Stage and background, ceiling and floor, wall and pillar, folds and shells, skin and scales and fur. One wonders with which words Lim Jeong Soo’s work can be woven together. Lim Jeong Soo does not imagine beyond what can be seen, heard, or touched. If sensation does not occur, nothing can secure meaning. If we twist this sentence slightly, we arrive at the conclusion that even if something does not exist, if its surface can be sensed, it secures meaning.
Therefore, for Lim Jeong Soo, the surface is the first place where the subject and the world meet, and a temporary stage that enables the emergence of the signified. “ZASTAVKA” and “STANICE,” which are also the title of the exhibition, are such stages and at the same time surfaces.
Lim Jeong Soo has been continuing installation works that explore surfaces and their textures. Gift wrapping paper, industrial paper, and fabrics of various colors and patterns are attached to walls, hung on lines, spread on the floor, or embrace each other to form new objects. These objects generally conflict with the viewer’s metaphysical desire to imagine beyond or inside things. Even if such dimensions exist, they are based only on states compressed or preserved on the surface.
Lim Jeong Soo replaces this absence with an interest in texture. This interest continues even in her recent works, which have more fluid forms compared to earlier ones. The use of performance and video media also supports the proposition that existence resides not beyond matter or within conceptual interiors, but on the surface. The body participating in movement is treated as one object among others, and the movements of performers, who appear devoid of personality, acquire meaning only at a phenomenological level based on the thin signifier of the body and its movement.
As if demonstrating this shift, in the exhibition 《Station and Station》, along with objects arranged across roughly a dozen stages, direct bodily images appear. (These images are printed and exhibited. In fact, there is no medium like photography that so effectively isolates the perceivable aspects of a subject and presents its surface.) The irregular forms extended from the body and objects composed of various textures and patterns are referred to by Lim Jeong Soo as “shell objects.” When an object resembling the body is placed on a temporary stage, only then does existence begin. The temporary metaphysics of beings perceived only through sensation. The curtain of the stage rises. What will we encounter?
Text: Nahyun Kim
