Space in the Glass — exhibition review

Space in the Glass is a solo exhibition organized and presented through the Seoul Museum of Art's program for discovering and supporting emerging artists (SeMA). The artist, who had already received the Young Photographer Award at the Daegu Photo Biennale for the series 3rd Story, works by borrowing filmmaking methods such as scenarios, location hunting and mise-en-scène. Space in the Glass, too, was produced like a film shot on location — through thorough preparation, composition and direction — and in that sense continues the earlier work. Yet if 3rd Story explored the strata of individual, experiential fantasy, Space in the Glass presents the fundamental, a priori zone of human fantasy — itself an archetype of the collective unconscious — in images of greater finish, through more careful mise-en-scène, soft and neutral pastel tones, and the exacting formal device of the circular frame. In 3rd Story, the desires and traumas of a childhood frustrated in reality lay latent in the strata of the unconscious, then in dreams were condensed, displaced and substituted into giraffes, robots, birds, airplanes and bicycles; at points where day and night, sea and desert met strangely, real places were sublimated into a dreamlike, poetic world.

In Space in the Glass, by contrast, the artist visualizes the points of origin of civilization and fantasy, as an archetype of the collective unconscious and a more fundamental, a priori ground of fantasy. The desert location is less a stage — a mise-en-scène of desire that merely fulfils an individual's repressed wishes — than a place of fundamental, archetypal human fantasy; here figures that symbolize origins and crossings, such as a train, a gate and a transmission tower, appear like the uncanny, stateless things of Surrealist painting. Turned into an unidentified middle zone, the desert in Space in the Glass is transformed into a mysterious place and substituted for the most exotic place on earth. The title and the circular frame recall the glass ball in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane: dropped by the dying protagonist, it shatters into fragments that suggest the loss of an innocent time. The artist's space within the glass, too, looks like a mirage that could vanish in an instant. The transparent fantasy inside the glass, easy to carry, seems like a crystal ball one can take out anywhere, at any time, to see the past or foretell the future through the present — yet it also reminds us that it is a psychological reality that will shatter if the glass breaks.

The soft, pale grey pastel tones, which make sky and desert hard to tell apart, like a middle zone, make the horizon look like an illusion that appears and disappears like a mirage in the heat of the sun. In the story unfolded by the folds of a barely visible horizon, a train and a carriage from nowhere, a monumental gate, and a bed and a dining table set in the middle of the desert form a nomadic space where the civilizations of East and West meet and communicate — and at the same time a place that transcends physical and topographical space, where reality and fantasy, and the gazes of artist and viewer, cross. The subtle gap of the horizon is a space where signifiers of passage and encounter — between the real and the unreal, between civilizations, between people — play freely, and also a space where the object of fantasy appears. Like the 'chora' described by Julia Kristeva, that space is a ground that generates and transforms diverse meanings and orders: a place born of the meeting and collision of heterogeneous things from many peoples and civilizations, at once natural and strange. Through meticulous location work and highly finished, transparent tones, the artist does not distort reality; rather, he lets the viewer chance upon something long forgotten, or meet a psychological reality that fulfils desire through imagination.

Thus Space in the Glass, by fusing the theatrical, fictional device of mise-en-scène with the cinematic device of location, re-enacts the world called reality as the fantasy of a stage, and through fiction lets us imagine the traces of the real — or the origin of time — that never fully appear in reality. In this it also reminds us, as Lacan pointed out, that reality is "nothing but the residue that returns from the stage." What the viewer encounters in the play the artist has made is not a distorted, fictional world but the source of the unconscious, accessible only through an unconcealed fictionality — at once the starting point of civilization and the origin of each viewer's own desire and fantasy.