Wonderful Travel Agency
This exhibition titled "WTA(Wonderful Travel Agency)" includes a broad range of Asian artists from China, Korea, Japan, and India. Seza Paker from Istanbul where Asia and Europe intersect and G. Caty from Nice, the Southern city of France where historically related with Indochina area are included in WTA as well. All these artists who participated in the exhibition share one thing-they work back and forth their motherlands and foreign countries. G. Caty, only one European artist in WTA, is not an exception in the respect that he has an experience of living and working out of his motherland. He was born in Nice but lived and worked in Brazil, Africa and other parts of the world.
This show, WTA tries to create a totally receptive environment of infinite nomadic mediation. Here to avoid misunderstanding, I will say that total penetrability should not be confused with the prospect of 'going to the root' of things; rather it is a condition of the viewers' optics shaped by the infinite deferment of the eclipse of the work. It would be naive to think that journeys to places (un)known are always made with the intention of searching for some hidden meaning. Sometimes, it is the flight from the creditors of meaning that pester the travelers in their places of permanent residence. The desire for nomadism and, in particular, for tourism can be justified if one becomes aware of the unconscious causes of what spurs on our will to move, our craving for new places.
History illustrates clearly that our world has developed based on a traffic network. Invention is not something falling from sky, but it is something that should be understood as a creation of hybridization. In other words, new work is nothing but a new mix of old works.
In that respect, traffic is essential for the social development. The society will be congealed and eventually forms a closed system that resists to any kinds of change without interchange. History tells that active hybridization is happening all the time somewhere in our planet. Marx and Engels frequently employed the concept of traffic in. Here traffic means 'ex-change', 'communication', 'product relation' and sometimes it can be interpreted as 'intercourse' due to the literal meaning of the word. Art is communication-it's the ability to manipulate people. The difference with show business or politics is only that the artist is freer. But also if art is not directed toward the social, it becomes purely self-indulgent, like sex without love. Today's artists are the creators of traffic system itself and at the same time the travel agents who lead the general public to the new world.
New era of liberal exchange and international travel has opened by when the Berlin Wall was crashed and the conventional antagonism caused by cold war has been ceased. Some of the intelligent enthusiastically insist of an optimistic possibilities saying that an era of perfect 'unity' will come soon.
It is, however, too early to predict the era of harmony. In my opinion, the culture of the 21st century seems to shape itself through a chaos that can be compared to the Babel tower age, as Paul Virilio mentioned. Travel and tourism became keywords, even symbols that represent our age. Tourism is increasingly developing and booming in spite of that fact the world's destiny becomes more and more precarious, with wars, diseases and natural catastrophes. The direction of the future world will heavily depend on tourism. It's already being turned into a mode of "consuming life". Its contents and routes are now becoming more diverse and innovative: everything, ranging from natural to artificial, from historic heritage, folk culture to exotic places, and even the emerging contemporary urban-scapes, is being touristised. This phenomenon has been prompted by the power of media-isation, informationisation and commercialization. The mode of consuming life is a summery of the idea that everything in contemporary society can be consumed once for all. When nature, history, culture and reality have all become souvenir objects along the route of tourism, our bodies and minds are also consumed, once for all.
Tourism has an enormous influence on today's art itself and museum culture. Nonetheless the art world that has had been in the darkness for a long time tries to speak out, an elaborated totalitarianism diffused in the institutional system suppresses those voice. It regulates heterogeneous qualities and controls them. Today Biennale already became 'Makiladoras', a huge number of imitation factories built in Mexico and in the border between the States and Mexico.
Something that can be called 'boutique art (l'a art boutique)' appears as a reaction to the biennale and as a trial to outgrow popular art market.
The boutique art imitates avant-gardes method in the respect that its ultimate goal is to achieve liberal art free from any regulation, but their target audience is limited to the intelligent.
