The clock on the wall displays misaligned hands, with both the hour mark and “40” (indicating minutes) positioned next to the number 3. The numbers do not maintain an even distance within the circle and appear to move away from their proper places. The viewer reads the time depicted in broken lines. The broken clock raises questions about the uninterrupted flow of the hour and minute hands, inviting its reader to follow a deviated temporal path.

Jeamin Cha’s Crushed or Unfolded series emerged from her research into her mother’s difficult-to-diagnose symptoms. The works were translated by hand multiple times. While attempting to understand a clock drawn by her mother as part of an assessment at a nursing home, the artist came across other similar cases online.1 She then took the clocks, symptoms of disorder, as motifs and drew them in ink on white paper before transferring them to a mural. The misaligned clock becomes an object of imitation, transformed into a different material than the original on the test sheet.

As with the anonymous test results in Crushed or Unfolded, Cha has consistently placed the traces of others at the center of her body of work. Rather than prioritizing themes and images over her subjects, she focuses on the plurality of relationships surrounding subjects and events. She determines the order, placement, and combination of images through numerous conversations, investigations, observations, and testimonies that provide the soil for her work long before the filming begins.

Here, research is not just a pre-production step or a source of material, but rather a process of engagement with others. Using research as a tool, she listens to and reads the voices of others from varying distances with a sense of collaboration. As a result, research in her work takes on a collaborative status and becomes a topographical map that guides the ecosystems she attempts to explore.

This mode of collecting and structuring a multitude of voices and stories suggests that for Cha, research is not limited to a preliminary stage of the work, contrary to the conventional description of artistic research within existing discourses. For Cha, research is rehearsal.
 
Despite its popularity, especially in European institutions since the 2000s, artistic research has often been associated with glass boxes containing visual materials, scanned documents, and excerpts, or book archives at the end of an exhibition. These materials have been invoked as backstory and background information to the work, for the additional enjoyment of a few active viewers.

This misconception relegates research to a secondary role in the final product rather emphasizing its status as practice, and perpetuates a distinction between the roles of artists and producers of alternative knowledge.
 
To the artist, research is however not just an annotation for understanding; it is also a form of composition and a tool for collaboration. Research is an investigative process, a state of vigilance, a process of contact and encounter. It reveals the myriad points of interaction that include the forms, subjects, and objects of learning.

It is a journey that begins before the production of the work and continues after the exhibition has been dismantled. Unlike the tendency to reduce an artist’s research to a component of the work or to dichotomize the two, this essay seeks to examine how Cha chooses collaboration as a mode of research and how the form and structure of collaboration take on an artistic language.

Cha’s artistic language integrates aesthetic and ethical values without making them mutually exclusive. This will be examined through two axes: temporality and materiality. In terms of temporality, we will analyze how she engages in a slow mode of paying attention. Meanwhile, in terms of materiality, we will analyze how she employs evidence in a manner that avoids oversimplifying complex associations.
 

Slowly Elongating Time
 
Slow watches are often easily discarded. Societies that restrict autonomy over one’s pace control time by relegating those outside the mainstream pace to the periphery rather than waiting for them. Cha is mindful of temporality during the research and collaboration process of her work.

Just as talking a slow walk can lead to an impromptu conversation with a stranger in the landscape, she uses coincidence in her work as a knot by connecting it to other elements and progressing forward. It is about respecting the time slowed down by engaging with others.

For example, she integrates ethical values into aesthetic values while inquiring how to formalize testimonies and confessions. By doing so, she delegates structure to contingency rather assuming sole authorship. This contingency forms an “autonomous structure” that functions as a “magnetic force,” building ethics through collaboration.
 
The main temporality in Almost One (2018) consists of a rehearsal of a rehearsal. The work captures a longer period of time than the children spend performing in front of the camera. From the children’s entry into the empty space to their pre-rehearsal conversations until the mismatch between what they are supposed to feel and their facial expressions, time exists between practice and performance and cannot be condensed into a specific narrative.

The awkward stares at the camera draw attention to moments other than the look of a child actor smoothly delivering lines in a series or movie. A moment of brief incongruity between direction and performance, accompanied by silence. The instructor attempts to guide the children through repetition, providing examples to help them express their sad feelings, but instead of dialogue, there is silence.

This subtle moment of the children’s refusal to act also rests on the production process. After learning about child actors who instinctively reject instructions from their acting instructor that they cannot understand, the artist organized a workshop-slash rehearsal that is separate from the final shoot.

The rehearsal allowed the artist and the film crew a chance to observe the teaching process and the children. Cha requested that the class be conducted as closely as possible to the original class during this shoot, without a script. Rather than rehearsing to perfect a particular scene, repeated runs were held to help comprehend contingencies, which set the stage for gestures of refusal to emerge.

