1. The Post-Life of Father/Painter Cha Dongha
The
last project that the Korean painter Cha Dongha (1966–2021) worked on during his lifetime was entitled ‘Festival’ (2006–2017). Using acrylic paints, he applied the obangsaek colors—the traditional Korean color spectrum of red, blue, white, black,
and yellow—to mulberry paper, before trimming down the
color fields to create something resembling monochrome painting. After creating
a few works in his ‘Festival’ series in 2017, he entered a hiatus lasting
around four years before his sudden death. Described as being “arranged with a unique sense of balance within grid forms bearing
clear monochrome colors,”
Cha’s
color field/monochrome paintings are elegant, serene, and beautiful. In an
interview, the artist said he hoped that his work would help in “consoling and healing people in the suffering we experience in life—offering peace of mind and healing of emotional pain simply through
the viewing of an image.” Cha Dongha—who would be roughly the same age as me today—created canvases of colors bearing cultural and regional
significance, based on a process in which he applied paints directly to Korean
hanji paper to form obangsaek fields and then used a knife to cut them down to
suit his desired compositions.
His style combined (practically invisible)
painting-as-act and the application of acrylic paint to a surface with the
(slightly visible) collage technique of layering color fields; the Festival
title served as a clue that introduced the cultural context (referent) of the
obangsaek colors. The culturally rooted image of the flowering colors becomes a
flowered bier or a banner for the funeral cortège that follows. The traditional
funeral that I witnessed as a child in my grandmother’s
neighborhood was a festival consisting of the family of the deceased;
professionals supervising the funeral rites; men bearing a coffin covered in
multicolored paper flowers; villagers holding similarly colorful funeral
streamers; and endless others following the procession. The individual’s death was signified as part of a ritual for the
community/collective to which they belonged.
For those who live on, the
spectacle of shared grief and mourning contextualizes death as part of the
collective/community and as something that can never be merely personal. We
live today in a culture from which death has been almost entirely concealed and
erased, existing as something unexpected or an object of fear. Yet within the
beauty of the symbols of death as mourned by a community and the flowered bier
passing through the heart of a village, there is a sense of continuity and
collectivity, showing that we will be preserved and carried on even after our
passing. Aesthetically structured in a way that avoids direct symbolism or the
sense of cultural affiliation, Cha Dongha’s festivals
of color fields, like his artistic process, seem to allude to his desire to
evoke such relationships, emotions, and promises in a kind of monologue (I’m not sure if the reporter understood his explanation above).
Cha
Yeonså may not have been fully aware of her father’s work—paintinglike creations that seem almost not to resemble paintings.
His death provided her with an opportunity/stage for observing his work as
someone who was herself approaching the artistic world through such
contemporary media as live performance, games, and cartoons. Cha Yeonså may
never have directly witnessed the traditions that the obangsaek mulberry paper
works denote/converge upon. Instead, she has experience with a different
community of brilliantly colored banners and costumes. In her feather’s “festivals” and
traditional Korean spectrum of colors, the younger Cha saw the rainbow hues of
queer pride. She shows no interest in a return/identification process in which
she learns from and establishes herself within her father’s culture and affiliations.
Instead, she has shown her prowess at
extracting the adult/male/mainstream/painter from within traditional
patriarchal culture and applying them to the culture of the non-mainstream
community to which she belongs. She insists that even for her father, there was
“definitely a queer aspect to his being a man who used
colors.” In that sense, the father Cha Dongha lives on
in a different post-life from the context of his painting work. As someone who
lives their life carrying, repressing, denying, and recognizing the not-me
aspects—the excess—we truly
resolve them through the self (me).
Cha Dongha’s
surviving works faintly referred to and latched onto cultural forms from a
tradition that had nearly died away; now, a certain excess—a remainder that both is and is not “me”—is revealed through the parallax perspective of Cha Yeonså as
someone who enjoys working in various peripheral/radical genres. What connects
the past and present festivals is the use of brilliant colors, creating both
similarity and difference as the superficial aspects render unstable the
biological relationship between father and daughter. This is both a
non-binary/queer person’s form of mourning for their
father and a subcultural transformation of traditional/mainstream culture.
Cha
Yeonså’s re-appropriation and reuse of her father’s work becomes something either inevitable or moral. The
time-honored/timeworn forms of death are “refreshed” by an artist who is more urgent and vital. Cha Dongha’s work Festival 09 #3 (2009, 103x180cm), which “clearly used colors representing the rainbow,” appears in the contemporary artist Cha Yeonså’s second solo exhibition as a keepsake, clue, difference, and
hostage.