Despite these efforts, it is the reality that the gigantic cultural institutions with strong financial backgrounds manipulate the entire art world, further more they increase the numbers of the braches all over the world employing the franchise concept. Then, what will be the alternative to this? It would be for those whose minds or identities are not already made up, who are willing to embark on the sort of voyage where one throws out one's hermeneutic compass and leaves one's discourse behind, the sort of voyage gor which Deleuze adopted the Proustian motto: the true dreamer is the one who goes out to try to verify something.
In the context that travel is a process to understand others, art is the art of travel. We often perceive death in territorial way - as something that overtakes us at a fixed point in space. Seza Paker shot the photos in café Basile in Paris, Dante's love Beatrice who slept away in her teens whom he really seeks in this strange trip and has Virgile as a guide. In suite of images, even if her work looks as if there is narration, it is mostly the idea of suggestibility in the form of a shadow charater who strolls inside/outside the cafe. Still life images like the red bottles - ash trays doubts of hellish thoughts might occur to this lonely stroller. The double chance is an old poster of lottery (maybe life's lottery sample to be in hell or heaven or in between). The black jiant pot is a clin d'oil to J. Pierre Raynaud work and: Dufy's poster of "la croisette" a glimpse to the capitalistic world's heaven. And the space filled with this very dense light and air. the shadow is very frequently around the poster "Bobino" where just like Eve in paradise is the beautiful bronde girl smiling looking far away and posing for "love croisieres". In fact it is also a commercial for a dance show of a cabaret type in the 1960's in Paris. When the bill machine makes that sound and probably is always a reminder of calculation of life, just like the man in confrontation seen from an outside point of view ready for his verdict. A little further near the bar is a door leading downdoors, to the stockage, to the unknown, to the uncalculated. The end image is in this passenger shadow that disappears on the passage. Seza Paker's dreamy journey is the threshold to enter another world beyond our ordinary everyday life. It is not an idle ideological play but a travel to follow a line of thinking which forms a fantasy escaped from a frame of space and time. Her images have a purity freed from dirty greed of possessiveness, and it has a strong power to softly touch our congested intellectual conception and our habitually fixed eyes. In her works, disappearance is not a mere collateral for a new creation. She awakes us to realize the greatness of disappearing itself. Due to the boldness, every element of which composes her work open to the earth beyond the boundary of the work itself. To invite a premonition into the work means to remove everything beyond the moment and open everything included in that moment. Here moment is not a mere instant but it indicates the moment when something becomes 'this'. We slip into it and again it slips into another 'this' through a transparency. She tells us to be totally wet, to remove and erase everything and to leave everything alone.
G. Caty who has lived in Brazil and Africa is interested in the meaning of Santa Claus. The belief in the existence of Santa Clause forms a unique way of satisfying our desire. Although it is a fake story, it has an amazing power to justify our diverse desires. That is the reason Caty is interested in Santa Clause. Caty is a great magician who can create great fantasy and endless stories.
The miracle existed in the story of Santa Clause is internalized through the belief of 'ideal' extension. It is based on the mutual relationship between two who intended to keep their selfish relations. A child just believes in Santa Clause only because he is someone that the child can imagine.
What the child achieves from this fantasy-even after he/she no longer believes in Santa Clause-is the affection from his/her parent, an accomplice of this plot. The gift from the parent is an approval of this compromise between them. In this meaning, the Santa Clause became a deceiving signal that there is a kind of structure to inform our desire to others and accept other people's desires.
G. Caty has created a cartoon hero René d'Azur, tracking his unlimited traces over the planet. His first ancestors lived 30,000 years ago in Syberia finding an anal black print (from anus) in a strange unknown carbon stone, a prehistoric thriller (but this is another story, called "the annals of René d'Azur"). Then some of them went away to East, in America (they became Indians), the other ones went to West, through Asia, Mesopotamia (3000 years ago), Turkey (the story in our WTA exhibtion), Ethiopia, Venezia etc. untill now with a great descendance all over the world and we can find them in the future too. René is like an axle around who everything can turn. Anyway, this is a support to make his life (and he hopes the spectator' life) most beautiful than art.
