Transversal wholes are blurred and uneven. They are connected to countless parts. The effect of this is to render the whole strangely crumpled.
We regard one of the roles of art as an entry point into/within smooth space, or as a line of flight from habitual states of being and thought toward/into the multiplicity of the world. (…) On another level, art indicates a mechanism of re-individuation that resumes the construction of new composites and new assemblages.

Upon entering the exhibition, one hears something that tickles the ear. It is clearly a human voice. Yet it is closer to noise than to speech. One strains the senses of the body to the utmost and listens intently. It resembles the sort of sound one might hear when snow piles up and scatters, when wind gathers and disperses, when air moves and seeps through a space.

There seems to be no fixed rule governing the sound, yet it is not complete disorder either. It is artificial and instinctive. It is neither artificial nor instinctive. It is obscure. Before settling in the ear, the sound wraps around the entire body, at once familiar and strange. Perhaps that is precisely why its uncanny mystery is intensified.

By the time one grows accustomed to the vibrations stimulating the ear and briefly turns one’s gaze toward the wall, one sees the six works from the ‘Score’ series (2024), which are at once the trajectory of the work, the musical notation for the performance, and autonomous works in themselves. They are not large, yet they offer enough clues to conjure an image of glaciers.

A little higher up glows angurværð (gentle sadness) (2024), rendered in neon. Reclining against a cushion placed on the floor, surrounded by sound, one looks beneath the neon light shining like stars in the sky at photographs of glaciers, numbers and charts, tangled thread-like lines and letters entering the field of vision, and it feels as though one has been transported to some unknown realm of nature.

In the exhibition 《Connecting the Dots》 (2024), Bokyung Jun presented works that attempted to attune themselves to glaciers and water. At some point—suddenly, or perhaps gradually—there began to arise in the mind of the artist, one of the beings who produces some of the most artificial outcomes in this world, images of things whose natural flow is shattered—strictly speaking, destroyed and disappearing—by human influence.

The first thing to fill her mind was the glacier. Before long, the image of the glacier caught in the artist’s eye, its sound received by her ear, the atmosphere felt upon her skin, and the life-history of the glacier, seen and imagined, all became elements of the work.

Although it is said that the pace has accelerated because of the harmful effects of human civilization, the time of the glacier still—yet still—followed the order of nature, as do beings belonging to other worlds. The artist was submerged in wonder. There was joy and there was trembling. Yet the destination toward which the glacier’s images and sounds seemed to lead felt closer to a sublime tragedy.

Water has symbolized both life and death since the distant past, and even bearing in mind that it signifies not complete extinction but continuation—circulation—its emotional tenor did not change. It was not forgotten. After sufficient time had passed, information about glaciers, together with the artist’s experiences, thoughts, and emotions, was recorded in images, handwriting, and drawings.

The six-part ‘Score’ series is based on the life cycle of a glacier. The first scene begins with the formation of snow crystals. Next, through interaction with its surroundings, the snow gradually compacts into a mass of ice, and after hundreds or thousands of years becomes a glacier and begins to move. Eventually there comes a moment when the glacier breaks apart; it fractures, sinks, and then rises again to the surface.

The fragments of ice and the air bubbles trapped within them, meeting the water, produce strange sounds that are difficult to describe in human language. They range from sharp, forceful cracking sounds to noises that feel almost like screams. As a researcher gathering materials, as an imagining subject, and as an artist, Jun collected, recorded, and expressed the traces of the thoughts and actions generated through this process.

Yet this was not enough to contain the glacier, which is at once a single mass and a collection of fragments, a piece-part larger than the whole. In some parts of the work, one even finds a domain that is rather directive and delimited. This is not at all to say that she dealt with a nonhuman species while making use of technology, one of the very symbols of human civilization.

Nor is it simply to invoke the more fundamental point that, because the human is the subject, there are innate limits that cannot be overcome. For example, the titles of the ‘Score’ series—“On a Six-Cornered Snowflake,” “Compression and Expansion,” “Frozen Memory,” “Song of the Glacier,” “Blue Descent,” and “Dark Bubbles”—as well as the information included in the scores and the sentences written by the artist, all have a high probability of being read explicitly.

Likewise, the title angurværð (gentle sadness) and the sentence “Clouds and wind, stars and flowers, glaciers and snowflakes—all living beings and every form of the inanimate leave traces on the human soul” convey the artist’s thoughts in a generous, almost revelatory way. Perhaps narrative itself—with its suggestion of a beginning, development, turn, and conclusion—and interpretation are precisely what is human.

For this reason, the artist needed another route, one that could depart from boundaries and partitions so longstanding that they appear natural, even beyond suspicion.

Come to think of it, a single mass of glacier resembles a single world. And the whole is always smaller than the sum of its parts. This is precisely what is meant by subscendence. “Wholes subscend their parts.” Not transcendence. Something else. This implies that parts are not confined to being merely mechanical components of a whole, and that genuine wonder, novelty, and different futures are always possible.

The same is true of the human. “Humanity is ontologically smaller than the humans that compose it!” Human beings do not exist only as parts of humanity. They do many things. Among them is the forming of relationships with nonhumans. And humans, in turn, also contain nonhumans. In the end, Jun gave up the overwhelming spectacle that most people conventionally associate with glaciers.

Instead, she chose sounds that move beyond the human domain. The ‘Score’ became channels for communion—or for exchange—between artist and performer, performer and performer, human and glacier. The story of the glacier expands into the story of the world.

