The subtitle of Ahn Kyuchul’s exhibition 《Invisible Land of Love》 carries an unmistakably somber tone. The word “country,” modified by that adjective, evokes the fissure carved between society and the state—a fissure that has generated absence and dispossession, and that has given rise to countless events and disasters that should never have occurred. It points to a fundamental cause that remains unresolved even now, and to the sense of powerlessness that has spread among many.

At the same time, if we set aside macro-level sociohistorical concerns and consider this exhibition strictly as an artistic act—if we refrain from limiting “country” to the notion of the nation-state—then “invisible love” may well refer to the world of art itself, destined to remain the artist’s unrequited love. Around the time he turned fifty, Ahn Kyuchul presented 《49 Rooms》(2004, Rodin Gallery). Today, the number of rooms has grown beyond sixty, and yet they remain an unfathomable maze, their destination still unclear. This fact alone lends plausibility to such a reading.

The eight works presented in this exhibition, including new pieces, exemplify the artist’s longstanding tendency to infuse sculptural practice with literary—particularly poetic—sensibility. His numerous drawings, often included as supplementary exhibition materials, function as a vast reservoir from which works can be realized at scales ranging from small objects to architectural structures. These drawings—composed of text and image, or drawings that themselves perform the role of text—span everything from ideas possible only in imagination to meticulously detailed plans.

Many of them have likely never been realized. In this exhibition, however, supported by corporate sponsorship, several of these ideas have moved beyond paper, passing through processes of design and construction to be monumentalized within physical space. The exhibition hall itself has been entirely reconfigured, from floor to ceiling, with careful calculation of the viewer’s movement.

The condition of the floor, the moment when stairs appear, and even the actions anticipated once the viewer enters a staged space have all been precisely considered. Unlike much so-called “conceptual art,” which prioritizes ideas while neglecting the concrete processes needed to embody them—often resulting in the obscuring of the original concept—Ahn Kyuchul’s exhibition is distinguished by the solidity and rigor of its mechanisms.


 
A Bridge from Drawing and Literature to Plastic Arts
 
The first work encountered by visitors, Nine Goldfish, consists of goldfish swimming within a tank divided into nine concentric circular compartments. Though sharing a single center, this stratified structure confines each fish to its own orbit, preventing free movement or mingling. It serves as a metaphor for life in partitioned spaces—an ambiguous condition that is neither fully communal nor fully individual, yet uncannily similar to our everyday reality.

Under the vision that such a mode of existence should be overcome, the work gestures—if only temporarily—toward the possibility of community. The subsequent work, The Pianist and the Tuner, stages a peculiar performance. Over the course of the exhibition’s 132 days, a pianist arrives each day at a fixed time to play the same piece, while a tuner likewise arrives daily to remove a single component from the piano.

Gradually, as the parts that constitute the whole disappear one by one, the situation becomes bleak—perhaps even catastrophic—re-enacting, in a somewhat mechanical fashion, a condition in which no action can ultimately produce any effect. The performance does not end in silence so much as it ends by performing silence.

The pianist, who continues to play day after day despite the growing dysfunction, invites multiple interpretations. Is this a positive figure who plants an apple tree even as the sky collapses? A dull figure unaware of the malfunction? Or someone fully aware of everything, yet resigned to continuing out of sheer helplessness? Ahn Kyuchul’s works, through literary metaphor, open themselves to a multiplicity of interpretations. Paradoxically, among the many meanings proposed by the artist, one of the most significant is meaninglessness itself.

The work 1,000 Scribes involves a thousand participants who apply online during the exhibition period and sequentially transcribe literary texts. In the “Scribe’s Room” set up within the exhibition, each participant is given one hour to copy a book by hand. The texts range from Yi Sang’s The Wings to Franz Kafka’s The Castle, resulting in handwritten manuscripts produced by countless hands. Each scribe performs this solitary act in an isolated cell-like space. The work suggests that writing (or artistic labor) is akin to exile or confinement; yet this act of absolute solitude is not an end in itself, but rather a temporary separation undertaken for the sake of a more intense encounter with others.
 
This is because, although each participant writes alone, the book that ultimately emerges is the result of a collective act. Through art, participants form a temporary community within an extremely individualistic contemporary society. In an era of instant, high-speed reproduction, the act of transcription functions as a metaphor for artistic practice itself.

The motif of the scribe, which appears in Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), can be read not only as social satire but also as self-parody of art. Is living not enough? Why must one also write? Are life and writing harmonious? If not, can writing alone fill life? Can writing, in turn, affect life? Does writing make life fuller, or more miserable? These endlessly branching questions—questions that admit no definitive answers—are borne by countless artists who live while making art.

