The Space Where We Stay – Zari
By Shin Seung-oh, Perigee Gallery Director


Constantly involved in serialized works such as Prosaic Landscape and Zari, Roh Choong Hyun is presenting his new paintings of the Zari series at this art show. In order for one to grasp his oeuvre in its entirety, it is essential to examine Prosaic Landscape. The world of his art can be naturally understood when comparing the similarities and differences between the Prosaic Landscape series, his previous Zari series, and the current paintings on show at this exhibition.

The Prosaic Landscape series consists of portrayals of the Han River civic parks. Its scenes mostly feature artificial facilities amidst natural landscapes, most of which have formed along the Han River. A variety of facilities such as public restrooms, park stores, and swimming pools are often depicted in this series. People, on the other hand, rarely make an appearance in his works and when they do they are anonymous. While working on Prosaic Landscape, Roh has continued to capture the ever-changing scenes of specific spaces with day and night landscapes, floodscapes in summer, and snowscapes in winter. While the series features spaces created by people for relaxation and leisure, Roh focuses on representing the distinctive landscapes of empty parks devoid of human life. Scenes of parks in different time zones and under the influence of different types of weather are portrayed, arousing mixed feelings in viewers as they observe the hushed and placid yet desolate and cold hearted atmospheres through a depiction of a dark night or the cloudy gray air. Roh manages to unveil a new aspect of a space we often visit to pass the time, thereby arousing our feelings of affinity toward the city of Seoul and the Korean landscape we inhabit through his repeated portrayals of immensely familiar and realistic scenes.

Similarly, the Zari series features zoo locations devoid of animals, its main component. Open to a range of interpretations, this series starts from stories apropos of the placeness of the zoo, a space we usually visit to observe and experience animals, as seen from historical and social perspectives. All the same, Roh concentrates on the scene that is visible when animals pass away in the zoo, that is, stage setting. Historically, zoos were formed to flaunt the invisible influence and strength of imperialist powers by exhibiting animals that normally live in different climates and terrains. The purpose of zoos has changed over time but this place which gives us such happiness is still one in which animals are confined to limited areas like prisoners for the sake of our own education and entertainment. With the zoo as a stage, animals are observed with curious eyes which mask surveillance. Zoo animals have degenerated into objects of surveillance on a stage regardless of whether spectators are there or not. However, in this series what the artist emphasizes is not the animals but the equipment set in an artificial space in which the animals play. This reality of the zoo he depicts is a cage resembling a stage set, something which appears somewhat arbitrary and imperfect. In this respect, the artist seriously considers the ways in which he can forge his own art, determining what he selects and excludes.

His portrayal of spaces devoid of animals distracts us in a way that causes our eyes to search for them in his works. Left behind after the main characters disappear is an arbitrary and precarious space characterized by awkward looking tree trunks, a swing made of entangled ropes and waste tires, artificial rocks, and poor, shabby murals of groves. And, an empty zoo Roh interprets seems to be a sealed space in which no flow of air is sensed and nobody can live. This secret room-like space rather enables us to scrutinize each structure one by one. Unlike in the Prosaic Landscape series, each space has a hushed atmosphere where no movement is sensed. After all, the artist shows that the stage set of this zoo is no different from the precarious structure of this world.

If so, what’s the difference between this work and the previous Zari series? In terms of content there is not much change in his series. If some, that may be change in his perception and thought. That being said, his way of depicting space has slightly changed over time. Roh seems to restrain his emotional renditions in order to unveil the structure of reality as he pleases while bringing forth the closeness and stuffiness deriving from a zoo’s confined space.

Some pressure is more apparently sensed in this series due to the stuffiness, stillness, and quietude in a closed space. He treats the surfaces of the zoo’s old, dirty walls that work as the borders with the fields of mild, thin colors rather than depicting them in rough brushstrokes influenced by his emotion. Through this moderation of expression he represents the space we have never viewed or experienced and a synesthetic space in which temporality is completely excluded, unlike any tactile emotion sensed in an external space in loneliness and aloofness the Prosaic Landscape series incarnates. These walls, by contrast with the stage setting, make viewers scrutinize the space with clandestine eyes. The Prosaic Landscape series deals with an open space with the artificial mixed with the natural we can enter and occupy in person whereas the zoo the Zari series captures is a closed space we just look at from a distance. Although the two series address opposite spaces in this way, they seem to be complementary to each other as the former focuses primarily on the external surface and temporality while the latter concentrates on unveiling the artist’s inner world.

Roh’s serialized works reviewed above are candid representations of realities of the world we currently inhabit. To the artist, an act of painting seems to be an expression of his concerns about how to naturally unmask meanings hidden behind realities. Accordingly, his series naturally discloses the structure of such connotations when temporality is accumulated over time. That’s why Roh has presented the two serialized pieces in order. We may come back to his concerns about what painting he’d like to create. What we can discover in his oeuvre is his attitude to maintain the balance of his perception and thought represented in his work and subject matter and the reality found in his pieces.

As examined so far, Roh has repetitively produced paintings to portray spaces between his subjective perspective and reality. His paintings obviously have their referents, anchored in the images of real spaces he observed with his own eyes and documented in photographs. He has occupied himself with capturing intangible images found in his surroundings of Seoul where he lives and works and broadly in Korea. In fact, his work brings some words like forlornness and desolation to mind. However, these are not intended to convey some negative aspects of the world we inhabit. They are rather intended to naturally or wholly reveal the structure of space the artist has internalized and his life has contacted. His work is nothing but a means to have viewers perceive the scenes and spaces he has represented in his own painterly manner as simple as he could with their own eyes. This is the way the scenes and spaces in his series can be realized as paintings only Roh is able to forge. After all, he wants to accurately portray what he newly conceives through what we feel in our surroundings. He also tries to grasp a thing through the thing itself and to hold the structure of reality in his own distinctive receptacles. He seems to allude that this is a way to comprehend the space of our life.

References

• 《자리》
  《Zari》)