Installation view of 《Black Hole Body》 (CR Collective, 2017) © Seo Young Chang

(...) A black hole will engulf me. When I am finished with this writing, I will be thrown into a dark corridor with no telling when it will open up again. By the time you read this, I will be no longer there. I do not mean death is at my doorstep. I mean irregardless of whether I live or not, the present me who is writing this will not overlap perfectly with me at the "present" time you are reading this. The route and time needed for connecting the two "present" times cannot be predicted.

Am I writing a prologue or an epilogue? Are you reading a prologue or an epilogue? Is my writing just beginning, or is it ending soon? Is your reading arriving at a destination, or leaving a starting point behind? How far or close are my space-time and your space-time? How many meters is the minimum distance between the two and how many hours does it take?

Remaining unknown is the entire process up until the successful delivery of my present at the time of writing to your "present." The route is continuously re-explored and the time needed is repeatedly recalculated. Therefore, only this statement is valid for now. A black hole will engulf me.  

There I will be as if not there, with an unnamed symptom. I will also be absent as if present with a bodiless language. I will become an (non-)existence that is presumed to live even if dead, as good as dead even if living, and all the same to you either way, and I will be guarding the black territory of oblivion. I will be a soul that loads arduously and a body that is caught in buffering.

Tenaciously repeating will be time that is like a merry-go-round circling in place, looking empty to you but full of failed gestures to me. Continuing will be a tunnel of a crouching time with a suspended take-off, the time of rehearsal for an unscheduled performance, a time of having to keep calm and wait until your name is called.

(...) What Seo Young Chang seeks to show us is this tunnel of time and the gestures of the body that hovers there. Calling such time "time beside time," "excess time," and "a time between certain times," she defines it as "the time after a certain event has ended and before the next event begins, or a punctured time that does not actually fit its purpose even if it is within a certain event."1)

To compare with an object, it is "what would remain if you took the cheese out of Swiss cheese."2) If you take the cheese out of cheese speckled with holes, you will get the holes, but those holes are not perceived to be anything. The body of the holes remaining after the cheese's body disappears lives the time of the remaining holes after the event is over.

Like this, the undefined body and unspecified time are the black hole body and time external to time that Chang's work presents. It is all too fitting that those things that exist through their absence are black, because black is also an ironic color that exists by not being any color.

Chang's video work is at the opposite end of general narrative films. While the plots of narrative films consist of a succession of main characters' actions and meaningful events, Chang's work is filled with the gestures between the actions and the time between events hidden in narrative films. Her work is like a secretive image that is projected onto the reverse side of a screen during the blackout between film screenings.

It is an image that is like a symptom that just barely projected out of a black rectangular hole in a theater completely empty of visitors. Perhaps we should even call Chang's video work the intestines of cinema. It is because this is the location of a loop of repeated contraction and relaxation that do not converge into an event, which only reveals its body if the projector is turned off and the narrative film's screen-skin is exposed.

The intestine-figures of this deep film ceaselessly climb up and down stairs with neither a point of departure nor a destination, drown forever, over and over, in an infinity pool, repeat writhing motions as if giving a massage, drive along tracks to keep returning to their place, and continue to deliver regardless of the sender and recipient's wishes. Perhaps Seo Young Chang began using video's loop technique to visualize intestinal movements that are ceaselessly repeated to the extent of being impermissible in the world of narratives.

The method Chang chooses to make the time of intestines in the black hole be visible and audible is inverting the world's insides and exterior. Her Black Hole Body confesses as follows. "The body dislikes empty space and excess time, and in any case wants to be an event. I want to be actual time, actual volume, something that is not nonexistent. I wonder if I would become volume if I invert my body, which is a hole. I wonder if one has to exit their body to attain volume."3)

The reason the intestines' time is perceived as being nothing, as if it were nonexistent, is because the intestines' gestures and sounds do not transcend the skin to reach you. Although I inside the black hole feel the outside signs, you are completely unaware of my intestines' trivial and personal circumstances. Seo Young Chang uses the video medium to invert this unilateral relationship and erect a monument for the very important internal organs, stretches circular motions into spiral ones, spins circles into spheres, and inverts holes to build a tower.

It is integrating, with respect to a sculptural substance with volume and density, the body and time of the flat (non-)existence wandering through the black screen. Now the intestine-figures attain a voice and, using voice-over, deliver to the audience a story excluding events, while the audience’s voice howls in an inverted and flattened world without coming to the intestine-figures’ ears.

(...) Therefore, I am currently writing a piece of writing that may be the prologue or the epilogue in a certain movie. Or you are currently reading a piece of writing that may be either the epilogue or the prologue in another movie. When the event of my writing this ends, the black hole will engulf me (again). When the event of your reading this concludes, the black hole will engulf you (again).

Then, over a blackened screen or, more precisely, behind that screen, Seo Young Chang 's work will begin to end at the beginning (again). You and I will repeatedly come across each other in that world of intestines, but we will not recognize each other. Only the sound of deviation from the track will be repeated like a siren (again). (...)


1) Catalog of Chang Seoyoung solo exhibition 《Black Hole Body》 (CR Collective, Sept. 5 - Oct. 12, 2017), not paginated.
2) Ibid
3) Ibid.

References