Despite its guileless simplicity, which
features in many early works by artists, Sleep Walker is
nevertheless an essential point of reference to understand the arc of Cha’s
practice. From Sleep Walker, which explored the intimate,
personal after-effects of urban development schemes through observations into
her immediate surroundings, the artist’s oeuvre has expanded into the various
facets of capitalist infrastructures that infiltrate the embodied experience of
everyday life in physical, psychological, and emotional terms.
The progression
seems natural, all the more because the economic forces that prompted her
project more than a decade ago have shown little sign of waning but have only
accelerated: although the logic of deregulation that defined neoliberalism was
momentarily overshadowed following the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and the
COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the world infused capital to rescue
crashing markets, the extreme, uneven distribution of wealth brought forth by
decades of such policies only exacerbated, as prices of real estate and basic
household items soared in many countries.
In light of such developments,
Sleep Walker does not appear as unfledged as it feels
prescient—the work is an early articulation of an artistic position that Cha
would continue to refine throughout her videos, drawings, and installations for
years to come, based on her observations of the socioeconomic infrastructures
that shape her daily life. But if Sleep Walker explored the
workings of a capitalist society through a spatiotemporally specific event that
is the construction of a shopping complex as an endeavor to renew the
Cheonggyecheon area, the works that followed have coalesced around certain
conceptual associations that stem from the lived realities of inhabiting a late
capitalist society.
What I aim to do in this essay is to untangle these threads
that have emerged in Cha’s practice thus far to understand how her works have
sought to engage with the capitalist infrastructures at play in the everyday
reality of contemporary South Korea. I argue that these thematic foci serve as
conceptual apparatuses through which Cha weaves her own diagnosis of neoliberal
societies, effectively rendering her works relevant beyond the specific context
of Seoul out of which they were born.
Indeed, as Cha’s is a practice that is
still in the works, these nodes should not serve as the definitive, exhaustive
list of ideas through which her projects should be understood. But as key
thematic concerns that helped lay the groundwork for her artistic position
shaped in the past dozen or so years, these ideas elucidate the ways in which
Cha carved out her own artistic language from the genealogy of predecessors
whose practices have also evolved from a certain critique of late capitalism.
Diseases, With or Without
Names
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
fraught relationship between disease and late capitalism does not seem so
far-fetched as it once might have appeared. Although its exact origins are
still to be determined, the fundamental biological trigger behind the COVID-19
pandemic—the transmutation of a type of coronavirus endemic to bats into a
variant that is infectious to humans—is theorized as the result of
deforestation undertaken by multinational conglomerates as well as illegal,
unsustainable wildlife trade still prevalent in China, both of which are fueled
by the logic of deregulated, globalized market economy.
Once the pandemic
unfurled, the already stark distinction between the haves and the have-nots
became even more evident, as the rich and the powerful flocked to sparsely
populated mansions to avoid human contact while the impoverished were forced to
continue working in dangerous conditions that left them vulnerable to
contracting the disease. The most effective vaccines, meanwhile, were developed
none other than by leading American enterprises that quickly patented the
products and used them as a means to assert the nation’s hegemony across the
globe by controlling its distribution.
That said, even though such striking
revelations are fresh in the collective consciousness due to the recent global
pandemic, the layers of relations between disease and late capitalism are not
in the least unprecedented. The American response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in
the 1980s presaged much of what happened during the more recent pandemic. The
privatized nature of the nation’s healthcare system meant that little could be
accomplished through state measures upon the neglect from the Reagan
administration, and the antiretroviral drugs later developed by pharmaceutical companies
were prohibitively expensive for many.
As a disease that primarily plagued the
so-called “outliers” of mainstream America—LGBT community, drug users, and
Latinx and Black communities—the epidemic was also, at least theoretically,
less of a concern for most bodies that were in the capitalist workforce. Such
fraught structural relations between disease and late capitalism recalls a
different, but related formulation by Byung-chul Han in The Burnout
Society that such psychological symptoms as burnout, attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and borderline personality disorder
originate from the logic built into the economic superstructure that we inhabit
now.
As Han writes, the diseases, which mark “the landscape of pathology at the
beginning of the twenty-first century,” are not “infections” but “infarctions”
that “do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but
an excess of positivity.” From the compulsive need to stay productive at all
times, Han claims, stems the mantra of positivity that is so characteristic of
the present moment as it pushes individuals to remind themselves that “nothing
is impossible”: as a psychological state, however, the violence of positivity
does neither “deprive” nor “exclude,” but only “saturates” and “exhausts.”
