is believed to exist between the recognition of the phenomenon and the substantial truth. It nihilates because the works of PARK Inseong go beyond the act of bringing out a question about the objectivity of documentaries to ask the meaning of film and painting on an enhanced fundamental level, and they move our perspectives towards a deeper consciousness beyond the screen reconstructed by fragmenting the film. Since the film was invented in the 19th century, it has been served as a means of reflecting a subject projected onto a lens in a camera to capture it on a sensitive paper. However, are we allowed to say that we have captured the real image of the subject through the films? The works of PARK Inseong seem to pursue an entry into an invisible world that sways behind the subject, which is beyond the horizon of films, instead of the filmed subject.
As we have observed in the works of PARK Inseong, he has been creating works called “scangraphy” by cutting, pasting, and filming again after applying light and colors to the films. In the screen where the colors oscillate towards the deep blue turning into darkness in the series of “films” and the blue-green aurora is likely to spread out throughout both ends of the sky, the aspect of the world becomes intangible yet deeper just like a world of “strings (玄)” mentioned in <Tao Te Ching>, while the viewers try to contemplate the profoundness with particular concentration. Here, the film is not served as a means of superficially representing the subject, but intends to move towards the deep bottom of the emotions and thoughts of the artist and the viewers that swing beyond the subject. On top of the ever-changing images spread on the film by PARK Inseong, the viewers are encouraged to superimpose the changes emerging in their consciousness and their own mental images underlying beneath.
This accords with the historical direction in which the aim of painting has been moving away from the representation of facts. The belief that images including photography and documentary, can embrace and represent all facts coincides with the obligation to represent the “Ideas” as the original form argued by Plato as well as what Hegel’s statement that self-realization of absoluter Geist (absolute spirit) is equivalent to reality. Nevertheless, the frame of “Ideas” or absolute spirit is also considered a sort of oppression, and reality is nothing but the totality of unlimited changes unable to be represented. From this perspective, the fact that painting ceased to aim at representation was not an event that had unseated the painter's place, but an event that emancipated the painters from the bondage of representation. Since the world and the reality of human beings cannot be represented despite the utmost efforts, the painters were obliged to repeat the arduous work of Sisyphus. However, since representation no longer belonged to the responsibility of the painters, it was possible for painters to transfer their images of mind and meanings to any kind of work or any type of image. Borrowing an expression used in East Asia, we can probably call this “Wen Yi Zai Dao (文以載道)” meaning “words of truth” or “a way of moral teaching” that tries to refer to the elevated dimension of will.
However, the concept “Dao (道)” in “Wen Yi Zai Dao” believed in East Asia is a mechanism that requires humans to not only represent the ideas of the law of nature through painting but also lead a life in accordance with “Dao.” On the other hand, “Dao” that modern artists can carry in their painting is the possibility of interpretation, understanding and participation that undergo never-ending changes. The intentions and appreciation of the artist and each viewer vary depending on the location and color of the painting as well as time of the day. The constantly changing images drawn by the artist by way of films and paint encourage the viewers to look back on the changes that arise in their images of mind. The viewers can display their boundless imaginations by superimposing any facet of their images of mind on those of the works of PARK Inseong. As one of the viewers, I also have an image that comes to mind when approaching his works. It is about a rural bus stop in Yeongwol-eup, where I lived in my childhood. Back then, I used to spend almost half a day squatting to draw pictures on the pebbles scattered on the floor. As a little boy, I enjoyed building castles, making roads, and creating stories of a variety of people following my interminable source of imaginations. The imaginations of those days spread out again through the images that PARK Inseong has unfolded. In his work, painting transforms into a medium of unlimited participation and imaginations, which are not tied to representation. The images of mind in which I used to build castles and make roads in my childhood imaginations may also be understood in relation to the mental images of ancestors who have been continuously creating civilizations from the past to the present. By connecting the mental images of those who built civilizations with ours, imaginations revive the aspects of people who lived on the vacant land as well as the thoughts they left behind, while allowing them to draw things that have never existed before, without being restricted to the things that had existed in the past. The works of PARK Inseong characterized by the refusal of the fixedness encourage the viewers to participate by displaying their imaginations and approach us as a work in preparation for a new civilization ahead. ◈