이병호, 〈Deep Breathing〉, 2011, 실리콘, 에어 컴프레서, 165 x 57 x 37 cm © 이병호 

Shade Tree. The phrase Lee Byungho has chosen as the theme of this exhibition may be understood roughly as either a “shadow tree” or a “tree shadow.” Of the two, however, “shadow tree” seems to resonate more strongly than “tree shadow.” Whereas a tree shadow simply refers to a fact or phenomenon, a shadow tree is a poetic conception and translation that overlays the tree itself with a kind of organic and symbolic metaphor. In any case, through this theme, the artist reconstructs and reimagines an old house.

There must once have been a tree beside that house casting a broad shadow, and perhaps, just as a shadow envelops reality within itself, the artist wished to recall the old house buried beneath that shadow—the shadow of consciousness, perhaps, or the unconscious—along with his childhood and the archetype of existence.

As is well known, words such as recollection, memory, and evocation refer to things whose substance remains ambiguous. Their meanings are inevitably unstable or partially lost, and the suggestive spaces that compel each person to fill in those absences with their own consciousness generate a distinctive atmosphere and aura.

Coincidentally, the exhibition venue was originally a two-story Western-style house that was later renovated, making it particularly suited to recalling and reconstructing an old home in this way. The artist may well have conceived the theme after first encountering the space. In any case, by incorporating site-specificity as a central element of the work, he reconstructs the exhibition space as an old house, allows figures from the past to wander through it, and lets traces of those former inhabitants remain.

As is well known, a trace is an impossible and incomplete project of summoning what is absent into the realm of existence. The essential task of the work lies in making the absent present, inviting each viewer to confront their own absence—the self that has already become a thing of the past and therefore no longer exists—drawing them toward the subtle boundary between absence and existence, and sharing the poetic emotion generated by this anomalous presence.

To share this poetic emotion, the artist introduces clues that might function as traces of existence. He encloses faded black-and-white photographs behind opaque frosted glass. The figures in these photographs cannot be readily grasped in their full reality. The hazy frosted glass functions as a kind of residue or blemish layered over consciousness. It is only through this residue and blemish of consciousness that I can barely confront the substance of the unconscious.

To confront one’s own trace, for the conscious self to encounter the unconscious self, for existence to meet absence—these are unmistakably ontological events. The artist also places human figures inside boxes enclosed on all sides by hazy frosted glass. As the glass obscures the figures, it paradoxically makes them seem more alive. Rather than allowing absence simply to dissipate as absence, the artist grants it a tangible material presence, revealing a striking sensory irony: opacity, rather than diminishing vitality, intensifies it.

This house has a basement. The artist transforms this underground space into something resembling an archetype of childhood, a womb of existence. Within this pitch-dark womb, he places an aged doll. The aged doll serves as an emblem of the artist’s own life compressed into a single form, as well as an emblem of time itself.

The basement resembles a gateway leading into the unconscious, inviting each viewer to encounter their own aged existence, their own archetype, at the bottom of its dim staircase. Perhaps every being has already been old from the very beginning. In a doll that seems to have aged before it was even born, the artist touches upon the absurdity of existence and a kind of grotesque realism.

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