2. Photographic Bodies in a Forensic Medicine Text and “Paper Cut Collage” as Technique
The
starting point for Cha Yeonså’s work in which
she used scissors to cut up her father’s “rainbow-colored” paper and “materials as things in between objects and artwork” came when she read through a forensic medicine text left behind by
a girlfriend who has “studied emergency medicine and
had a lot of experience removing dead bodies from a period working for the 119
[emergency] service.” A great many sheets of paper had
been left behind in the studio. (How strenuous a process could it have been to
arrange the paper on the canvas that Cha Dongha found it so difficult to move
on the next stage after that long period of hesitation prior to beginning his
work?
In that sense it must have been a truly difficult execution!) There were
stacks of mulberry sheets in different colors, and Cha Yeonså debated what to
do with them—how to “consume” them. For her to shift the strict adult/male/artist to the
periphery—the one who had used his ruler and knife to
cut up the paper and create geometric structures—she
would need to begin/intervene from the opposite side. Because of her
astonishing/disjunctive skill with applying fabric scissors to paper for the
first time in her life, her trimming of the mulberry sheets took place in a
state where any intervention of the head/hand was nearly impossible.
As a
hostage/tool of the scissors, the younger Cha had an amateurish/random
technique and excitement that ran counter to the normalcy/inertia of a father
who had based his work on calculation and contemplation. The technique of “paper cut collage” was shared by both father
and daughter, but there was also a large difference in that the former used a
knife, while the latter cuts with scissors. The difference was quite large
indeed: the obangsaek colors outside the coffin, covering a “meaningless” body with symbols of community
and the afterlife, and the non-bodies that the community rejects: the
pornographic objects used by doctors to identify the “cause” and things that are meaninglessness itself, unbearable to the
untrained eye.
The father painted the veil; the daughter actually ventured
straight inside. Cha Yeonså writes that she “looked
inside the book because being alive was so terrible, and I wanted to see more
terrible things.” The natural outcome (price) came as
she began applying her scissor skills to mulberry paper for the first time in
2023. The state of being conscious with paralyzed limbs—of having the consciousness separated from the body—ate away at a young, frail body that had seen what should not be
seen. This was the price exacted—and, as she must have
realized later, the gift granted—for passing the
threshold and sharing the use of a studio that had also been a small room in
their home, along with objects whose names, reasons for being, and affiliations
had faded away.
What Cha Yeonså received was a dead woman who had been
assaulted and raped, with a comb thrust into her genitals; a fully matured,
stillborn child discarded in a trash bin; pieces of flesh with all
representational aspects stripped away; hands and feet without wrists or
ankles. What the self saw became something that confronted, swept over, and ate
away at the self. Off in the study, mother Sohn Nari turned a blind eye, as the
house was left clammy with ghosts, phantoms, resentments, and sorrows that coexisted
with all-too-clear scenes/memories of a father’s
absence.
This was the artistic style and survival tactic of a girl/body
withstanding the awful fact that life went on even after the terror and grief
of her father’s death—yet
unable to follow or rely upon the social rituals for withstanding that. Cha
Yeonså rejected compliance with the binaries of adult society, with its demands
to restore day-to-day life in the wake of tragedy. She heightened tragedy into
tragedy, into an ordeal and persecution of self-imposed suffering.
This may
explain why the solo exhibition 《This Unbelievable
Sleep》—which Cha was set to hold after being selected
for OCI Young Creatives in 2023—never came to pass, due
to a set of complex circumstances. When she created her collage works in 2023,
they drifted placelessly and more or less namelessly, as she adopted the same
system that her father had used to title his series with names such as Festival
23 #1.
3. “Their Names” and Post-Life
The
names of the works in the ‘Festival’ series began appearing over the course of
the group exhibition 《Motel》, the Art Sonje Center group exhibition 《Tongue
of Rain》, and this latest exhibition entitled 《Feed me stones》. The title Bouquet
was given to the first work from the series in 2023, which shows a cut-out
image of a stillborn, fully matured child. Dildo was
assigned as a title to work #3-1 from 2023, showing only the lower body of a
dead woman found with a comb inserted inside her. Mandarava
was given to work #10, showing the lower body of a dead woman with her legs
spread wide.
