The work of visual artists is generally presented to the public through exhibitions. The notion that an artwork constitutes an autonomous whole, independent of the external world, and an irreversible state of completion was invalidated long ago.

Today, as the elements comprising a work are installed variably according to the conditions of the exhibition environment, the exhibition has become part of the work itself and, as an artistic act, has come to resemble the performing arts. An exhibition is realized for a specific period in a specific place, almost as though the works were performing.

Unless viewers visit the exhibition venue during its designated period, they permanently miss the particular aspect of the artist’s work that can appear only within that time and space. Even when a work bearing the same title is later installed in another exhibition venue, changes in space and arrangement will alter both the aspect it presents and the effects it produces.

In contemporary exhibitions, where installation and action predominate, what viewers gain is an experience of such mutable space and a sense of singular temporality.

Youngle Keem’s work has primarily taken form in printed matter and moving-image works that combine text and images. Some of these publications have been issued by Sail and Anchor, the publishing house operated by the artist herself. A substantial number of Keem’s works are available in book form through bookstores.

From the viewer’s perspective, this means that her work can be encountered without submitting to the temporal and spatial constraints of an exhibition. Rather than experiencing a work in a mutable format at a single exhibition venue during a fixed period, viewers engage with works in a stable and uniform format within their own living spaces. Free from the hurried regret imposed by fleeting temporality, they may look and read repeatedly for as long as they wish.

To devote as much attention to publishing as to exhibitions; to devise and produce a durable yet portable final form that exceeds variability; and to circulate the work as the mechanically reproducible medium of the book: through these practices, Keem’s work goes beyond simply writing texts or producing images such as photographs and drawings.

By diversifying the means through which viewers can materially access the work, it advances toward remaking the very environment in which art is produced and received. Art moves beyond the exhibition space and enters the most concrete dimensions of our everyday lives. Resting on a bookshelf, it can be taken out and revisited at any time, prompting us to imagine anew the categories of artistic works and activities.

Art that is not mediated by the exhibition, and that increases the possibilities of access and repeated viewing, inspires an unexpected sense of liberation in the viewer—and perhaps does the same for the artist.


Youngle Keem, Captive Stones, 2019, Book, 136 pages, 13 x 19 cm © Youngle Keem

Youngle Keem’s writing and moving-image works can be broadly divided into two categories in terms of their subject matter and creative principles. One consists of selecting a particular object or phenomenon as a subject and amplifying the stories concentrated around it through writing, as in A Wall, Captive Stones, and the recently initiated Black.

The other likewise begins with a particular subject, but uses it to summon and present individuals and events that have been insufficiently illuminated, erased, or forgotten in modern and contemporary Korean history, as in Blue Land and Searching for Seahorse. As seen in The Chronicle of Monami 153 and several essays in Captive Stones, these two tendencies do not remain clearly separated, but may also merge flexibly.

For example, in the video Blue Land, the artist retraces the history of a distinctive building that was first constructed in Hoehyeon-dong as the Belgian Consulate in the early twentieth century, later used by the Commercial Bank of Korea, and then dismantled and relocated to Namhyeon-dong in the 1980s, where it was transformed into the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art.

Layered onto the history of the building are the diplomatic relations between the Korean Empire and Belgium, South Korea’s economic growth and repression of workers from the 1960s onward, and the demolition of the Sadang shantytown during redevelopment projects in the 1980s.

At this point, the blue Smurfs, one of Belgium’s best-known cultural products, intrude into the video and transform into the construction workers who built the Western-style architecture imported into Korea; factory workers in white headscarves and caps, mobilized and repressed in the drive for modernization and export targets after liberation; helmeted plainclothes riot police beating citizens who had taken to the streets in opposition to military dictatorship; and cap-wearing demolition crews and residents of the shantytown.

Countless citizens at their places of work, members of the public who left behind no individual accounts of the lives and deaths they experienced, and other participants in history repeatedly infiltrate, vanish from, and reappear within the video and its narrative.

The narrative, which gathers, arranges, and extends real objects, actual events, and fragments of fact according to the artist’s imagination, produces an effect of verisimilitude while inducing a dizzying confusion in viewers, who can no longer distinguish where fact ends and fiction begins. With subtlety and abundant humor, and without creating any sense of incongruity, the artist connects two contradictory categories: what may be factual appears almost false, while what must have been fabricated appears almost true.

As we encounter Youngle Keem’s work, we are reminded once again that human interpretation has always already been inscribed even into natural objects and phenomena such as stones and colors. We also become deeply implicated in the political contexts through which artificial objects such as ballpoint pens and buildings are produced as the results of labor, consumed, disseminated, and misused within particular historical circumstances.

Furthermore, we come to recognize that these are neither neutral natural objects nor mere commodities and consumer goods, but materials for an equally political artistic practice.

References