At this moment he is in the Ottoman's history to build René's story in Istanbul. About 15 years ago, he appropriated the surface 50 cm X 50 cm with the method of tautology. Paraphrasing Joseph Kosuth, Marcel Broodthers he invented the _expression "art as production as production". This is an unlimited serie of paintings with identical formats (50 cm X 50 cm). It is not painting to the lowest power (zero degree of painting) but painting with a hatred power plus one (level n+1, in French: "haine" means hate). This is an "art pompier" pyromania (Caty says that "pompier" in French means also fireman). It is a pirate art, stealing ideas and images. This production involves such as an exhibition. so called "art as exhibition as exhibition". Caty wanted to mixt Duchamp and Malévitch, Niele Toroni and Robert Filliou, etc.. Fluxus artist Robert Filliou said, "art is what makes life more beautiful than art." Here Caty says, "René d'Azur could make humanity more beautiful than René d'Azur".
His works are related to capture, hybridization, unexpected mutant propagation, surplus, seeding, rhizome multiplication of words and images, logic of meaning, immaterial play, etc. He likes joking with words, their meanings and their sounds and being precise with them, playing with passed, present and future, rhythming sentences. I
Wang Du explores Fluchtlinien (Deleuze) freed from today's consuming society where tourism became a part of our lives. Fluchtlinien is a reality. It is not to hide into desert or artistic imagination escaping from the real world and evading our responsibility, but to make a hole so that the world can leak. It is exactly opposed to renunciation or abandonment. It is closer to a new happiness. He designed an artificial tourist spot with a project titled in Italy 2002. Its original form is an abandoned water spray pot. However, once it's included in the content of tourism, it'll become a surprising and unbelievable object of discovery. It'd be as priceless as the cultural remains consumed by time, derived from remote history. For our WTA show he uses the special materials like fruits, vegitables etc, sculpturing them being to the image which from the local media, reproducing the image to be the travel souvenir which could be eating or taking away, that is on the art of travel beyond present all packaged travel culture.
Our contemporary civilization dissolves into the complicated value structure like puzzle and a Lego play became one of the most representative models for our society. Each individual is the subject who customizes his/her own civilization according to his/her taste from culture, art to clothing and food.
Shilpa Gupta, an Indian artist, worked with Internet on-line in order to create human bodies customized by bionics. The bionics in the 21st Century will grow through a dramatic improvement in a prosthetic technology related to human body with artificial internal organs and electronic body parts rather than conventional organ transplantation. Through her works, human body became the matrix, a circuit where a harmonious hallucination of consciousness possibly exists without physical body. Whereas Shilpa's work, [Xeno-Bio-Lab] is very critical. (www.xeno-bio-lab.com) Xeno comes from Xenophobia- which means racism. Her project is about the the organ trade / tourist industry which maps itself on trade routes of South to North, Brown/Black to White, Poor to Rich and Female to Male; marked by capitalism and perpetuated by globalization and desperate greed which the society has wrapped itself with. Organs are traded from an mother in Indian village desperate to arrange for her daughters wedding dowry, from a Chinese prisoner for whom consent is not a choice or from an unclaimed body in South Africa. And while you are in these zones selecting your organ, why dont you shop-stop and hop onto a Cheap Travel Destination Deal!
Bahc Iso, a Korean artist, titled his work borrowing www (world wide web), an initial URL on the Internet. He wrote many geographical names on a blue paper. Those are the names of unfamiliar places and all of them have particular and unique pronunciations. Gigantic blue background reminds us of sky or sea and vague white letters of the names of the places written or glued on the blue paper look like paper scraps drifting all over the world.
Oscar Wild's note, "A map that does not include utopian imagination has no value" seems to be very useful to explain this work. In addition, those strange and unfamiliar sounds of the names of the locations such as Araraquara, Fakfak, Nunachuak, and Quezaltenango among many others directly appeal to our tactile and auditory sensibilities rather than providing visual information in the same context of what Marshall McLuhan emphasized in his book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy".
