26 Apr 2010

Ida Hajdari speaks to Korean Artist So- Young Cho

Ida Hajdari: Untitled text work (2009) works as well as it does partly because of the nature of the Korean language where the characters themselves and the way in which words are written seem to lend themselves so well to being seen like points of intersection in a grid. Have you considered doing a version of this work in English? Do you think this is possible at all?

So-Young Cho: There is an English translation of the work in progress (in fact I think the work could exist in any written world language). However the considerations behind an English translation or even other translations of the work are for me at the moment practical ones, as opposed to conceptual or aesthetic, since no audience in for example London or Paris would have access to it as I intended without some kind of translation or glossary. This is an interesting thing – the audience I mean.I take most things visually; and you’re right that Korean script (Hangeul) does make it easier to work in this way because of the nature of the system, and the visual aspects of the system. I was able to compact and contain lexical elements into this ‘grid’. I tried to make it compact and symmetrical like a grid or a map. Korean does allow me to do this more than say English. To an outsider (a ‘viewer’ of the work not a reader) it does appear more regulated aesthetically than it actually is at the level of the word. And this is more noticeable for them. They can’t read it, they can only look. The visual aesthetic must be raised for the non-Korean speaker and lowered, subordinated, for a Korean. I did think that anyone who came to it and could read Korean would literally read the whole thing before they would accept the whole image as ‘an image’, because they can understand the objects and know what they ‘look’ like. Obviously a non-Korean can’t do this; so they can’t read the diagrammatic aspect. Yes, it would make an interesting comparison to contrast Korean language audiences with non-Korean audiences. It is hard to imagine what a viewer might get at an interpretative level beyond or within the perceptive level if they had no idea what it was that they were looking at!So going back to the issue of translation – as a bilingual English-Korean speaker/writer I can say that the work will never really be the same, but it could still be valid. Each language has an ‘aura’; culture, politics, aesthetics, many things make it unique at a level of sense. Also I think the sound system can never be silenced; there is an inner voice. This is directly comparable to the visuality. This could be considered in parallel as the materiality or ‘music’ of an alien language in terms of audio. The pictorial elements of my first language do make this work very special I think, but everything has to be considered in the end. And as I said in the beginning, I never meant for this work to be translated, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be. Maybe it can’t be equal. It can’t be transferred. That’s the point.


I.H.: What is particularly disconcerting about the above work is the relationship between word, i.e. noun, and object, especially in the case of those objects that are represented to scale. For instance, in order to represent the wall in your room, the word ‘wall’ has been repeated, if I’m not mistaken, thirty four times. I am reminded of a statement made by George Maciunas (I think!): You can talk about a thing, but you cannot talk a thing. What you seem to have devised is a method for writing things. Was this something you had in mind when conceiving the work?


S-Y.C.: Again, this is a matter of visual perception for me. Every time I look at a word I am aware that I instantaneously see the object in my head and I do think they 'look' like each other in that way; they look to be where they belong. I wish I could find a word other than 'aura', but when I listen to the word 'book' in Korean or in English, I can draw a book, it cannot be explained. It is instinctive and visual. The diagrammatic and personal elements map my world, so they could through their specificity show a reality. But I'm not sure that is what Maciunas meant. There are two ways to analyze his thinking: one is questioning whether or not the 'word' is a thing; that is a question of its materiality or objecthood; the second is can a 'word' actually be the thing to which it refers; conceptually this seems impossible but as I say, the diagram gets quite close. It also depends on the notion of abstraction in noun forms I think. So the things in my room are much closer to their concrete form than say the notion of 'hatred' for example.Having said all this and to answer your question I don’t think I was aware of a method of ‘writing things’ when I made the work. It was very impulsive actually. But because of its physical, locational relations to ‘real life’ I think maybe it is closer to nature and reality than the most conceptual and generic of language, yes.