Jun was particularly drawn to the fact that a glacier, a vast mass of ice formed when water vapor turns directly into ice, is fundamentally based on water, which never remains fixed. A glacier, as captured by the human eye, appears to be a motionless solid, but it does not stop. Because it contains movement both inside and outside itself, it is a highly “sensitive and dynamic being.”

Through the glacier’s amorphous nature, Jun believed she could draw out a kind of thought experiment that resists and unsettles the standards and categories established and fixed by humans—standards that may themselves be violent. Of course, not only glacier-water but every being in the world is in process. Each contains and undergoes change in one way or another.

For that reason, the narrative of the glacier becomes a fitting subject, one that shares a meaningful intersection with the parts that live through the world. Jun wanted to create a landscape of “sounds disappearing because of climate change,” and did not simply wish to reproduce the sounds of nature.

Thus, in Nameless Song: Glacier Blue (2024), she focused on “amorphousness, fluidity, process, and release from fixed definition,” exploring ways of “presenting” bodily sound that could hold as much as possible of all that she had experienced and gathered from the glacier. She understood the human body as a point of connection through which one encounters other beings.

The humans (performers) producing these bodily sounds did not merely explain or imitate the glacier from a human perspective; rather, they sought to move closer to difference itself. “Sound as vibration,” beyond human language—that is, fragmented words, friction, the tongue, the breath—“escapes from meaning” and moves toward sounds that do not become speech. Bodies depart from a motionless state of stasis and continue to generate themselves without end.

In fact, Nameless Song: Glacier Blue is already resistant in its use of bodily sound. Even today, the dichotomy between mind and body persists, as does the hierarchy between them. Language is perhaps the clearest embodiment of this power structure. It is transmitted through the body, whether by writing with the hands or producing sounds.

Yet language is generally understood as belonging not to the physical body but to intangible thought and the mind. Language also contains the worldviews, norms, stereotypes, and prejudices that govern society. Anyone who uses language therefore inevitably becomes accustomed to it and, at the same time, subject to its domination and oppression.

Nameless Song: Glacier Blue, however, consists of sounds produced by people that cannot be received as meaningful speech. Rather than deciphering meaning, one is led to imagine the bodily postures required to make those sounds and the pure movements of the body while producing them. A temporary freedom is granted.

These are sounds that emerge from humans yet can never be fully rendered as language: vibrations and rhythms resonating from the throat, sounds whose purpose is not to communicate meaning but to exist as ends in themselves. Precisely because they cannot be systematized and therefore resist linguistic thought, they contain an equally limitless range of possibilities.

To be indefinable is positioned at the opposite end of impossibility. The artist seems to have come to understand this through the process of making the work: “The essence of everything is manifested by profoundly ambiguous beings that possess no intrinsic value of their own and cannot be distinguished from one another. If those beings did not exist, or were not as they are, nothing could ever come to pass.”

Another reason Nameless Song: Glacier Blue may be interpreted as resistant lies in the fact that sound, rather than vision, occupies the central role. A hierarchy has traditionally existed among the human senses as well, with the ear, associated with hearing, positioned beneath the eye. Yet human beings are surrounded by auditory experiences no less than visual ones.

The world is always filled with sound. Even without limiting the discussion to art, human civilization has long been visually oriented, and little appears to have fundamentally changed today. Sound that moves beyond visuality and physical presence therefore not only generates an expanded perceptual experience but also disrupts hierarchy.

This is particularly true when, unlike music that follows a score fixed by a composer and maintains a sense of completion, such sound emerges through an open-ended process based on minimal instruction and maximal relationality.

At the same time, both the process and the outcome of this work inevitably evoke, to some degree, a becoming-nonhuman. “Becoming (=generation),” which “must be understood not in a substantive but in a verbal sense,” is “a process in which series composed of virtual points that characterize every object or being momentarily encounter one another and produce a transformation.”

It is not imitation. “It is not satisfied with undergoing resemblance.” Indeed, concentrating on resemblance obstructs becoming and produces stasis rather than process. Becoming, therefore, is neither lineage nor evolutionary descent, and is “neither resemblance, nor imitation, nor, above all, identification.” It does not take place in the imagination; neither dream nor fantasy, becoming is “entirely real.”

During the recording process, the performers did not attempt to enact a particular state of glacier-water or imitate its sounds. Bokyung Jun’s becoming-nonhuman is not an attempt to locate the identity of a nonhuman species or to concretize and visualize its ideal attributes. Instead, the artist and performers continually formed relationships with and responded to the glacier-water—a symbol of the nonhuman and of the world—instinctively filling time within an ongoing flow.

There was no completion. “Becoming is always in the middle.” It is “between-two” and “emerges only through the middle.” If a point implies an origin, the line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, neither point of departure nor destination, neither origin nor goal. It is an “irresistible deterritorialization.” As a result, Nameless Song: Glacier Blue renders the boundary separating human from nonhuman impossible to articulate.

The “creative involution” that demonstrates directly experienced “nonhumanity itself” conveys “other possibilities existing simultaneously.” The artist’s attempt proceeds toward “an objective zone of indetermination and uncertainty,” toward “something common or indiscernible.”

A concise and unadorned, yet far from simple, wish: that these attempts, which absorb even collision, contradiction, and limitation into the realm of possibility, may continue. That repeated fracture may produce resonance. That things may be made anew. And that none of these processes ever come to an end.

References

• [비평] “아무것도 이루어지지 않더라도 그 존재들은 잃을 게 없을 것이다.”
  [Critique] “Even If Nothing Comes to Pass, Those Beings Will Have Nothing to Lose.”