Juree Kim’s houses, made entirely of earth and gradually eroded from below by the force of gravity as water is added, present in compressed form the process of things wearing away over time. As the most common feature of the urban environment in which the majority of people today live, the house often serves as a measure of environmental change.

Kim’s initial concern, however, was the internal question of the body. Yet if the house may also be understood as an extension of the body, it was inevitable that one point of departure for this work would be the body in the process of collapse. The body, too, returns to earth and dust. Its transformation, however, does not occur as rapidly as changes in our surrounding environment.

The body and the house as its externalization both initially deteriorate through natural forces, yet the renewal cycle of housing, which has become even shorter than that of the body, introduces a social question: why are houses being demolished and rebuilt at such a frantic pace? Before there is even time to recognize or formulate an intention, the ontological question abruptly expands into one of the macro- and micro-powers that govern everyday life.

At a time when sociological interest in urban transformation is increasingly reflected in works of art, the intensity and density found in Kim’s work derive from its origins in an ontological concern. Her work confirms that only a critical consciousness internalized and embodied by the artist, rather than an external approach, can sustain and strengthen the breadth and depth of an artwork.

This does not mean that the artist neglects basic research or the process of representation. Kim’s work is far removed from light satire or cynical gestures that strike quickly and withdraw, and it also differs from the critical approaches found in intellectual idealism or ideology concerning social reality. Nor does it remain at the level of simple fellow feeling or compassion for realities distant from the self.

Its attitude is not one of liking or disliking, right or wrong, but simply of acknowledging that things are so. The artist responds to a harsh reality with even greater cruelty. The process of perfectly reproducing even the tiled patterns on the exterior walls of an old house and then slowly destroying it is no less violent than the violence found in social reality.

To tell the truth, the life of making art is itself cruel. Had the houses not been created in such perfect form, their collapse would not have produced such a powerful impression. Meaning arises from that gap. The event that occurred in 2009, when this body of work began, was the sight of houses in a redevelopment district near the artist’s studio being brutally torn apart one day.

In the half-demolished remains of red-brick houses that had until recently been inhabited, household belongings spilled out like internal organs. A house destroyed without allowing its residents time to gather themselves calls to mind lives destroyed along with it. The house is, after all, a kind of microcosm that shelters human beings.

Nothing is eternal, yet a house that suddenly collapses evokes the cold war continually unfolding within everyday life, as suggested by the title of an exhibition held four years earlier, 《Silent Invasion》. The sight of houses destroyed as though suddenly bombed led the artist to focus on the process of their collapse, while reduced-scale houses made of earth allowed that process of transformation to be viewed at a glance in compressed form.

At first, it was simply the neighboring district, but once the artist widened her view, she realized that such events were an omnipresent reality in the republic of (re)development. Houses produced according to policy decisions or economic cycles rapidly encroach upon space and disappear just as quickly, often before reaching the end of their expected lifespan.

Yet because development proceeds at different speeds, some areas remain suspended in a state of delay, forming transitional landscapes that will soon disappear—or are expected to disappear. In her earlier 'Hwigyeong_Evanescent Landscape' series, the artist perceived an “evanescent landscape” in Hwigyeong-dong, an area slated for redevelopment.

Inspired by redevelopment sites scattered across various locations, including the neighborhood where her studio is located, the present exhibition 《Scape Collection》, whose title serves as its subtitle, focuses on Hannam-dong, where the exhibition venue is situated.

Located between Namsan Mountain and the Han River and commanding impressive views, Hannam-dong is a neighborhood where disparities of wealth are clearly reflected in its residential landscape. Opposite the affluent area of spaciously arranged “white houses on the hill” stand tightly packed, low-rise red-brick houses built during the 1970s and 1980s after replacing the earlier low buildings with slate roofs.

These areas, likely destined for redevelopment into luxury villas or apartment complexes suited to their expansive views, have survived through minor repairs rather than major construction because of the expectation that they will someday be completely razed. As a result, their original structures and forms have gradually been altered, and unusual inventions born of everyday life frequently appear throughout the neighborhood, attracting the artist’s attention.

On the hillside are stepped houses with four stories on one side and a single story on the other, houses attached in a “separate yet together” arrangement without exterior walls between them, spontaneously formed dwellings adapted to the terrain and shape of the land, and maze-like, steep alleys extending like capillaries between densely packed homes.

