Shin Jungkyun, Sing the Begonia, 2017, Single channel video, 4min 30sec © Shin Jungkyun

One very long lie

Shin Jungkyun has been working around issues of the military, national security, ideologies and conspiracy theories to expose anxieties that are latent in the divided Korea. By appropriating stylistic features of different genres in media, Shin’s simulations oscillate between the truth and fiction, a message and its form, the past and the present, and the serious and the playful. His videos truthfully follow Marshall McLuhan’s statement, “The medium is the message.” Mundane and trivial stories are retold in the styles of propaganda TV shows, documentaries, and reportages with exaggerated CGs and stiff formats; and by doing so, the artist amplifies the dormant anxieties. And the sum of these approaches tends to conclude in forms of Mockumentary In mockumentaries, nothing is trustworthy. Because it is impossible to distinguish the truth from the fabricated.

In order to disclose the lies that are weaved in, it is inevitable to cast doubts on the undisputed daily conditions such as time, space and systems Therefore the narrative of a mockumentary flows naturally like a drama or a reportage, but in fact, it testifies nothing as well as accusing nothing. Demonstrating neither truth nor fiction, his narratives of conflicts cannot enter the clear logic, and therefore the residues of the controversy remain within the viewers as ambiguous deja-vus of the anxieties.

Shin Jungkyun, A Song Written in Okryuche, 2013 ©Shin Jungkyun

Shin’s previous works such as Sing the Begonia (2016) and A Song Written in Okryuche, (2013) have already proved his proficient manner in showing how a form can invert its content And he also embedded these twists within the layers of his videos. Shin appropnates the stylistic features of documentaries and reportages to make us be over-conscious of our day-to-day realities, and then he puts these authoritative styles in the frame of a mockumentary to dilute their sincerity. He tells not-so-serious stories using very serious voices, to make not-really-serious accusations; and then again he presents his work in the form of a not-at-all-serious genre, to the world where everyone talks so seriously (the art world). However what he aims to become within his complex maze of twists is not a lone whistle-blower (the hero) of which status the previous generations had fought for. Rather, he proposes that we suspend judging instead of resolving and closing the cases

While the authoritative aesthetics that he appropriated structure the narratives, the clumsy CGs and the B-grade references periodically appear and damage the credibility of the messages. In this term, his works are somewhat like the low-budget mockumentaries filling up the unpopular cable TVs in the idle hours, or the fake documentaries overflowing Youtube; rather than Blair Witch which requires the viewers’ ceaseless immersion. So, this might be his final twist. The repeated reversals between the form and the message eventually confuse the conventional structure of narratives and soon transform the reality itself into a potential conspiracy theory stuck in between the truth and the fiction. There is no more certainty. And we get to doubt if everything (perhaps even the Art itself) is just one very long lie.

In his exhibition , he talks about a time (our time) and its reverse side (the time of the national security) that have been actually coexisting. Apparently, some of the spies’ time cannot be co-registered with the time of our peaceful reality. Like the side B of an analog tape remaining silent while we play the side A; the two times are there together, but the two cannot be simultaneously represented because they exist as the contradicting conditions to each other. And this is the primary condition for sustaining the illusion called ‘the everyday reality.’ The stories told in Shin’s works in Re-wind, of the spies who had been sent to the North and the young military men who had got into the states of coma while serving the military, are actually quite familiar to us but we (our time) have never adequately talked about them: these remain as obscure tales. It is not because they have been skillfully hiding, but instead because we have been pretending to be blind to them. Or, maybe we have not recognized them from the beginning as they, like the Invisible Man, lived a different time while existing in the same time with us.

Shin reconstructs this obscure time, which could not have been represented within our inner time by collecting the alibis and clues from the marginalized testimonies of the witnesses. And like the sketchy stories told by the B-grade media, his simulations adeptly combine different genres and settle within a style. By the end of the stories in his videos, the artist places the other time on ours, as if trying to leave a mark that they lived a different time while simultaneously sharing our time. Like one very long lie.

References