The pale blue lightings installed in front of the artist's map seem to disturb the audience's sight at first glance. However, as a matter of fact they illustrate a dramatic contrast between a vastness of the world and shabbiness of our lives.
Bahc Iso describes his work as a skeptical testimony of the inaccurateness of our knowledge or the zone in between knowing and not knowing. He also said, "Although globalization and new liberalism appear to be penetrated throughout all over the world, our real lives are still unpleasant, trivial and superficial as they have had been all the time." In fact, we have become to have better understanding that we could misunderstand even at the time when we thought we understood and of course we misunderstood when we could not understand the more we experience contemporary art deeply.
Hiraki Sawa transformed his room into an aircraft station with facilities for landing and taking-off in his video work. He is interested in the idea of where is the borderline between outside world and his own. A wall in his room becomes a horizon. He is observing and been observed. Yet outside world stays uncertain. Sometimes one's imagination could appear to be more real than reality. Observing the outside but at the same time observing and examining where his world belongs. He say that there is a street that we walked yesterday but we do not know if we can go back to the same street today. However I have my own room to come back every day. And all the things I am surrounded with seem real to me but they could betray me as well." Here the world he thought it was real becomes no longer real. He wants to find a way to express this condition could also be gone by tomorrow. Even the appearance he is describing could be realized in someone's space. He said that the world he had been looking for was in not so far distance from where he was.
Hong Sung-Min produced a single channel video, which reminds of a Hollywood action movie and a Korean commercial movie. He said that he got the idea for the work while watching the Benny Hill Show, a famous British comedy drama. What hit the artist strongly was a scene of explosion right after Benny Hill swings his golf club from.
In his single channel video, Hong tracked down a daily schedule of Hasan who is working for the Islam restaurant as a chef in Seoul. At the same time the artist filmed himself acting in the Hyatt Hotel, a mosque, and a typical Korean style church and sometimes posing a tourist in the famous sights of Seoul.
Hong's video successfully produced the images of a creative geography (Kuleshov Effect) by naturally permeating documentary and fiction into the whole story without a drama structure.
He carefully examined the boundary or dividing line between the imperialistic terrorism and defiant terrorism and how they influence on our everyday life. His work leads the audience to experience the agitating dividing lines. Today we became bystanders who watch all different kinds of movies and panoramas in the huge theater called 'world'-the heroes for these movies are diverse from Olympic Game, World Cup, Biennale to Cyborg and Bionics. This theater called the 'world' is very dark and deep and the exit to the truth seems like nowhere.
Hong tried to reveal the irony that we are the ones who built this horrible theater and the movies playing in the theater now are nothing but our own stories. In his work, he composed a spectacle reality by revealing the risk of globalization, how our entire planet is becoming a battlefield for imperialism and multitude.
Young Chul Lee
This show, WTA tries to create a totally receptive environment of infinite nomadic mediation. Here to avoid misunderstanding, I will say that total penetrability should not be confused with the prospect of 'going to the root' of things; rather it is a condition of the viewers' optics shaped by the infinite deferment of the eclipse of the work. It would be naive to think that journeys to places (un)known are always made with the intention of searching for some hidden meaning. Sometimes, it is the flight from the creditors of meaning that pester the travelers in their places of permanent residence. The desire for nomadism and, in particular, for tourism can be justified if one becomes aware of the unconscious causes of what spurs on our will to move, our craving for new places.
History illustrates clearly that our world has developed based on a traffic network. Invention is not something falling from sky, but it is something that should be understood as a creation of hybridization. In other words, new work is nothing but a new mix of old works.
In that respect, traffic is essential for the social development. The society will be congealed and eventually forms a closed system that resists to any kinds of change without interchange. History tells that active hybridization is happening all the time somewhere in our planet. Marx and Engels frequently employed the concept of traffic in
New era of liberal exchange and international travel has opened by when the Berlin Wall was crashed and the conventional antagonism caused by cold war has been ceased. Some of the intelligent enthusiastically insist of an optimistic possibilities saying that an era of perfect 'unity' will come soon.