Cha Yeonså’s series ‘Festival’ (2023–2024) represents a collaboration between her racing scissors and her
own right hand, which acts as a kind of level controlling them; the stories
placed after that title represent the horrors, hardships, and persecutions that
the artist has brought center stage, but the relationships between the results
and the names that she has assigned as a creator invoke the presence of a
child. Through her cutting, aspects of violence as representation and the
tactile qualities of “damp flesh” are stripped away almost completely, leaving something dominated by
the sense of play and of “seeming like.”
The stillborn child’s body with the
placenta attached resembles a bouquet held by a child; indeed, that is the
English title that has been assigned to the work. Cha’s
perspective shifts toward flowers and things that begin to look like flowers—toward a certain beauty or brightness that overshadows the tragedy
and “non-bodyness.” In the case
of the murdered woman found with a comb inserted inside her, the object is
replaced outright with a dildo—an object used for
sexual gratification.
The dead woman with her legs spread is given the name Mandarava,
based on the redness of the color field created with mulberry paper. In
Sanskrit, this word refers to the flower of heaven or to the devil’s trumpet; in Hinduism, it refers to a guru/deity. As a metonym for
the color red, Mandarava loses its cultural associations and stability through
its coupling with different signifiers; it becomes at once lighter, more
connected, and more distant.
Lingering
in a coffinlike room; withstanding bodies with uncovered coffins and deaths of
unclear causes (the hassles of the adult/male world); listening to their
stories of grief and anger, and thereby ex-isting as a “not-me”—the underdeveloped child completes
all these acts like homework lessons. Looking once again, she confronts the
deaths and stories she has translated to paper. “When I
looked at the results,” Chai said, “the bodies all seemed to be performing a festival in funny-looking
shadows.” No longer objects from a forensic medicine
text, they have gained shadows and engage in festivities, and thus they need a
definite name.
The difference/uniqueness of Cha Yeonså appears through the
force of the shears within the disjunctive relationship with paper, having
established a proficiency for improvisation and elusiveness; through the “freshness” of forms that gain new lives
through “mulberry paper like patches of my father’s flesh”; and through a realm of persecution
where there exists no other reason besides love. If a child that has been
stillborn and abandoned is a bouquet, if the comb inserted in the genitals of a
murdered woman is a dildo, and if another dead woman with her legs spread is a
Mandarava, then tragedy can be said to harbor a humor, brightness, and power
that is not reducible to tragedy.
This may be described as the complexity,
hybridity, and lightness of the world, which we bear witness to through the
mediating presence of Cha Yeonså—an artist who is
neither a shaman, strictly speaking, nor fully a child. Having first received Mandarava,
a work intended as a text value or as an abundant gift, I observed it at home
and thought that this woman, so tattered that she appeared as thin and light as
a piece of paper, seemed to be masturbating. So what was responsible for making
this slain body appear to be pleasuring itself—the
artist Cha Yeonså, the scissors, or the situation?
Seeing the words of the
creator that appear before me, stating that this woman as a “flower with thick hair” is rubbing heartily
at her clitoris, I sense that this is true for all the weights of the world. As
a result, the image at once resembles religious art, erotica, sculpture, and a
deadpan joke. The house is “lifted” by the red joke/play/laughter. Laughter is a spasm of the remaining
body that has been fully through the tragedy, surviving while remaining
faithful to the tragedy script.
Laughter is the haze or dust that arises in the
absurd situation of confronting of the self-evidentness of what is given. If
beautiful things are fated to be found out as horrible, then the place where
horrible things are found to be humorous is the threshold to life. Cha Yeonså
has been through that hardship and persecution.
4. Low Pressure Sodium Lamps and Monochrome Painting
The
term “monochromatic light”
refers to devices such as low pressure sodium lamps that are applied to limited
uses in outdoor environments such as highways, tunnels, low-visibility roads,
refrigerators, and other settings where difficulties distinguishing colors make
the use of ordinary lighting unsuitable and where color rendering (a property
of light sources that make the colors of an object appear distinct, with index
values closer to 100 indicating lights that are most similar to natural or
solar light) is not an issue.
Room for One Colour, a 1998
monochrome light installation work by Olafur Eliasson (with a target color in
between yellow and orange), overwhelmed the colors of the viewers’ clothing and shoes, which might have appeared “natural” from outside. This experience with
an interior where only the yellow/orange spectrum remained was described by a
critic who wrote, “The central element is the
realization that the external reality is conditioned in large part by our
perceptions of it. Through our understanding that vision is not inherently
objective, we are able to see ourselves and the outside world through different
colors/perspectives.” Cha Yeonså has explained that she
became aware of Eliasson’s strategy while preparing for
this solo exhibition at SAPY.