In this light, Cha’s Nameless
Syndrome (2022) does not read so much as a take on a mysterious
pathological phenomenon that started infiltrating her immediate circles as an
implicit critique of the society that produced it. The single-channel video, as
the title suggests, concentrates on women who are experiencing medically
inexplicable symptoms. Such thematic focus is succinctly announced from the
very beginning of the video by a female narrator, albeit with a sense of
hesitation and melancholy produced from the elongation of her syllables and
slow, sustained tone: “O’s symptoms were difficult to be diagnosed, a very rare
disease.”
Following from the opening statement is an associatively rich prose
that weaves together such varying sources as the narrator’s personal
experiences with O and her doctor; the tripartite relationship between Giovanni
Morelli, Sigmund Freud, and Cornan Doyle via Carlo Ginzburg; the intentional
elimination of the “self” in discourses on illnesses as discussed by Susan Sontag;
the pathology of fibromyalgia; and the colonial appropriation of Bengalese
knowledge as revealed through the notion of the fingerprint.
Paired with the
narratives are footage of female patients in different circumstances, as one’s
naked body becomes the subject of digital imaging and another limp figure
undergoes physical treatment in the arms of a therapist, suspended in a shallow
pool. What the juxtaposition of Cha’s texts and images reveals, then, is the
sense of dissociation produced by the foreign disease, as the listless
expressions emanating from the patients’ bodies are associated with the
incomprehensible symptoms that defamiliarize their own somatic experiences.
As
a formal motif, such a disconnect from their own bodies is materialized through
the various technological apparatuses that flatten the physical complexities of
the patients into such depersonalized artifacts as an ultrasound image of a
breast and a plastic cast of an ear canal. But the layers of association that
Cha builds through the concept of corporeal dissociation assume broader
significance against the backdrop of social critique that the artist builds
within her practice.
Construed in relation to the inextricable relationship
between disease and late capitalism as formulated above, the patients’
dissociation with their own bodies in Nameless Syndrome
recalls Karl Marx’s theory of alienation: the worker is alienated from the
product and activity of one’s own labor in the incessant assembly line of
capitalism, effectively objectified into a value-producing entity that is
detached from oneself and others.
And if alienation necessarily dictates the
experience of the subject within a capitalist society in varying disguises as
such, Nameless Syndrome implies that the unnamable plague
that assumed control over the bodies of patients may be just one of many
instantiations of the phenomenon. The video thus brings into relief many
potential forms of alienation to which the capitalist subject is vulnerable in
the everyday: the nameless syndromes in other shapes borne out of late
capitalism that afflict our minds and bodies, with or without our knowledge and
awareness.
Such an interpretation of
Nameless Syndrome holds traction since it merges the
artist’s recurring attention to the manifold layers of alienation as well as
her broader set of interests surrounding the infrastructures of late capitalism.
In particular, the reading offers a convincing segue into Cha’s practice when
considering other works by her that similarly engage with the notion of
alienation, such as Crushed or Unfolded (2020–2022).
The
series, which exist both as wall drawings and works on paper, consists of
manual reproductions of the results of the “Clock Drawing Test” unofficially
used to detect cognitive impairments and dementia. As patients who are
developing such conditions are believed to have difficulty drawing a perfect,
circular clock, the results that comprise Cha’s series hardly resemble the
object attempted to be depicted. Consisting almost entirely of crooked, warped
marks that betray hesitation, the drawings offer little clues about the
signified object to the viewer save for struggling endeavors at a clockwise
arrangement of numbers.
One iteration shows that even such a simple task of
positioning numbers in order seems difficult, as the patient’s attempt to write
number 5 turns into an incomprehensible scribble after the first four
successes. The drawings, then, are a visual demonstration of varying states of
the human mind in which its most fundamental faculties such as rationality,
memory, and volition are on the verge of dysfunction, which effectively
question the patients’ claim to subjecthood.
And though the cognitive states
that produce such distorted drawings may not directly align with the phenomenon
of alienation as Marx advanced it, they could be construed as fundamentally
synonymous as conditions that strip humans of their most essential qualities.
That the drawings depict clocks, an apparatus to measure and visualize time,
also adds logical weight to the reading of Crushed or
Unfolded as an investigation into the various forms of alienation
produced by late capitalism. After all, the emergence of capitalism enabled a
certain compartmentalization of time, as the opening hours of factories for
mass production were determined by such calculations as profit, efficiency, and
operational costs.
As failed attempts to render functional clocks, the drawings
seem to hint at the idea that such profit-maximizing division of time may not
be applicable to patients with cognitive losses—for some, just like their
drawings, the patients are failures of capitalist subjects as they cannot
generate profit. Such an interpretation is one that eerily resonates with one
of the many poignant utterances made by the narrator of Nameless
Syndrome: “My illness brings about slowdown and strike, and even
causes unemployment and poverty.”