I.H.: Untitled text work is in a way a documentary work; you have written out and represented the entire contents of your room. In terms of the theoretical issues that the work raises it doesn’t matter at all of what variety the room that you chose to work with was. It is nonetheless interesting that you chose your bedroom. The thing about bedrooms is that they are both generic and at the same time, perhaps not simply through the nature of the objects in them but the ways in which these objects are arranged/scattered about, very telling of the person who inhabits them. I suppose my question is why this ‘exercise’ in painstakingly representing/documenting such a private space?

S-Y.C.: First of all, it was very impulsive. I did it to send to a friend back in Korea; but maybe that reason wasn’t that important; maybe I wanted to do it for myself. It was almost stating where I am; not literally physically stating where I am. But also somehow to try to figure out whereabouts I am in the world I’m living in and where I’m heading. It was a question of ‘life’ almost. I don’t know if we all want to know where we are; but for me I very much wonder where I am in my daily life. I don’t think it’s possible to work out physically where you are in the world we’re living in; even though we know all the maps and we get satellite information and so on we somehow accept that there can be multiple universes. It was putting down an answer to this question physically on a piece of paper! At that time I felt as if I was going somewhere, and I felt that I was questioning if I walk and walk and go forward would the atmosphere around me really change. I sometimes feel that I’m always running. Sometimes it occurs to me that there is no proof of our different visual worlds being the same or a similar world. And I sometimes wonder if something that I see through my eyes for that moment actually exists; which is a question of whether the outside really exists, a profound question of existence and proof. And while I was writing I was asking myself whether if that room existed only for that moment I should make evidence of it.

I.H.: The drawings in your Untitled (2009) series have a strong narrative element. Roger Orwell has argued that the possible displacement and evocation we feel when faced with these mutated bodies is a response to the departure that they represent from the body, which he reads as a possible metaphor for verbal syntactic structures overlaid with a visual syntax and grammar, and our response as an expression of our instinctive awareness of such structures. These drawings, however, form a series; so apart from the relation that the mutated body that is represented in each one of them has to the body, they also have a relation to each other and to the ‘whole’ that the series represents. Do you recognize and/or understand these two narrative threads? And furthermore do you understand them as being complementary?

S-Y.C.: Yes I do see these narratives and the structure of these anatomical works as being sublimated into something very similar to what Roger has said. I have thought about this before in fact. I see each piece as a word, as a sentence, as a story, as a series. I see each work as dependent and independent at the same time. We don’t have to listen to a story to know a story. I have taken out the ‘words’ in the ‘story’ that explain the ‘story’, if you like, and presented them in the way I’ve presented them. Before I started drawing these pictures the only thing I planned was that there should be twelve of them. The reason for this is unimportant here, but it maybe shows I was considering the discursive elements of the works. I do think there is an interrelation between the individual works. The body worked like a material for me. If you make something out of wood, that something evokes in some way all the nouns of furniture. If they have the same materiality it would at the same time present a unity. I think these works do form a poetics of the human anatomy, a poem, a message of the limits and limitlessness of the human body, of the boundaries of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’. I don’t think I clearly need to know what this is, or what it means. But the poets can reassemble language as I have the human body. Interpretation is for someone else; who can really say what literature really means; I don’t know, just as I don’t know if or when I will ever make another one of these works.

3 comments:

  1. Good to see a discussion of So-young's work on this forum! Here (below) is an unformatted version of a short critique I wrote about it recently. It's in two parts (A + B)

    Roger

    ______________________
    A

    Body Language:

    What is intriguing about the work of So-young Cho is its potential to sit squarely across and oscillate freely between the verbal and the visual with a level of sophistication rarely seen. This is explicit in a work like Untitled text work (2009) but is maybe less so in many of the artist’s other works, e.g. Untitled series (2009), which are easily and perhaps superficially ‘read’ as sketches of painful transformations, surreality, grotesquery and/or erotica. And as the bounds of perception and interpretation can of course never be contained, they are these things, and more. Yet for me as a language theorist and art researcher interested in the liminal arena, or staging posts between verbal (what I have elsewhere called art-lingua) and visual representations they present quite fascinating figurations.