Juree Kim’s works contain traces of the gradual transformations undergone by the similarly styled brick houses that must once have spread across the neighborhood’s hillsides. Planned artificial structures undergo a process of naturalization, and the works replay this process in compressed form. The heterogeneous elements that have gradually transformed otherwise homogeneous structures are emphasized not as pathological signs to be concealed, but as traces of formation that should be revealed.

Old and cramped houses are captured through spatial changes accumulated over time, including structures that have been added, layered, and proliferated. The houses continue endlessly along the steep contours of life, while the densely filled space, without the slightest gap, becomes a continuum of disjunctions.

These are rhizomatic forms spreading with the vitality of weeds. In the landscape photographs collected by the artist for the work, tangled electrical wires can be seen running between the densely clustered houses, appearing like offshoots in the foreground. Although the structure of the rhizome can cause one to lose direction as in a maze, the labyrinthine structure it creates may also function as a defensive barrier that suspends the violence produced by the shortest routes of purposeless efficiency.

The process of collapse becomes especially dramatic through models reduced to a fraction of their original scale. This temporal process has also been expressed through photography and drawing. In a photographic work taken after a house was constructed, coated in white, and then destroyed, the skin-like surface cracked by water contrasts with the flesh-like interior, heightening the work’s visceral intensity.

In the drawings hung on the wall, there are structures connected solely by railings. Different structures are rhizomatically linked while shifting points of view. To some, this accidental network may appear as a disorder that ought to be organized, but to others it may emerge as a heterotopian landscape, contrasted with a new order that offers utopia only to a select few.

Heterotopia refers to “rare spaces that appear within a given social space, whose function is different from others or even the exact opposite” (Foucault). It possesses “spatial imagery liberated from the root of social determination” (David Harvey). These structures, not planned as a totality but added over long periods of time, may appear somewhat unprincipled, yet each of them is necessary.

There are always reasons why they must be there. In this naturalized landscape, as in nature itself, there are no superfluous remainders. The working process is as meticulous as building a house. Some pieces are produced only after even a three-dimensional drawing has been made on the computer. The houses, destined soon to disintegrate, are constructed with near-photographic accuracy out of slabs of white clay.

The final stage of the work is the process of pouring water over it on the opening day of the exhibition, or the day before, so that it slowly erodes from below. The degree of destruction varies according to the speed at which water and clay react. If a large amount of water is poured, the work can collapse within two or three days. Since change occurs only through water and gravity, the amount of water is adjusted according to the duration of the exhibition.

The reduced models, made of porcelain clay, reproduce the exterior exactly, but their color remains the natural color of the clay. In this way, the work reveals the inner substance of the house as it is. Some are almost completely disintegrated, leaving only the site and traces behind. They resemble contemporary archaeological ruins, retaining the marks of collapse exactly as they are.

The representative work in this exhibition is a cluster of seven or eight houses attached atop a retaining wall. Similar yet slightly different, these houses share a family resemblance and are modeled on an actual building in Hannam-dong. Yet they are not exact replicas; there are also fantastical structures composed only of particular elements of buildings. A house made solely of railings, with neither entrance nor exit, or a brick house splitting apart like a decalcomania image, exemplifies the logic of proliferation.

This mode of division, like asexual reproduction, conveys a primordial yet resilient vitality. Such fantastical models, which contain the process by which individual units proliferate, do not necessarily need to be destroyed. Though they take the form of structures, they are already collapsed, or they symbolize the force that rises like a phoenix from within the fragments of ruin.

Why does the artist focus on such shabby and impoverished landscapes? It is likely because such landscapes betray the notion of a single, unique, and objective concept of time and space. The multilayered surfaces unfolding along the contours of nature or life resist the will toward a dominant power that, grounded in a single deep root and column, extends itself outward in a grid.

Although the fine mesh of life that has gradually spread over long periods is by no means refuse to be cleared away all at once, such structures, which contain singular experiences of time and space, are granted only a temporary life by a single force—a power that surges in like a tsunami. This resembles the violence inflicted upon art that seeks to remain a singular practice in a society where diverse values are not recognized.

Juree Kim’s work is a case of the other taking the side of the other. Is the disappearance of concrete places under the force of abstract power an inevitable process, like the increase of disorder according to the law of entropy? Yet violence that approaches with the force of nature is neither just nor inevitable. The act of accelerating natural processes by pouring water does not confine its destructive force to nature alone.