It is, however, too early to predict the era of harmony. In my opinion, the culture of the 21st century seems to shape itself through a chaos that can be compared to the Babel tower age, as Paul Virilio mentioned. Travel and tourism became keywords, even symbols that represent our age. Tourism is increasingly developing and booming in spite of that fact the world's destiny becomes more and more precarious, with wars, diseases and natural catastrophes. The direction of the future world will heavily depend on tourism. It's already being turned into a mode of "consuming life". Its contents and routes are now becoming more diverse and innovative: everything, ranging from natural to artificial, from historic heritage, folk culture to exotic places, and even the emerging contemporary urban-scapes, is being touristised. This phenomenon has been prompted by the power of media-isation, informationisation and commercialization. The mode of consuming life is a summery of the idea that everything in contemporary society can be consumed once for all. When nature, history, culture and reality have all become souvenir objects along the route of tourism, our bodies and minds are also consumed, once for all.
Tourism has an enormous influence on today's art itself and museum culture. Nonetheless the art world that has had been in the darkness for a long time tries to speak out, an elaborated totalitarianism diffused in the institutional system suppresses those voice. It regulates heterogeneous qualities and controls them. Today Biennale already became 'Makiladoras', a huge number of imitation factories built in Mexico and in the border between the States and Mexico.
Something that can be called 'boutique art (l'a art boutique)' appears as a reaction to the biennale and as a trial to outgrow popular art market.
The boutique art imitates avant-gardes method in the respect that its ultimate goal is to achieve liberal art free from any regulation, but their target audience is limited to the intelligent.
Despite these efforts, it is the reality that the gigantic cultural institutions with strong financial backgrounds manipulate the entire art world, further more they increase the numbers of the braches all over the world employing the franchise concept. Then, what will be the alternative to this? It would be for those whose minds or identities are not already made up, who are willing to embark on the sort of voyage where one throws out one's hermeneutic compass and leaves one's discourse behind, the sort of voyage gor which Deleuze adopted the Proustian motto: the true dreamer is the one who goes out to try to verify something.
In the context that travel is a process to understand others, art is the art of travel. We often perceive death in territorial way - as something that overtakes us at a fixed point in space. Seza Paker shot the photos in café Basile in Paris, Dante's love Beatrice who slept away in her teens whom he really seeks in this strange trip and has Virgile as a guide. In suite of images, even if her work looks as if there is narration, it is mostly the idea of suggestibility in the form of a shadow charater who strolls inside/outside the cafe. Still life images like the red bottles - ash trays doubts of hellish thoughts might occur to this lonely stroller. The double chance is an old poster of lottery (maybe life's lottery sample to be in hell or heaven or in between). The black jiant pot is a clin d'oil to J. Pierre Raynaud work and: Dufy's poster of "la croisette" a glimpse to the capitalistic world's heaven. And the space filled with this very dense light and air. the shadow is very frequently around the poster "Bobino" where just like Eve in paradise is the beautiful bronde girl smiling looking far away and posing for "love croisieres". In fact it is also a commercial for a dance show of a cabaret type in the 1960's in Paris. When the bill machine makes that sound and probably is always a reminder of calculation of life, just like the man in confrontation seen from an outside point of view ready for his verdict. A little further near the bar is a door leading downdoors, to the stockage, to the unknown, to the uncalculated. The end image is in this passenger shadow that disappears on the passage. Seza Paker's dreamy journey is the threshold to enter another world beyond our ordinary everyday life. It is not an idle ideological play but a travel to follow a line of thinking which forms a fantasy escaped from a frame of space and time. Her images have a purity freed from dirty greed of possessiveness, and it has a strong power to softly touch our congested intellectual conception and our habitually fixed eyes. In her works, disappearance is not a mere collateral for a new creation. She awakes us to realize the greatness of disappearing itself. Due to the boldness, every element of which composes her work open to the earth beyond the boundary of the work itself. To invite a premonition into the work means to remove everything beyond the moment and open everything included in that moment. Here moment is not a mere instant but it indicates the moment when something becomes 'this'. We slip into it and again it slips into another 'this' through a transparency. She tells us to be totally wet, to remove and erase everything and to leave everything alone.
