Installation view © Alternative Space LOOP

Around 2014, Yang Ah Ham started to feel that she was hitting the wall with her art. After twenty years as an artist, she felt devasted witnessing the practice of criticism give into the system and lose its rigor. “Where did it go wrong?” “What can we do to find our way out?” These questions naturally grew beyond the personal, and into the social dimension. Since then, the artist began to question the political system in very specific ways.

In March 2018, Ham translated those thoughts into a sketch. The sketch was based on the two-dimensional organization chart of the government, which reflects our current political system and the invisible barriers it represents. In a pencil drawing, the artist began to sketch out the figures represented inside and outside the organization chart, and the events that occur inside and outside their kingdom. Afterwards, she asked her friends to reenact the figures and their actions, which she filmed against a green screen. The sweeping scenes of the drawing were gradually replaced with the footages of real people.

‘The Undefined Panorama’ series combines all of those scenes on one screen. Presented in one point perspective of the camera, the figures appear and perform their act in order throughout the screen. The viewers can imagine a narrative through their own perspective, based on the order of the acts. From the experience, the viewer can examine their own position within the coordinates of the present world. Continuing on Ham’s practice of art as a means of social criticism, the work provides a point of departure through which she further delves into the issues of the individual and the social system.

The massive scale of projection in ‘The Undefined Panorama’ presents a genre painting of contemporary mankind in many aspects reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Haywain. Mirroring the world in transition into monetary economy after the thirteenth century when greed emerged as the root of evil, the religious painting captures the sin of human greed in their desire to possess hay, which symbolizes earthly currency. In the triptych, Bosch unfolds the history of human sin through various figures such as fallen angels, gluttonous clergymen, murderers, perpetrators and charlatans performing quackery.

Installation view © Alternative Space LOOP

Yang Ah Ham’s work presents a kind of puppet show where each figure performs their role on the stage, representing the current social system. The central theme of ‘Undefined Panorama 2.0’ addresses the process of neoliberalism taking root, as seen through the history of finance. As a figure walks onscreen and taps on a black sign in the government organization chart, the word “Treasury” lights up and the story begins. The narrative explains the origins of unprecedented wealth made possible by the neoliberalist economy – following Thatcherism in the 1970s, the emergence of investment banks (de facto speculation firms) in the Reagan era, and the “Big Bang” of the stock market in 1986. In the end, the techno-utopia imagined by Nicholas Negroponte, which he described as a “community where all users are connected online,” only gave way to the birth of technocrats and the new super-rich.

Like Bosch’s fifteenth century masterpiece, Yang Ah Ham captures these ironic situations brought on by digital technology in a portrait of human greed and materialism. At the same time, the artist criticizes the current attitude of indifference, which assumes neoliberalism as a general condition that has existed throughout history. Neoliberalism, however, discourages not only an artist’s need to interpret the times, but also an intellectual’s desire to examine the system, and ultimately, draws them into its structure. The social role of art is not just limited to activism, but includes providing an insight to the world. To achieve this, Yang Ah Ham carries out numerous individual research, because without research, the effort only amounts to conceptualized, idealistic and meaningless slogans. ‘Undefined Panorama’, therefore, is created through the process of uncovering truths that were deliberately left out from the official academic curriculum, and interpreting them through the artist’s own subjective research.

Yang Ah Ham believes that change dependent on the system has its limitations, as witnessed by the failure of the communist revolution and socialist reform in the past. Instead, Ham believes that revolution of the individual is the only way to overcome the system. To accomplish this goal, systematically overlooked information and truths must be researched and reassembled, then educated and shared among the public.

Undefined Panorama is scheduled to unfold in different versions over the next several years. The process of production will be shared with the audience and their feedback will be reflected in the next version. This democratic process also deeply relates to the fact that all of the actors in the work are the artist’s friends, and the friends of their friends, because when the system only speaks for the privileged few, the only way to challenge it is through the proactivity solidarity and support of those who lie outside the system.


Written by Ji Yoon Yang

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