Moon Hye-jin / Art critic

 

Park Inseong once wrote this in a memo of 2014, "If audience fully trusts the story of a documentary film or understands the development of narrative that occurs in the film as arrangement of true time, could the elements accepted by the audience be an event or a fact?" 1) This doubt about outward appearance of documentaries, the linchpin penetrating in the works of Park Inseong is implied in this question. The myth of documentaries delivering the fact as it is has already collapsed in a great part by the powerful challenge of semiotics and post-structuralism. The fact that documentaries comprise interaction of many forces where representation competes with meaning has now become a common sense. Despite this, Park Inseong believes that various media starting from photography are still tied to the shadow of the object in a powerful and persistent manner. The theory of photography index of which humans are not able to intervene at least at the moment the light touches the film and the genre identity of a documentary that is believed to report truth make it possible to hide the intervention and transformation making a fact a real fact encouraging the audience to accept something of which some interpretation has been already added and altered as a fact. The event Park Inseong talks about refers to a state prior to the occurrence of the superficial fact that is believed to be true. When it comes to a fact, the secondary interpretation had been already applied to it. For Park Inseong, revealing a structure creating this is the base of the conceptual theme of this exhibition as well as a fundamental critical mind looking at the world.

  The works submitted to the exhibition of 2020 Young Artist of the year such as painting, digital C prints and video installation encompass a variety of media. However, these works inherit the previous critical mind in the sense that they also show a structure than an external phenomenon. In particular, Cuz of frame (2020) is a work placed as continuation of the existing works in the closest manner in that it is based on the analog photography film. Cuz of frame is a serial work composed of three works with the same name (two black-and-white works, one color work). To begin with, we will take a look at the black-and-white works composed of one pair. The first work the audience notices must be the film roll with 4x4 arrangement placed in four rows cut into four pieces. The presence of perforations strongly manifests materiality of the film. However, observing them from a distance for a while, we can realize that 16 film frames gathered to form a circle. The work on the left side has a dark background with a brighter color of the circle, while the work on the right side has a bright background with a darker color of the circle. On the other hand, the color work placed in the center repeats the figuration of circles made of blue circles with a red background and red circles with a blue background. Above all, Cuz of frame addresses the issues of figuration/ background and the concrete / the abstract. It is because the figuration that did not exist in a separate frame appears due to arrangement of the film. The perforations, which are the circles consecutively arranged on the rectangular bands also form part of the whole picture, creating structural beauty and rhythmical movement occurred when the big circles cross small ones. In this aspect, this work can be considered photographic manifestation of geometrical abstraction. This coincides with structural film in the sense that it emphasizes materiality and frame of film. Nonetheless, approaching the work Cuz of frame in a more fundamental perspective, its starting point consists in consideration of factuality of film. Unlike digital media, the frame of analog film is the intrinsic frame of media itself that even the artist who took the picture cannot intervene. At the same time, the serial number and information embedded in each frame are the unique film identity that cannot be duplicated or substituted. For Park Inseong, the frame itself hidden for not being printed but delivering faithfully the information from the moment of taking pictures is the very factuality of photography that exists before the image. The artist's comment regarding "A perfect screen for me = perfect film" 2) means that the image has already experienced distortion, but a state that is more fundamental than that signifies the entire film including even the frame. If there had been no frame, the illusion of perfect circles would have dispersed because of the black frame, and the contour lines would have disagreed by the segmentation destroying the illusion of the image even more. In particular, the color work makes the broken sphere look more fragmentary by placing the film row composed of six rows as segments, fitting the crooked corner of the exhibition. Finally, the image called "circles" is illusion, and what really exists is nothing but each film frame, making the same object even look different according to the device and composition of representation. For color work and black-and-white works, the same subject of photography was taken and only the type and framing of the film varied. However, the work that used the whole film roll in order of serial numbers without leaving out even one piece of frame materializes the concept proposing "as it is," in the literal sense.

  On the other hand, the painting that was tried for the first time in this exhibition also describes the gap between what is visible and the real substance. His new painting works resemble photography in terms of appearance of images and the production method. The external features having circles on the square plane without concrete shapes are also connected to Cuz of frame, but what is more fundamental than this consists in the fact that the image is created by pushing with squeeze and not by brushes. In case of Fixed idea (2020), by putting the paper on the area to express the circle, and repeating the white paint more than 120-130 times on the background, the artist creates the shape using the technique of intaglio. 3) Later, by pushing the paint with squeeze into the empty space, the color stain is made. Excluding subjectivity of the artist, this work is created following a mechanical method. It is no different from photographic painting. In particular, unlike painting of which the paint is added on the canvas as relief, this work (of which the shape is made by filling intaglio) has the same level of background and figuration, so it is indisputably more flat and photographic. What must be emphasized here is the process of the production instead of the final result. At a glance, the image that looks like monochrome abstraction is nothing but a result of repeated act of piling paint layers on the surface and pushing them inward. The related work entitled Moved perspective (2020) also presents implication similar to this. This work was created by combining the techniques of relief and intaglio. The paint layers from the first to the third ones are formed by slowly moving the concentric circle to the right side to pile up the stratum. The movement of the concentric circle coincides with the movement of perspective of the camera lens that is taking pictures while moving a part of the circle in Cuz of frame. After piling up the level up to the third one in relief, for the fourth level, the artist evenly fills the rest parts in white, except the separate circle in intaglio. For the fifth level, the artist thinly adds paints in relief again on top of the flattened surface. The result reaches discord between external image and the production process. The painting that looks like the sole circle painted on a white plane at a glance is nothing but the trace of which the skin overlapped by paint layers with various levels is partially exposed. The images that look equal can be formed in a completely different manner. Contrariwise, despite the similar process using the same material, superficially different images can appear.

The works of Park Inseong embody this phenomenon by themselves. Park Inseong has been constantly doing experiment on non-identity of images and real substance or truth, as we can see in Be Documentary (2014). In this work, when three film rolls attached in the same order of color films for film editing are played in a different manner due to the physical speed difference made by the 8 mm projector, over time. Park Inseong casts light on the process rather than the final image or a structure that establishes it rather than a fact. In this aspect, he is understood from the significance of Vilém Flusser who practices the thesis of which true photographic criticism is supposed to be the criticism of devices and not the criticism of images. The declaration of Dziga Vertov, "Long live life as it is!" does not refer to "as it is" in the sense of external similarity, but "as it is" as a true substance of life infinitely inherent in potentials under the surface. 4)

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