G. Caty who has lived in Brazil and Africa is interested in the meaning of Santa Claus. The belief in the existence of Santa Clause forms a unique way of satisfying our desire. Although it is a fake story, it has an amazing power to justify our diverse desires. That is the reason Caty is interested in Santa Clause. Caty is a great magician who can create great fantasy and endless stories.
The miracle existed in the story of Santa Clause is internalized through the belief of 'ideal' extension. It is based on the mutual relationship between two who intended to keep their selfish relations. A child just believes in Santa Clause only because he is someone that the child can imagine.
What the child achieves from this fantasy-even after he/she no longer believes in Santa Clause-is the affection from his/her parent, an accomplice of this plot. The gift from the parent is an approval of this compromise between them. In this meaning, the Santa Clause became a deceiving signal that there is a kind of structure to inform our desire to others and accept other people's desires.
G. Caty has created a cartoon hero René d'Azur, tracking his unlimited traces over the planet. His first ancestors lived 30,000 years ago in Syberia finding an anal black print (from anus) in a strange unknown carbon stone, a prehistoric thriller (but this is another story, called "the annals of René d'Azur"). Then some of them went away to East, in America (they became Indians), the other ones went to West, through Asia, Mesopotamia (3000 years ago), Turkey (the story in our WTA exhibtion), Ethiopia, Venezia etc. untill now with a great descendance all over the world and we can find them in the future too. René is like an axle around who everything can turn. Anyway, this is a support to make his life (and he hopes the spectator' life) most beautiful than art.
At this moment he is in the Ottoman's history to build René's story in Istanbul. About 15 years ago, he appropriated the surface 50 cm X 50 cm with the method of tautology. Paraphrasing Joseph Kosuth, Marcel Broodthers he invented the _expression "art as production as production". This is an unlimited serie of paintings with identical formats (50 cm X 50 cm). It is not painting to the lowest power (zero degree of painting) but painting with a hatred power plus one (level n+1, in French: "haine" means hate). This is an "art pompier" pyromania (Caty says that "pompier" in French means also fireman). It is a pirate art, stealing ideas and images. This production involves such as an exhibition. so called "art as exhibition as exhibition". Caty wanted to mixt Duchamp and Malévitch, Niele Toroni and Robert Filliou, etc.. Fluxus artist Robert Filliou said, "art is what makes life more beautiful than art." Here Caty says, "René d'Azur could make humanity more beautiful than René d'Azur".
His works are related to capture, hybridization, unexpected mutant propagation, surplus, seeding, rhizome multiplication of words and images, logic of meaning, immaterial play, etc. He likes joking with words, their meanings and their sounds and being precise with them, playing with passed, present and future, rhythming sentences. I
Wang Du explores Fluchtlinien (Deleuze) freed from today's consuming society where tourism became a part of our lives. Fluchtlinien is a reality. It is not to hide into desert or artistic imagination escaping from the real world and evading our responsibility, but to make a hole so that the world can leak. It is exactly opposed to renunciation or abandonment. It is closer to a new happiness. He designed an artificial tourist spot with a project titled
Our contemporary civilization dissolves into the complicated value structure like puzzle and a Lego play became one of the most representative models for our society. Each individual is the subject who customizes his/her own civilization according to his/her taste from culture, art to clothing and food.
