Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

For his exhibition at OCI Museum of Art, Eunhyung Kim creates works inspired by Pictures at an Exhibition, a musical composition by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky composed the work based on ten drawings by his friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann. Eunhyung Kim, in turn, translates this music back into visual images.

Hartmann’s ten drawings each contain a different story and have no narrative connection to one another. Mussorgsky connected these disparate images through music from the methodological perspective of a viewer walking through an exhibition, transforming them into a single, complete composition. He introduced the concept of the “Promenade” into the music, using it in the form of preludes and interludes that serve as a unifying link between the ten musical episodes, each based on a different story.

Like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, a representative work of musical realism, Mussorgsky vividly depicts the various images presented in the exhibition—a gnome, an old castle, chicks, a witch, and catacombs—allowing listeners to envision them through music.

The composer translated into music what he had consciously perceived, remembered, and emotionally responded to. In contrast to these distinct episodes, however, the Promenade sections are highly subjective and unrelated to any particular narrative, rather than being realism-based melodies intended to represent a story.

Nor were they composed merely to serve the formal function of linking the other episodes. In this sense, if the pieces depicting the different narrative images emerged from the realm of consciousness, the Promenade sections can be understood as expressions of images generated from Mussorgsky’s relationship with Hartmann, submerged within his unconscious.

In other words, the Promenade is not merely a connective device that accompanies the viewer from one picture to another while walking through the gallery; it possesses an independent creative value arising from Mussorgsky’s relationship with his friend Hartmann. In this way, Mussorgsky did not simply translate pictorial images into music.

Rather, through fragments of works presented in Hartmann’s posthumous exhibition, he sought to express Hartmann himself. For Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition may have been a means of recognizing what Hartmann meant to him and healing himself from the grief of losing his friend, while revisiting his memories of him.

In this body of work, Eunhyung Kim depicts the ten musical episodes composed by Mussorgsky through concrete and representational paintings. Rather than describing objects through sight, he listens to the music, receives and responds to it through hearing, and then translates that response back into visual form.

The process of transforming one sense into another creates a gap within the brain’s stages of perception, allowing the subjective, primordial self residing in the unconscious to intervene and create interference. The artist attempts to evoke bodily and emotional responses through synesthetic perception rather than through the brain’s response to a single sense.

To express an internal, unconscious, and primordial subjectivity rather than a conscious and logical description, Kim translates Mussorgsky’s music through spontaneous and immediate brushstrokes. Like musical melodies, he uses highly free-flowing lines that are neither planned nor schematic, creating black-and-white images.

Hartmann, who created the original drawings; Mussorgsky, who transformed those drawings into music; and Eunhyung Kim, who recreates that music as visual art, are three creators who existed in different periods and worked through different expressive media. Music exists within the relationship between Hartmann and Mussorgsky. Painting exists between Eunhyung Kim and Mussorgsky.

Eunhyung Kim uses his art to establish an ontological identity within the relationships between the individual and the other, and between himself and society. His practice thus extends beyond the aesthetics of relationships or formal experiments in the transformation and convergence of music and painting.

Memories Between the Unconscious and the Conscious

In his earlier 'Designing Egos' works, Eunhyung Kim depicted images drawn from personal memories, relying on spontaneous impulses rather than deliberate technique. From an unconscious state, he brings images submerged within the self to the surface of consciousness.

This resembles automatism, a method frequently employed by Surrealist artists seeking to glimpse the essence of the unconscious: a way of recording, without conscious intention or control, the stream of images that emerges when one encounters the unconscious in an unconscious state.

Unlike the Surrealists, however, who sought to draw images directly from the unconscious, Kim brings forth memories that linger between the id—the realm of instinct and the unconscious—and the ego. His black-and-white images also appear closely related to a mode of self-cultivation that seeks to understand one’s existential value and the principles and essence of the world through mindful contemplation rather than a state of complete mental emptiness.

