CHUN Jin-sung (Historian, Professor at Pusan National University)
The belief that a space contains memories within it does not seem to accord with our ordinary experiences today. Space is no longer the “specimen(s) of fossilized duration” that science philosopher Gaston Bachelard prized, but functions as a catalyst for change that continuously destabilizes our everyday lives. Do we still have a home that we, who live in this modern world, can indefinitely stay in? Can our ill-defined memories that wander without destination acquire the land they deserve on the site of our national history, or perhaps on the world stage? If not, perhaps they can settle in the homeland where the spirits of our ancestors dwell?
Jaeyeon Chung is an artist who set out to solve the mystery of space, which is ever elusive regarding memories. Chung, who cannot sympathize with the official memories that public spaces represent, nor with institutionalized memories, retraces the fragments of her lost memories to discover her identity. She is committed to being truthful to herself, to exploring and reproducing the traces of the past – the memories of her body that have been embedded in her senses. If Chung’s world of art can be labeled “site-specific art,” then it isn’t because she upholds the values of the place in question, but because she focuses on experiencing the unique materialities that dissolve those values with her physical body. What she confesses in her statement, to “ a sense of shame over not sympathizing with the symbols and signs of ideology and the fear of being discovered because I have no historical awareness” isn’t a confession of her artistic incompetence, but rather indicates that she is experiencing space in a completely different way.
Space isn’t a fixed entity, but is the catalyst for and result of specific experiences. Certain spaces are differentiated from the rest due to specific memories, ideas, and ideologies, as a result of which they acquire status. For example, by considering the West’s distance from the less advanced East, South Korea’s contrast with the North, Gangnam’s advancement compared to Gangbuk we may eventually find our place. Space is relative but independent at the same time. When memory changes, space is pushed to change along with it, changes which it will reject through inertia, which causes tension. Space divides memories and stands in the way of readjustments. In doing so, it gains independent power. Space paradoxically creates new memories through its intrinsic materiality. When seen in this light, the ideas that space is a given, and that it contains our memories in its entirety, become vestiges of pre-modern historical views that can no longer be maintained.
Jaeyeon Chung’s installations, which so slyly privatize public spaces like they were her living room, boldly rip off the veil of ideology that stifled them, and blow life back into the spaces themselves. Her early works like You Might Break the Mirror and Love Letters in Hyde Park, read whimsy in parentheses, however, they carry heavy nuances as they hint at new ways of looking at space that are highlighted in her later works. Personal interventions within a public space change a coercive and cold place into a more intimate one that can be felt by our senses in an instant. Of course, this place is not occupied by any single person. It is closer to the boundary between public and personal realms as the artist anticipates reactions from the public and closely observes them. Opening Project, which Chung was involved in after she returned to Korea, appears to be an example of physically overcoming the issue of demolishing the wall between the public and private spaces, at least in terms of the artist’s personal development.
As mentioned in the artist’s notes, Jaeyeon Chung’s works are installed to create spaces for communication without social walls or barriers. However, what she created is, in fact, closer to a place of division than communication. The series of works that involved moving cement blocks, much like the ordinary everyday labor that Chung performed in London, seems far from an act of communication. Bricks that drift through space without becoming a part of an organic structure are reminiscent of ruins. Though this may not have been intended, it still reads as a historical allegory , just like the idle labor of moving the wreckage of the ruin, a history that wanders, unable to find a place to anchor down. – The shadow of posthistoire is cast deep over Chung’s work.
The socialist regimes that set young intellectuals’ hearts aflame collapsed in a futile failure; the new worlds that were born out of the desire for independence have evaporated to leave behind the fear of tyranny and disillusionment, which might be a fate worse than colonialism. Representative democracy, which seemed like the most rational option, is seeing the issues raised by representation all around the world. All official ideologies and systems of legitimacy have lost their historical aura. The glorious past can no longer promise us anything. The performance entitled Way In/Out, which was carried out in front of the historic Royal Academy of Arts, points to this fall, as well as the crisis of reproduction. Chung expressed the hardships that artists face in this day and age as follows: “It isn’t easy to gain a convenient shell that speaks for you.”
Under these unprecedented circumstances, work that “retraces” a well-known public space with the personal memories of the body is indeed convincing. The memories of the former Government General Building (중앙청) that Chung recreated in Retrace and Lost Corner illustrate the fissure that has formed between official history and the personal memories of a faint image. More accurately, they illustrate the fissure that formed historically between the Japanese General Government Building (일제총독부청사) and the Government General Building (National Museum of Korea, 국립중앙박물관). The memories of that place could never be wholly personal. The sensations that an individual body feels had already been distorted by the Western sense of history that the building embodied. It was built where the palace of a former Kingdom had “originally” been, after tearing apart its memories. In this sense, the artist’s memories weren’t even about what was “originally” there. Unlike the title of the work, the artist’s memories are not “lost” but are based on something that is no longer there being forgotten. The image of a space created by Jaeyeon Chung is exceedingly “post-historical.”
Space provides the categorical conditions for history, however, it acquires a history of its own simply by becoming the medium for social and political change. Space is a driving force in history in the sense that it has the power to weave the different situations and contexts that people experience in a synchronic and structural web of relationships. Therefore, spaces that we are associated with are always humanized. In other words, they are places that experienced historical shifts by being won over and restructured by political powers; they are nomoi. When the cosmos is brought into chaos, people are finally able to find their place. Topophilia was the original mode of human existence. However, all this has become a thing of the past. We have now found ourselves wandering in non-places. The unequal levels of development that have been exacerbated by the worldwide division of labor depending on what part of the world someone may be in, the shifts in capital and labor in its wake, and disputes over national borders, immigration, and tourism turned spaces that were once safe and comfortable homes for us, places full of memories, into layered and contradictory social and political processes. It has become more difficult for us to maintain our historical identity in the “space of flows”, a phrase coined by sociologist Manuel Castells.
Ultimately, we have no choice but to find the exit from this kaleidoscope of a world in our body’s memories, which is our most basic “place.” Maurice Merleau Ponty emphasized the embodied nature of human consciousness and the intimate connection between the body, perception and space.However, it is our harsh reality that even our body can no longer definitely provide us with an intimate place to stay. Modern and contemporary art has already been exploring the relationship between the body and space for a long time. Rachel Whiteread took a concrete cast of the empty space inside the home like the bathtub, floor, and room to subjectivize the body that has been stripped of the physical connections with the home in her 1993 work House. Antony Gormley covered himself in a layer of cling film and took plaster casts of parts of his own body , nearly burying himself alive in the process in his 1997 work Another Place. These works illustrate the reality of the post-history age, where it is difficult for our body to find a place for itself.
Space artist Jaeyeon Chung’s works take part in a ubiquitous issue in contemporary art in terms of conveying deep anguish about post-historical space and the memories of the body. However, if her anguish feels deeper than most; it is probably because of the heavy history of her homeland that bears down on her past and present. After all, even the Marronnier Park that was envisioned by architect Kim Soo Geun, which Chung tried so hard to restore by demolishing the art museum wall isn’t “original” either. The faint memories do no more than extend the memories of the colonial past. In the end, we must find our exit “outside” history, which has provided us with our unwavering identity and source of representation. We must break away from the spurious infinite of our individual identity that establishes itself as the inevitable result, and become a site that highlights the fissures and contradictions between space and memory and disappears without resistance.