Shilpa Gupta, an Indian artist, worked with Internet on-line in order to create human bodies customized by bionics. The bionics in the 21st Century will grow through a dramatic improvement in a prosthetic technology related to human body with artificial internal organs and electronic body parts rather than conventional organ transplantation. Through her works, human body became the matrix, a circuit where a harmonious hallucination of consciousness possibly exists without physical body. Whereas Shilpa's work, [Xeno-Bio-Lab] is very critical. (www.xeno-bio-lab.com) Xeno comes from Xenophobia- which means racism. Her project is about the the organ trade / tourist industry which maps itself on trade routes of South to North, Brown/Black to White, Poor to Rich and Female to Male; marked by capitalism and perpetuated by globalization and desperate greed which the society has wrapped itself with. Organs are traded from an mother in Indian village desperate to arrange for her daughters wedding dowry, from a Chinese prisoner for whom consent is not a choice or from an unclaimed body in South Africa. And while you are in these zones selecting your organ, why dont you shop-stop and hop onto a Cheap Travel Destination Deal!
Bahc Iso, a Korean artist, titled his work
Oscar Wild's note, "A map that does not include utopian imagination has no value" seems to be very useful to explain this work. In addition, those strange and unfamiliar sounds of the names of the locations such as Araraquara, Fakfak, Nunachuak, and Quezaltenango among many others directly appeal to our tactile and auditory sensibilities rather than providing visual information in the same context of what Marshall McLuhan emphasized in his book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy".
The pale blue lightings installed in front of the artist's map seem to disturb the audience's sight at first glance. However, as a matter of fact they illustrate a dramatic contrast between a vastness of the world and shabbiness of our lives.
Bahc Iso describes his work as a skeptical testimony of the inaccurateness of our knowledge or the zone in between knowing and not knowing. He also said, "Although globalization and new liberalism appear to be penetrated throughout all over the world, our real lives are still unpleasant, trivial and superficial as they have had been all the time." In fact, we have become to have better understanding that we could misunderstand even at the time when we thought we understood and of course we misunderstood when we could not understand the more we experience contemporary art deeply.
Hiraki Sawa transformed his room into an aircraft station with facilities for landing and taking-off in his video work. He is interested in the idea of where is the borderline between outside world and his own. A wall in his room becomes a horizon. He is observing and been observed. Yet outside world stays uncertain. Sometimes one's imagination could appear to be more real than reality. Observing the outside but at the same time observing and examining where his world belongs. He say that there is a street that we walked yesterday but we do not know if we can go back to the same street today. However I have my own room to come back every day. And all the things I am surrounded with seem real to me but they could betray me as well." Here the world he thought it was real becomes no longer real. He wants to find a way to express this condition could also be gone by tomorrow. Even the appearance he is describing could be realized in someone's space. He said that the world he had been looking for was in not so far distance from where he was.
Hong Sung-Min produced a single channel video, which reminds of a Hollywood action movie and a Korean commercial movie. He said that he got the idea for the work while watching the Benny Hill Show, a famous British comedy drama. What hit the artist strongly was a scene of explosion right after Benny Hill swings his golf club from.
In his single channel video, Hong tracked down a daily schedule of Hasan who is working for the Islam restaurant as a chef in Seoul. At the same time the artist filmed himself acting in the Hyatt Hotel, a mosque, and a typical Korean style church and sometimes posing a tourist in the famous sights of Seoul.
Hong's video successfully produced the images of a creative geography (Kuleshov Effect) by naturally permeating documentary and fiction into the whole story without a drama structure.
He carefully examined the boundary or dividing line between the imperialistic terrorism and defiant terrorism and how they influence on our everyday life. His work leads the audience to experience the agitating dividing lines. Today we became bystanders who watch all different kinds of movies and panoramas in the huge theater called 'world'-the heroes for these movies are diverse from Olympic Game, World Cup, Biennale to Cyborg and Bionics. This theater called the 'world' is very dark and deep and the exit to the truth seems like nowhere.
Hong tried to reveal the irony that we are the ones who built this horrible theater and the movies playing in the theater now are nothing but our own stories. In his work, he composed a spectacle reality by revealing the risk of globalization, how our entire planet is becoming a battlefield for imperialism and multitude.
Young Chul Lee