Scenes generated and extinguished solely through water and clay are not natural but social landscapes. Human society adjusts natural forces according to its own criteria. Society grants legitimacy and efficiency to only one kind of force. Kim’s work captures the disappearance of sites of life, inscribed with concrete specificity, under the pressure of abstract universality.

This abstract force is generated and intensified by the tendency of capitalism to concentrate power in the hands of a few. In The Condition of Postmodernity, the geographer David Harvey argues that capital is not a thing but a process. Capital may be understood as the process of reproducing social life through the production of commodities, and the rules internal to its operation confirm that capital is a dynamic mode of social organization that incessantly transforms society.

This process repeatedly resorts to disguise and fetishization, achieving growth through destruction, creating new desires and demands, exploiting the possibilities of human labor and hope, and accelerating the pace of life. The production and destruction of space are intensified by the cycles of capital. Yet capital gives rise to the problem of overaccumulation.

Growth based on overaccumulation produces an even larger impoverished population. The problem is that the means of resolving overaccumulation are limited. Harvey argues that crises of overaccumulation are followed by intense aesthetic movements. The trauma of place found among younger artists has generated an aesthetic tendency to gaze upon disappearing landscapes of life and their minute contours.

They possess a sensibility different from that of a generation that perceives the grounds of life solely as “real estate.” They resist the immense current that uproots the lives of native inhabitants and seeks to subordinate others in an orderly manner to a homogeneous system resembling a single tree transplanted from elsewhere. Yet the success myth of Korea’s real-estate capitalism, which emerged through compressed growth, is also gradually fading.

Juree Kim’s work foregrounds places imbued with the particularities of concrete life against the abstraction of space driven by capital. At the same time, the process by which these places dissolve corresponds to the tendency in contemporary society for space to become temporalized. As the city is covered with diverse interfaces, “the city disappears into the various temporal regimes produced by advanced technology, due to a spatial integration unaccompanied by temporal integration” (Paul Virilio).

Kim’s works, which at times resemble slowly sinking ships, express the process by which space implodes into time. Although implosion culminates in the somewhat tragic form of collapse, the delicate networks of life revived through the artist’s work also suggest durability and resistance against the destructive force of time.

A house composed solely of railings, or drawings in which the architectural elements of a house are connected disjunctively, reveal how the networks of life are generated. Collapsing buildings leave behind fragments and remnants, which are grafted together to form new structures.

This process does not proceed according to a unified blueprint. These structures are formed by the addition of parts and never constitute a single whole. What drives them is the desire to continue living despite immediate difficulties. If the planned city forms an organic whole, then its parts are, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest in Anti-Oedipus, specimens of death opposed to the organism that forms a larger mass.

Heterogeneously grafted fragments presuppose not the everlasting prosperity of life, but a life conscious of death at every moment. By connecting with the infinite in every direction and on every plane, the fragments postpone death. This desire operates within the places observed by the artist. It produces strange connections.

These connections are improvised and invented on the spot. Anti-Oedipus states that nothing is originary. Meaning is not the issue; only use matters. If a thing is what it is, it is so only by being something else

Juree Kim’s houses, which foreground contingent networks of relation, do not represent, signify, or symbolize anything. Assembled from whatever materials are at hand and sustained through such makeshift arrangements, they exhibit the characteristics of what Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage.

Bricolage may be defined as a whole in which multiple attributes are intricately combined: it is “the possession of a heterogeneous and oddly assorted yet limited stock of materials and rules, and the ability to place fragments into ever-new configurations of fragmentation. Under these conditions, the work of production and what is produced, the totality of tools and the totality of what is made, become indistinguishable” (Lévi-Strauss).

In the terms of Anti-Oedipus, a place understood as bricolage contains neither humanity nor nature; there is only the process through which this produces and connects that, or that produces and connects this. The distinction between self and non-self, outside and inside, no longer carries any meaning. Desire makes things flow, itself flows, and interrupts those flows.

What emerges in Juree Kim’s work is a form of connection that continues through drifting and lines of flight. These various forms of disjunction may constitute a force of resistance against imminent collapse.

References

• [비평] 압축 재생된 이접의 지대
  [Critique] The Compressed and Revived Zone of Shift