Exhibition poster of 《On the Writing of Letters》 © Incheon Art Platform

As part of its residency program, Incheon Art Platform runs the “Creation and Production Project,” which supports the creative activities of resident artists. As the third visual arts project of 2023, the platform presents resident artist PAIK Jongkwan’s solo exhibition 《On the Writing of Letters》.

PAIK Jongkwan approaches everyday events from unfamiliar perspectives, collecting images and sounds and exploring what kinds of social contexts they may appropriate within the situations in which they are placed. Working primarily with collected footage, he creates moving-image works that reflect on the histories and trajectories of audiovisual media and devices themselves, while also questioning the aesthetic and political boundaries connected to them.

The process of arranging, connecting, pausing, and reconsidering images resembles the act of writing a letter. In 《On the Writing of Letters》, PAIK imagines the time of delay that occurs in the process of exchanging letters and attempts a form of letter writing using images that stand in for that time as a kind of language. Taking as its motif the temporal delay between the writing, sending, and receiving of a letter, the exhibition presents video and photographic works that reflect on things that can only be seen and read through the investment of time.


Artist’s Note

What image should be attached after another image? This is a question that inevitably arises whenever I work with the ‘moving image.’ Depending on the type of work, the unit of an image may be a scene, a shot, or a single frame. If conveying a narrative is important, it may be sufficient to divide scenes according to a scenario and construct shots accordingly, but there are times when the frame itself must be considered the smallest unit.

The process of selecting and arranging photograms that function as frames from within an archive always begins by presuming an imaginary viewer. Generally, this viewer is another person, but at times it may be only myself, or even a nonhuman entity. In the process of ‘writing’ and sending images, the viewer as recipient always exists within the field triggered by those images, though with varying degrees of probability.

Desiderius Erasmus, the classical scholar and representative ‘humanist’ who lived across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, left behind a book titled 『De Conscribendis Epistolis』, or 『On the Writing of Letters』. During his lifetime, letters were among the few important means available for transmitting messages, and depending on whether they were made public, they could in fact function much like literary journals or newspapers.

Letter writing, as it had been in antiquity, was a kind of technique, and Erasmus, himself a master of the letter, densely enumerated its methodology across seventy-four sections of his book with abundant examples. In 《On the Writing of Letters》, I would like to consider a form of delayed (image) ‘writing’ that is not included among those seventy-four sections but must now necessarily be addressed.

Here, ‘delay’ refers not only to the time required to write and exchange images, but also to delays occurring among the internal elements of their content. Writing a letter, then writing again before a reply to the first one arrives, then writing yet another before replies to the first and second letters arrive.

Within such deferred and delayed conditions, arranging images, linking them into sequences, stopping them again for reconsideration, and thereby writing images. Assuming in advance that the viewer’s reply will be delayed, or perhaps may never arrive, and nevertheless writing images now. Rather than hastening merely to transcribe, I want to question what an ‘accurate’ image might be and attempt a practice that simply captures the labor of time.

References