This structure, derived from the conversations between the instructor and the children, becomes the basis for the cohesion of the key moments of refusal in the work, evoking an unscripted time.
 
The slowing down through observation and the subsequent noticing of things that are not immediately apparent can also be found in Cha’s other works. Sound Garden (2019) presents the sound of interviews with Korean female mental health counselors and images of cultivated trees being transported to be planted as urban street trees.

Here, the interviews collide with the images, which are derived from another time, rather than capturing the experiences of Korean female mental health counselors. As witnesses and testifiers, the counselors share their experiences including the structure of the counseling center, relationships within the organization, and their own roles and values.

Meanwhile, a voiceover narration cuts across the image of a cultivated tree migrating to another land. The time of the days and nights in which the tree is transported overlaps with the time in which a counselor recalls past counseling sessions. The overlap complicates the time-map of the counselor and the tree, while also reestablishing their respective locations.

Chroma-key and Labyrinth (2013) is another video work that relates to interviews. On Strike on Ground (2013), a handbook of interviews with members of Cable Worker Union, and Chroma-key and Labyrinth are examples of a reciprocal relationship that expands upon each other.

In August 2013, the artist met with fifteen members of the five hundred subcontracted cable workers who went on strike against labor exploitation, documenting the impact of C&M Internet’s employment structure on the installers’ personal lives, which led to the publication of On Strike on Ground. Chroma-key and Labyrinth, in contrast, does not directly convey the content of the interviews, but instead highlights the repetitive manual labor of cutting and connecting cables, often invisible to the recipients of the services. Sometimes the camera goes as high as the top of the utility pole and other times it follows the worker as he untangles the cable in the urban labyrinth; combined with the green screen, it draws attention to the ephemeral sense of labor.
 
Instead of focusing on the workers’ personal tragedies or faces, Chroma-key and Labyrinth turns its attention to the elements of their labor: utility poles, city alleys, phone calls on the job, broken television screens, and so on. The work pays attention to the everyday movements of their hands and the objects they touch. By doing so, the viewer can see that labor is not just about the individual worker, but rather exists within a larger web of interactions.

This observation is shared by a unique language of art whose tempo may be different from that of political slogans, a difference that the artist approaches with awareness. The role of art and its potential to change society, in Cha’s words, is akin to “a very slow and faint gesture made in the dark.” But it is precisely this slow process that brings together the possibility of changing the world around us.
 
Isabelle Stengers, a researcher at the intersection of philosophy of science and feminism, views slowness as a sign of resistance: paying attention means intentionally slowing down. The pace of slowness helps us to question what we should pay attention to and what the dangers are, and opens up interstices even in the midst of an urgency. What we need is “not the capacity to pay attention, but the art of paying attention.” Walking along those who walk at their own pace, Cha invites the viewer to join them.

 
Evidence Found by Chance
 
Slowness can also invite randomly encountered material as a protagonist. By incorporating materials found while slowing time down, Cha rejects simple causal narratives and complicates events. The artist’s research differs from fact-finding in that she pays attention to the material and makes it an important collaborator.

Rather than seeking direct experience and first-hand testimony from individuals like traditional documentaries, Cha gives space to the evidence, revealing broader interrelationships among microscopic things. These materials serve as clues and symptoms, summoning the various debris scattered around the periphery of the testimony.

This attitude witnesses history and politics through specific materials, pulling tangled threads to the surface to reveal the whole web. It deconstructs the absolute authority of the essential by expanding its base.
 
In Hysterics (2014), Cha incorporates blacklight, a forensic technique that relies on bloodstains, as a material that illuminates the process of becoming hysterical. The body lying on the floor at the beginning of the work invites the viewer to ponder why it is pale and on the ground, and to follow the camera’s gaze as it moves on the track.

This creates a series of questions about the causality of the tragedy, but the material revealed only by the irregular flickering of certain lights does not provide the desired answers. When the lights go out, the traces disappear, leaving blank sheets of paper.

Heinreich Heine’s superimposed poem takes this further, allowing the “questions that circle and pierce…disappear into white.” Only the material that makes visible the afterimage of the event remains; questions are amplified rather than resolved.
 
While Hysterics shines a (black) light on the grounds of sightings and disappearances, Ellie’s Eyes (2020) investigates technologies of seeing, such as x-rays, through-wall movement sensing, and AI-assisted psychotherapy. Behind the development of these technologies is a desire to make the invisible visible and a fetishization of the image.

Cha examines the act of seeing in her essay which disrupts the intended use and purpose of the images produced by technology. An x-ray image is superimposed over a text about medical examinations; an image of a motion tracking signal, over a text about research into through-wall movement sensing at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; as well as an image of Ellie, the avatar of a program developed for psychotherapy, facing the viewer. The evidence produced for seeing becomes unfamiliar, beliefs about the ethics of seeing are disrupted.
 
