Ji Eun Kim, Rainbow Rice Cake Project #2, 2004, Oil on canvas, 130.3 x 162.1 cm © Ji Eun Kim

I once heard, in private, a story about a curator who temporarily took a position in a government organization. After removing the familiar green felt sheet from beneath the glass top of their desk, the curator was apparently ostracized by the civil servants working there.

The appearance of what might be called bureaucratic stationery—green felt sheets, green rubber mats printed with measurement scales, black approval folders bearing phrases such as “For Approval”—as well as the typography and design of various notices and warning signs, is in fact difficult to trace in terms of origin or identity.

One can only assume that such objects and documents were produced cheaply, according to government procurement prices and with little more than minimum necessity and function in mind. As such, they appear decidedly anachronistic in an age of design revolution. Or, at a time when tastes have become increasingly fragmented and specialized, they might even be consumed as nostalgic commodities or kitsch.

Even if not quite to that extent, their simple forms, banal materials, and absurd combinations of elements often stimulate our aesthetic sensibilities and lead us into strangely complex emotional states. At the same time, when we look closely at the forms and uses of such objects in public institutions, they can also be read as manifestations of laws and systems that discipline our vision and touch at close range—in other words, as monuments of everyday life.

That is, if, as Wu Hung argues in Moment and Eternity, monumentality is not merely a matter of scale. In that sense, perhaps the curator truly did deserve to be ostracized for having damaged the monumentality of an object preserved beneath the glass!

Ji Eun Kim’s practice is grounded in the meticulous tracing and identification of public design encountered on the street—“design” here understood in its broadest possible sense—which would otherwise easily escape notice. One of the first things to enter Kim’s field of vision was the dust-control screen erected around construction sites.

Once uniformly drab and gray, these screens had, without our noticing, been transformed into vividly striped designs. Kim discovered that behind these striped “curtains,” stretching across the center of a city still caught in the midst of development and construction, stood nothing less than a regulation issued by the Ministry of Environment: the Enforcement Rule of the Clean Air Conservation Act.

The fabric reminded her, on the one hand, of rainbow rice cakes served at festive tables; on another, of Minimalist art; and from yet another perspective, of Christo’s work. Kim’s paintings and texts are thus not only explorations of the city but also extensions of her study of the ontology and epistemology of art.

In other words, insofar as this exhibition constitutes a meticulous investigation into how visual literacy operates in the public sphere, or how the mechanisms of visual experience that permeate everyday life are constructed and put into operation, it may rightly be described as a report on the very status of “public art.”

In Korea, where public art administered under the Enforcement Decree of the Culture and Arts Promotion Act has been reduced largely to disputes over artworks attached to buildings, and where the production of such works is often perceived as little more than a struggle among artists and contractors over their livelihoods, this young artist attempts to trace the context through which “the awkward situation of contemporary art in the marketplace” has come to be staged.

What makes this premise provocative is that it leads to a further series of questions: if so, what should contemporary art in the marketplace look like? What kind of artwork belongs beside a street vendor’s cart? Depending on how the artist—or artistic imagination—mediates between written laws and regulations, their material manifestations, and the images that reproduce those manifestations, we may find ourselves inhabiting entirely different environments.

The resulting forms—appearing at times in the shape or location of a building, at times in the material or texture of a sound barrier, and at times in the manner in which roadside trees are pruned—are strikingly rigid. They are also nearly omnipresent, appearing as yellow lines on the ground, signs underground, and utility poles overhead. Their ubiquity often makes us forget that they are, in fact, artificial products generated by controlling only a limited number of variables.

The strength of Ji Eun Kim, who is now holding her first solo exhibition, lies precisely in the way she captures and demonstrates that these seemingly inflexible things are in fact flexible—that is, in her ability to reveal the ideological nature of institutions themselves. For if it is impossible for the artist of today to change institutions, the artist may nevertheless expose their rigidity and omnipresence, penetrate their gaps, and “leak” the very plasticity of the systems that appear so immutable.

References