Despite romantic proclamations that art and life are one, what is clear is that a gap exists between living and writing—a gap comparable to the one that separates words and things—and it is precisely this gap that makes writing possible.

If the distance between the two becomes too great, however, both life and art suffer significant loss. The work Wall of Memories, also participatory, is looser and more open than the transcription project. Visitors write, on provided notes, the names of “things we have lost, things we long for, things that are absent,” as instructed by the artist, gradually filling an entire wall. As participation accumulates, the wall continually changes, resembling a slowly unfolding card sequence or animation. Over the five months of the project, tens of thousands of words are collected and later compiled into “books of disappeared things.”

This work inevitably recalls the Sewol ferry disaster, which plunged the entire nation into mourning the previous year. The countless notes affixed along the shoreline in memory of those who never returned represented the minimum responsibility of the living—to remember—in order to prevent the repetition of such tragedy. Absence and disappearance simultaneously signify a failure to find one’s proper place.


 
A Repeated Point of Beginning That Must Be Emptied in Order to Be Filled
 
The work Time of Plants II metaphorizes beings suspended in an abstract space rather than anchored to a specific site. Flowerpots hang in midair like a mobile, maintaining a precarious balance despite the fact that plants ought to root themselves firmly in the ground. Confined within the fixed boundaries of their pots, unable to move, these plants resemble the goldfish in Nine Goldfish. While the message originates in the artist’s conceptual imagination, it is embodied through collective audience participation or works at architectural scale.

64 Rooms consists of sixty-four rooms made of deep blue velvet fabric. Whereas a similar work from over a decade ago employed rigid doors and conveyed a cold, neutral atmosphere, this version, constructed of thick tent-like material, appears softer. Yet the fabric that envelops the body as one passes through intensifies a sense of fear. Aside from red LED floor lighting installed as a concession to those with claustrophobia, the space is pitch dark, amplifying the maze-like structure into something abyssal.

In sketches for this work, the artist wrote, “rooms of dark blue velvet, a labyrinth as deep as the sea.” A maze destined for endless wandering will be experienced differently depending on how one accepts that wandering. In an age obsessed with rapid solutions, the detours presupposed by a labyrinth may seem wasteful—or even dangerous, potentially leading to ruin. Yet art often voluntarily assumes such risks. This is, arguably, the identity of art in contemporary society.

The Room of Silence, positioned at the end of the exhibition route, stands in stark contrast to the labyrinthine structure of 64 Rooms. Entering this rounded chamber finished with white clay and lime, one encounters a bright, open space. If 64 Rooms evokes a sense of malignant infinity, The Room of Silence approaches sacred unity. For those with religious backgrounds, it may recall a spiritual space. Conversely, for some viewers, this luminous room may be more frightening than the dark maze. Unlike the blue labyrinth that seems to swallow all sound, the white circular room amplifies even the smallest footstep or whisper.
 
If 64 Rooms produces an enforced silence, the silence here is associated with awe. In a space so quiet that even the slightest movement resounds, one becomes silent almost unconsciously. Silence, in this context, is not merely a negative condition but another mode of speaking—much as language itself speaks through the spaces between words and lines. When all secondary elements are stripped away and only emptiness remains, even the subject we clung to until the very end is emptied out.

As the final work in the exhibition, The Room of Silence can be seen as synthesizing the artist’s message. This space of absence is also a space of plenitude; an interior that is simultaneously exterior. It presents itself as nothing less than the space of art itself. Considering not only the other works in this exhibition but also the literature that has long preoccupied the artist, one might call it the “space of literature.” And if the blank page of a sketchbook that the artist opens at the beginning of a project were to be spatialized, might it not look like this?

This is the repeatedly renewed point of beginning that must be emptied in order to be filled. Examining the various materials presented alongside the works in this exhibition, it becomes evident that drawing functions in Ahn Kyuchul’s practice as a bridge between literature and the visual arts. In that spirit, I would like to conclude this essay by transcribing several passages from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, a work that offers profound insight into literature itself.

‘To write is to enter the space where solitude is affirmed, where there is the threat of fascination.’ ‘It is to throw oneself into the risk of the absence of time.’ ‘Within the absence of time reigns the endless new beginning. Everything that is original is subjected to the ordeal of endless beginning, that pure impotence. The question is not to spend one’s time writing, but to move into another time in which work no longer exists—to approach the point where time is lost, where one enters the solitude produced by fascination and the absence of time…’

References

• [비평] 살 것 인가, 쓸 것인가.
  [Critique] To Live, or to Write