Cha continues her investigation of technologically generated body images in Nameless Syndrome (2022) which is based on the stories of women with unidentified illnesses. Eschewing the modernized forensics that diagnose and define bodies and pathologies, the work instead uses forensics to reveal the periphery, exposing the gaping hole between the diagnosis and the subject’s experience.

As if conducting a forensic analysis, Cha explores the mystery between the event and the object through materials that drift away from or are derived from the event. For example, in “Trio: Morelli, Freud and Conan Doyle,” the second chapter in Nameless Syndrome, the artist cites historian Carlo Ginzburg’s Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.

Cha interweaves the results of medical imaging of breasts photographed with x-rays with the similarities of 19th-century art historian Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes author Conan Doyle, and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. They all had medical backgrounds and were concerned with reading the whole picture, clues, and symptoms from what were considered to be peripheral and minute details.
 
In Nameless Syndrome, Cha uses quotations and mammograms not to identify diseases, but to capture symptoms of how the medical system reads the body. Medical imaging, with its detailed examination of the inside and outside of the body, is an attempt to give name to a nameless phenomenon.

In the process of interpreting an unidentifiable disease through various techniques and devices, a gap is created between the image and the subject. This gap becomes a space of investigation to which Cha invites several authors to contribute with extensive research on the disease. The sentences extracted from this research are not secondary footnotes but serve as the “spine” of the work, determining the length of the gap between image and narration.

As the interviewees read these sentences in their own voices, their position shifts from someone listening to the doctor to someone telling the story. As the speaker’s position is pluralized through reading and listening, the viewer becomes a witness rather than an onlooker.
 
The onlooker keeps their distance and does not intervene in the events; on the other hand, the witness can pluralize the political, medical, and cultural coordinates through the discussion of how to track, understand, and use the given evidence. The artist shows awareness about the difference between these two attitudes in her use of the time-mediated nature of video language.

In her earlier works, Autodidact (2014) and It Is Not a Question but a Balloon (2010), Cha transitions the viewer from an onlooker to a witness through archival research, using the words of individuals involved in political incidents. Autodidact shows the forensic material collected by Mr. Hur Youngchun in addition to his handwritten notes in an attempt to shed light on the mysterious death of Private Wongeun Hur while in service, and narrates the case evidence to the viewer.

In It Is Not a Question but a Balloon, the artist transmits the narration of Sukyung Lim, who illegally visited North Korea in 1989, via flying balloons and radios. Multiple time zones are hybridized by the transmissions, to which no response is expected, and the floating of the balloons.
 
What can we do when we discover the history of the event long after it has occurred? How does it affect us? Rather than seeking solutions and remedies, Cha pulls up an opaque anchor that exists between the fragments and the present, allowing the previously anchored story to wander within our current ecosystem.
 

The Right to Opacity
 
Let us go back to the clock with its blurred outlines and unclear time. Cha has produced several series of drawings called studies alongside her video works. These series of drawings are artworks within the artistic process and distinct from storyboards.

The shapes and colors depicted in the gouache on paper drawings, such as the Sound Garden Drawings (2017), the Study for a Bed Seen from Outside (2017) series, which were exhibited alongside On Guard (2018), the studies for Chroma-key and Labyrinth, and the Drawings for the Video Work Hysterics (2014), are not exactly reproduced in or transferred to their respective counterparts.

Rather, they serve as gaps that extend the aesthetic realm of the debris and traces of conversations that emerge during the research process. The layering of process upon process and the resulting increase in opacity of the theme under investigation mirrors Cha’s collaborative approach, which centers the peripheral at a slow pace.

Édouard Glissant argues for the right to opacity, maintaining that attempting to explain the unexplainable is far from solidarity. Requesting complete transparency is a pressure that reduces existence and defines it within the grids of the system.

Respecting opacity is an act of honoring political complexity.12 The things we discover when we slow down our pace prevent us from reverting to simple conclusions. Just as one must stand still to perceive the parts of a spider’s web that are connected to the outside world, a slower pace lifts the veil of illusion about explicit truths and brings the voiceless into the proximity of our senses.

Noticing and welcoming the things around her at different speeds depending on the work, Cha refuses to erase the Crushed or Unfolded clocks; her work asks us to coexist with opacity. Her collaborative approach is a constant rehearsal for this coexistence. There is no single absolute time, and therefore, no ethics or aesthetics can exist independently of everything.
 
Through Cha’s act of making someone’s time indelible by inscribing broken lines on a bumpy, hard wall, a crushed clock becomes a clock to be read rather than a wrong one, while the lines on the wall become our horizon.

References

• [비평] 느리게 관심을 기울이기—차재민의 리서치와 협업 방법론
  [Critique] Slowly Paying Attention: Jeamin Cha's Research and Collaboration Methodology