- ‘Awakening’ - A Journey towards Mysterious Writing ‘Awakening’ - A Journey towards Mysterious Writing Park, Choon Ho (Chief Curator, Kim Chong Yung Museum) What makes artists? To put it simply, artists are those who live on and are acknowledged by what they express. Thus, artists should have their unique sensibility, let alone excellent ability to express themselves. However, candidness should come before sensibility to express something better. Sensible expression without frankness may be sweet at first sight yet audiences will hardly be touched and moved by it. That is why going through a variety of experience is a significant asset for artists. A great number of audiences are immersed in the inexpressibly mysterious charm found in the works based on artists’ own experience. And we find such mysterious charm and enchantment in the works of artist Ui Sik Gim. Audiences first encountering his works may be a little bit bewildered. The first scene the audience faces after entering the exhibition hall is similar to the specimen of a huge dinosaur’s skeleton, which one typically expects to see in the museum of natural history. Taking a closer look, one finds tiny little letters written on the bones which are hardly legible. The audience unconsciously tries to read those letters, but they soon realize that they cannot. Although written neatly in a row, it is something mysterious and impossible to read. While interviewing Artist Ui Sik Gim, I listened to what he had to say on his life as a senior at the university. He found death hovering over his life after a tragic car accident, lost his dear grandfather after he passed away, and broke up with his lover. Probably caught in a series of mysterious misfortunes, all those tragic events, hard to overcome even a single one, unleashed simultaneously in an instant and he suffered immensely to overcome the difficulties. He ended up feeling completely helpless and powerless. With little time left until the graduation exhibition, he went into seclusion. Right before the exhibition, however, he decided to express through his work how he was going through all those difficult challenges. He first started writing a diary – not to reflect and introspect on his life but to desperately forget all of the misfortunes around him. He confesses now that it became the start of his artistic works. In other words, his art started from a very personal thing. That is why the work he submitted to his graduation exhibition was named “Memory-Room.” “Memory-Room” allows the audience to look inside the room through a small outside window where one can barely put their head. It looks like a real room. There are a desk, a pillow and a bed, and a suitcase and shoes which the artist really used. The desk is a place for meditation whereas the bed is for taking a rest. The suitcase and shoes could mean deviation from one’s daily life. On the surface of those items the author left a writing with tiny letters in a naked body. Probably he wanted to show himself in an explicitly candid manner. But the audience fails to read those writings because he intentionally made it impossible to read to ultimately erase the memory within his brain. It is an ironic situation because a person is writing to forget something whereas the original purpose of writing lies in recording and remembering. As black light and fluorescent light are repeatedly switched on and off, it symbolizes one’s daily life and sleep taking place within that space. However, the simple scene shown beyond the other side of the window is full of symbolic meanings. After graduation, Gim held four solo exhibitions. Let us look at the titles of each exhibition. The first one was “The Nature,” the second one was “Kunstkammer,” the third “Physics,” and the fourth “Writing Skeletons.” Throughout those four exhibitions after his graduation exhibition “Memory-Room,” he started to write on bones rather than on his personal belongings. The first solo exhibition reflects such change and its title became “The Nature.” In ancient Greek, physis used to mean the nature. Therefore, the titles of the first and the third exhibitions are similar. However, the title of the second solo exhibition “Kunstkammer” is translated into ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in English. Newly emerged aristocrats who accumulated a great wealth during the Renaissance Age enthusiastically started to collect rare and precious items. They soon needed space to display and show off the precious collections to others and those kinds of space were called “Kunstkammer,” which corresponds to museums and galleries these days. As the museum of natural history still exists, nature and kunstkammer are in a relationship of disappearance and conservation. The titles “The Nature” and the “Kunstkammer” are composed of nouns and related to recognition, whereas the title of the most recent exhibition “Writing Skeletons” emphasizes the action of an artist. What is remarkable, however, is that the artist is writing skeletons rather than letters. The title of the coming exhibition is ‘Natura.’ The Latin word ‘Natura’ can be translated into ‘character.’ In this sense, the meaning of the previous title “The Nature” should be understood as character rather than Mother Nature. He made skeletons of the animals to figure out their nature (character). He used to say, “Bones stand for death.” Thus, bone is the evidence that a living creature existed. However, if nobody saw that living creature, their nature (character) cannot be identified just through the remaining skeletons. One can merely make an educated guess on the biological traits of the creature based on scientific knowledge. The nature (character) of a living creature is an object for philosophical reasoning. What is peculiar is that the skeletons Gim made are a combination of bones of at least two species. It means that the skeleton on the exhibition were not actually those of the living creatures. It looks meaningless to study the nature (character) of the living creature that never existed and has been made artificially. Then, what kind of nature (character) is Gim interested in? In the coming exhibition, Artist Ui Sik Gim exhibits a skeleton of a huge Minke Whale’s flipper. Gim left mysterious writings on the skeleton. He actually gave me astounding information about the Minke Whales. According to recent research, Minke Whales turned out to be the living creature with the most similar DNA MAP with humans among marine animals. It reminded me of what I learned in my biology class during high school days when teacher taught me that whales belong to mammals and the evidence of such evolution is that the skeleton inside a whale’s flipper has the same structure with human hands. One can probably guess that humans and whales stemmed from the same ancestor from a far distant past. Gim used to make imaginary creatures and now he is making a skeleton of a living creature. Why did Gim specifically choose to make a whale’s flipper that corresponds to humans’ hands? The answer can be found in the video work that he showed during his 2011 solo exhibition. Under the title of “Hommage de Stanley Kubrick,” he produced a video clip that edited initial parts of the “2001 Space Odyssey” of Director Stanley Kubrick. It starts with the first scene that begins with the famous symphonic poem “Thus spoke Zarathustra” and ends with the scene that symbolically shows when early human beings learned for the first time to use the thigh bones of animals as tools. In that final scene, humans throw the thigh bones high up in the air and a camera captures the bones as a close-up on the background of the sky. Gim highlighted the thigh bones in the video clip by inserting it as 3D animation. It shows that he is seriously contemplating over the issue of origin. In the “Memory-Room,” Gim tried to erase the memories of painful times when he was caught between life and death, separated from his grandfather forever, and suffered from a broken relationship with his lover. He describes his works at that time as an intentional behavior to forget. However, separation occurs because the relationship was initially formed. Nonetheless, Gim keeps leaving mysterious writings. Those mysterious writings are visualization of murmurings uttered by human beings before they developed language. Gim changed the place where he leaves his writings from his personal belongings to bones, which I believe is the evidence that he is expanding the boundary of his thinking. He no longer attempts to erase the memory and rather tries to figure out what he forgot and the very nature of human beings through the erased memory. His works started from a very personal thing and later expanded into much wider and universal matters, which intensifies the mysterious charm found in his works.