In other words, at the boundaries between emptiness and mindfulness, unconsciousness and consciousness, he creates ambiguous images situated between narratives structured through the linear flow of time and fragmentary images assembled within nonlinear temporality.

Amid unresolved, chaotic images in which abstraction and figuration intersect, he seems to insert his creative world into an intermediate realm between the id and the ego, attempting to organize and locate his own identity within the confusion of memory. The instantaneous, elongated brushstrokes further intensify the ambiguity of these boundaries.


Structural Formation for Perceiving Memories of the Unconscious

Images drawn from the intermediate realm between the unconscious and the conscious are restructured from two-dimensional arrangements into forms occupying multidimensional space. In contrast to his unconscious planar drawings, which depend on the immediacy of creative impulse, the artist attempts a precise and deliberate spatial composition in these sculptural works.

Rather than taking the form of predictable three-dimensional geometric structures, the sculptures assume unstructured, organic forms. As a result, countless bends and multidimensional folds emerge. Like fragments of memory connected through numerous wormholes, moving across time and space without temporal constraint, Eunhyung Kim’s sculptural works seem to depart from the x- and y-axes of three-dimensional space and merge with a gravitational field that distorts space and time.

Multidimensional folds are formed, within which the artist’s memories intermingle and time and space become entangled. This entanglement deliberately connects one scene to another, allowing his ambiguous personal memories to be objectified on a more conscious level. The artist has stated that the forms of these works derive from the brain. The human brain is a realm of infinite complexity, like a miniature universe.

Taking the brain—a realm of multidimensional space-time rather than merely three-dimensional space—as a motif, he physically gives spherical form to memories drawn from his own mind. By materializing his own infinite complexity within the realm of rational consciousness, the artist first lays out unconscious drawings in his two-dimensional works and then attempts a logical reconstruction through sculpture, stabilizing the turmoil of memory and seeking to share it with others.

Identification of the Self with the Other

All of the figures appearing in the artist’s works are depicted in similar forms, giving the impression that they may in fact be the same person. Although these figures belong to different narratives and exist in different times and spaces, within the works they are represented as though they were the same individual inhabiting the same temporal and social realm.

Through this process of identifying the figures with one another, the artist dissolves the distinction between the self and the other. The relationship between the individual and the other functions like a mirror that reflects the self back upon itself, while individual identity is evaluated and defined through others.

Because human beings are social animals, collective identification through mechanisms of sameness becomes an inescapable condition. We often derive greater satisfaction when our value is recognized by others than when we define our own worth ourselves. In this sense, the artist connects himself to others in an attempt to dismantle feelings of isolation and loss, seeking a sense of his own existence within society through relationships with other people.

The artist draws chaotic memories from the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious, lays them out across a two-dimensional surface, and then reassembles these dispersed memories within relationships with others. Memories that have taken concrete form within the realm of the ego are organized into more objectified images and communicated to the public.

This working process bears similarities to psychodrama, a form of psychotherapy founded by psychiatrist J. L. Moreno. Without a predetermined script, patients acting as characters perform spontaneously according to whatever comes to mind, thereby expressing repressed emotions and conflicts.

Psychodrama, which allows individuals to view themselves objectively as though through the eyes of others and gain insight into themselves, is one method used to treat difficulties in social adjustment. When the subject of the drama concerns public or collective issues, it is referred to as sociodrama. In this respect, the artist’s practice can be seen as closely related to sociodrama, as he introduces numerous figures on the premise of relationships with others and seeks to establish his identity within a social collective.

The artist repeatedly engages in drawing as a means of expressing memories submerged within himself without rational repression, then objectifying those images by connecting them to the perspectives of others. Through this performative process of repeated reflection, he establishes his identity within society and continues to envision a future defined by his own subjectivity.

References

• [비평] 작가 김은형 작업에 대한 아주 주관적인 감상
  [Critique] A Highly Subjective Reflection on the Work of Artist Eunhyung Kim