Cha
has introduced monochrome light to the gallery to mitigate a situation that she
experienced when all the different emotions she experienced as she began her
own ‘Festival’ series in 2023—as a relay
continuation of and intervention in her father’s series
of the same name—disappeared in the next year, leaving
only the practical functions and technique. (A major part of this had to do
with her adoption of an exceedingly vulnerable dog named “Teto,” who could barely see or hear.) The
artist had undermined normative prestige with her misreading of the obangsaek
spectrum as a “rainbow,” and in
her exhibition venue, those colors vanished performatively, losing all of their
cultural force.
Cha also made use of Olafur Eliasson’s
monochrome light as a convenient means of “connecting
myself with the dead bodies/phantoms/them.” In a gray
room designed more for a performance than an exhibition, her “they” are exhibited sprawling over the
floor. Like coffins, like “small, tender things” that one might easily fold, the works lie on mirror film that is
modeled on reflective water, causing the ground to shimmer and reflect the
viewer. The images are so blurry and blackened that one has to approach very
closely to see what they have been cut out of, while the original color of the “material” is completely unknowable.
The
gallery installation creating something resembling an underwater environment is
based on a pond outside Cha Dongha’s studio in
Namyangju. Cha Yeonså has described the sense of feeling persecuted in her
father’s studio—shunned there
by the items collected by him during his lifetime, the lovingly cultivated
trees and the insects that had grown up there. (Hearing and seeing to excess
represents both a hardship and a gift of the younger Cha.) She also mentions
having reconciled with the trees during a three-day stay to record sounds in
her father’s garden with the exhibition’s sound designer and sound director Lee Solyoub. Explaining that Lee’s “spiritual clarity” was a source of great help, she has said that staying the night
there evoked a sense of beauty that was the polar opposite of the setting’s aggressiveness. (Perhaps a setting where one can commune with
ghosts, phantoms, trees, and the frogs in the pond is itself a queer, tender,
vulnerable, open, and loving environment.)
A
suryukjae performed by the Buddhist monk Donghwan—a “religious ritual of reciting the Buddha’s dharma and offering food to comfort and appease spirits and hungry
ghosts roaming the waters and land”—is followed by Lee
Solyoub’s mastering of the song “Ongdalsaem” and a monochrome video showing
Cha Dongha’s garden and pond. At this point, I grinned
broadly. Here was a long-forgotten children’s song, an
image of a deep valley pond providing a home to frogs—the
places associated with the dead father, now presented as non-human/living
things welcoming Cha Yeonså. The gallery was arranged/structured to resemble
the inside of a pond, and while the artworks (and their associated stories) may
be situated inside of that, so are we.
Through the monochrome light-based stage
installation, all the different presences invited into the exhibition “become gradually brighter through other means besides color—soaked, lifted, peeled.” Immersed in water
and summoned like spirits, we begin to “peel” like loosely pasted paper. “We” disappear, entering a pseudo-experience of something more akin to
the afterlife or a strange form of life. Donghwan conducts a ritual to bring an
end to Cha Yeonså’s “festival,” to her persecution, her odyssey. This somber ritual of deliverance
brings the artist to her next work, soothing her “them” and the non-human beings that exist under many other names.
It
operates as the work of scrubber-performers who cleanse grime that has been
swollen with water. At the same time, these are words that can only be spoken
by Cha as the one who has lived through all these experiences; the “unattended spirituals” and “festivals” are not mere recipients of the
artist’s beneficence and care. She knows all the things
that they have done for her. The same idea is expressed by Johanna Hedva as
someone who has lived with all manner of illnesses and ailments: the idea that
in caring for those who are suffering and weak, giving and receiving are one
and the same. In the same way, Cha Yeonså shares how she has “learned that nightmares and sleep paralysis demons can sometimes be
very welcome things.”
Nothing
in this world lives/appears with just one aspect or face. Things are the most
beautiful because they are the ugliest, the most adept at welcoming us because
they are the most aggressive, and the brightest because they represent the
deepest darkness. We await the next work received/assumed by the vulnerability
of Cha Yeonså(‘s body) as she alternates
between the two extremes.
Postscript:
I decided that I would/could not comment this time on the scattered works of
poetry found throughout the gallery by Kim Eonhee, someone whom Cha Yeonså
often quotes. I felt I should not address the world of adult/female/monsters
because it was not so much a pond as a mire. For this text, I would be joining
Cha in experiencing only the world of the girl and “kappa” (cited by the artist as the character
she most resembles).