    In the text work, Untitled text work (2009), word is image, image is word, or to be more accurate the words are dots in a matrical scalar and non-scalar iconic representation of the artist’s room. This work is seen and read almost simultaneously; although phenomenologically this is very unlikely. It is diagram and annotated text. To call it a ‘concrete poem’ I believe is probably to misrepresent it. It is balanced, equally visible and invisible. (And if the work cannot be read, perhaps due to illiteracy in the Korean language, and is only seen, the material elements of the language become raised and form a conjunctive imagery, an abstract, rectangular compound work. This is very interesting in itself; yet I will not be discussing this phenomenon here.)

    Furthermore, and more intriguing still I think is Untitled series (2009) and its ability to metaphorize our instinctive awareness of verbal syntactic structures and at the same time build a grammar and a signification both from, in and beyond the anatomy of the human body—to be image and language without ever appearing as the latter.

    Most linguisticians would accept the word as the primary unit of semanticity, next unit next to unit, so sense or meaning through relation, the logic of sense, a building of a systemic unifying forward movement towards coherence or ‘oneness’ or the whole message. I am proposing that we intuit this in this artist’s work and yet simultaneously access a mutated or transmogrified physiology which signifies far beyond it component parts, an image (studium, punctum) and a visual/sentence—both intrinsically flat and ‘timeless’ and at the same time as linear and temporal as if in the reading of a line of verse or line of prose, a reconstitution of the body from the body, a germinative code or ‘body language’.

    Of course grammatologists, with Jacques Derrida as their captain and guide, have argued rightly for the scratched surface matter and iconicity of all script and writing, evident in Chinese bases, less so in the phonemic iconicity of the Alphabet, blazingly obvious in hieroglyphs, but mostly lost to history and the language system’s need to at least aid the illusion of arbitrariness, to reduce and simplify to for efficiency’s sake,. Yet here we have a reversal, a mesmerizing reversal, clearly inconistic as a sign or representation – yet also potentially arbitrary symbol, at least in its generative syntax, its grammar, its meaning making machinery of body part next to body part.

    Continued in B >

    Roger Orwell, March 2010

    Copyright 2010, all rights reserved.

    University of the Arts London Language Centre The London Consortium

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  2. Part B


    And as visual paragraph moves to superordinate visual text: what of the symbolism or signification of these works? What discourse is networked from this language of the coded human body? What narratives are built? Intertexually and consciously we could call up Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein , or to be accurate his ‘monster’, The Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick), cyborgs, numerous preternatural sci-fi beasts (from the adversaries of Doctor Who to Avatar 2010); the work of cosmetic surgeons. But here I am perhaps falling into the interpretative trap I evinced in my introduction.

    What we so successfully cannot understand in these works is the space beyond verbal and visual language and yet within it—a poetry. For me Shelly (not Mary but Percy) is a pointer towards the true meta-narrativity of these works. The romantic poets and their difficult and dreamy relation with technology, the body and its extension, intrusions and prosthetics, the turn from nature to industry and modernity and the tension therein: this is where this beautiful syntax leads us, to deep-structural understanding, fascination and xenophobia.

    It is no surprise to know that So-young Cho, as well as a visual artist, is a poet. Time spent with her work and we already know that, and also know that in her case always the two are one. I believe ( I know) the visual sentence is de facto ‘impossible’; since to read is to eventually presuppose writing. Yet here we do I think potentially experience the writing of the image and the drawing of language, or vice versa. For me this is a disjuncture and a bliss I will return to many times I think.


    Roger Orwell, March 2010

    Copyright 2010, all rights reserved.

    University of the Arts London Language Centre
    The London Consortium

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  3. Thanks Roger,
    We love encouraging discussion so comments like yours are very much appreciated.

    Please do keep in touch, and do let us know your thoughts!

    Best

    Fox& Squirrel

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