The Ecstasy of Transference and Dialektik

His father disliked Father. But this doesn’t mean he didn’t like himself: he did not like his own father—that is, the grandfather. His father lived like someone who didn’t have a father—he was ashamed of his father. His grandfather was a shaman—a male shaman, called Cheonhodong Shaman.

But the grandfather wasn’t a shaman while he was living in Ongjin just below the 38th Parallel. People said that he must have been a Christian like a lot of people from the same area. Who knows? He might have been a Buddhist. At any rate, some time before the Korean War, he traveled upstream on a boat on the Han River to Seoul and unloaded at the Gwangnaru Ferry. He had lived in an affluent household in Ongjin. In Cheonhodong, he was doing all right. As often found in mythical descriptions of a wealthy man, he could travel about 10 kilometers from Maljuk-geori to Cheonhodong without leaving his own land. That’s what they say. This was all before his second son had had his second son.

Nobody knows why the following happened. And there’s no way to know. One night his grandfather woke up suddenly and went straight toward a mountain, as if he knew his destination. His sons and daughters followed him and tried to dissuade him, seeing that he acted as if he was possessed. Then they saw him dig with his bare hands at a spot on a slope somewhere in Gwangju, today called Gangnam, finding a sword, bells, and a folding fan, and bringing them back.

Clearly, he was possessed or bewitched. Right away, he invited a spirit into his home and established a shrine. Whether his main spirit was General Choe Yeong (1316-88; a Goryeo general) or General Im Gyeong-eop (1594-1646; a Joseon general), we don’t know. He hung a worn-out portrait on the wall of the shrine, a Sinjangdo Divine Guardian portrait.

His grandfather lived in a house inside a couple of inner gates, past a few apartments let to other families. After pushing open the door, people would find a shrine at the farthest end of the left side of the house. His second son’s family lived in a house about 100 steps from his first son’s house, where he himself lived. His second daughter-in-law would leave her two sons at his first son’s house when she worked. Thus, the artist lived seven years under the care of his grandfather, but did not realize then or afterward that his grandfather’s spirit would always stay with him. This second son of his second son was the artist Sangdon Kim, who suffered from dyslexia.

During his years at Cheonho Elementary School, Sangdon Kim was a handy child with artistic talent. He didn’t know why this was a good thing, though, nor where to use it. His homeroom teacher gave him various tasks, and she also encouraged him when he graduated. He drew more attention with his talents in the art club at Cheonho Middle School. Although he didn’t put much importance on it, he wanted to try out his talent because his elder brother was recognized for his artistic talent.

At Dongbuk High School, to which he commuted by bicycle, he joined both the art club and the Judo club. Like most boys growing up in a poor neighborhood at that time, he felt he needed to be strong. A private art-school teacher at the Gildong Crossroads guided him into the Department of Environmental Sculpture at the University of Seoul, an option whose tuition costs were lower than most other universities.

His college life was not satisfying to him, although, whenever a demonstration occurred on the campus, he liked to participate with performance art and his artistic expression. They were different from other, usual forms of demonstrations, so at some point he realized that he was leading them. Around that time, he also thought that he needed to go to France to study art, so he registered in YMCA language courses to learn the language.

He had dropped out of the college, and then attended a special program at Kaywon University of Art and Design in Uiwang on the outskirts of Seoul, which had an exchange program with Düsseldorf Art Academy in Germany. There, he encountered Nam June Paik, Tadao Ando, and many German artists. In that program, which did not even require exams, his close relationship with Germany began.

One night, during his military service, Sangdon Kim had a strange dream: mountains collapsed and the sky crashed down to the earth. That day, he was given an unexpected leave of absence, so he went home—where he found that his grandfather had just passed away. He arrived there even before his family had tried to reach him in the military. Absentmindedly, he had gotten off the bus a stop before his house and had dropped by his uncle’s house. When he arrived, he found them hanging funeral lanterns in front of the house. It was a strange incident, yet it did not feel strange to him.

Somehow, he managed to go to Germany to study photography. To earn the tuition, he had worked all kinds of odd jobs: snow removal, carrying boxes at a fish cannery, and dishwashing in clubs and restaurants. It did not feel unfair to him. For his graduation photography project, he studied trees. He followed and recorded the lives of the Tannenbaum Christmas trees in Berlin. Each year, some 400,000 such trees were imported from Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Poland. After the season, they were sent back to Poland, to be ground up, mixed with potting soil, and resold in Berlin.

By getting lifts on buses and trucks, he diligently traced the birth of these special trees, their injection with auxetic, an artificial strengthening agent, their sale into a wealthy city, and their end as soil in Berlin, leaving no trace of their former existence. In Germany, although he did not think overly about his grandfather, his ability to empathize with trees, that animistic ability, might have come from him. His grandfather no longer lived, but he lived inside Kim, and appeared everywhere—as liquid, as vapor.

Although he lived on German sausage and bread and learned German for years, Sangdon Kim’s dyslexia did not improve. As a student, he had read not only letters—he also read spots and wrinkles on the paper. He could not understand why he should only read letters. He looked at the book in its entirety. He memorized the great art critic Walter Benjamin just by sight. Although the speed of his reading, from cover to cover, was much slower than normal, he chewed books like rice and swallowed them with his eyes. Like that, books entered his body in their entirety, and he felt entranced.

Returning to Seoul after finishing at the Berlin University of the Arts Meisterschule, instead of trying to find a university teaching job, like other people returning from overseas studies, Kim worked as laborer, carrying meats in the Wangsipri slaughter neighborhood. And he did art late into the night. The smell of dead pigs, wafting from his body, was also a book read by his nose.

He also worked for an interior decorator and in restaurants. Although he exhibited his sculptural pieces professionally in biennales and galleries, his livelihood did not change much. Although he never stopped working, he did not have savings. In fact, he had actually not tried to save. He was satisfied making enough to allow him to work on his sculptures, after taking care of his basic expenses.

Once he worked as a recorder of graves for people without family members. In Sangpaedong, Dongducheon, the site of main camps of the United States Second Infantry Division, almost 4,000 graves were of unknown people. Instead of gravestones there were only wooden stakes with numbers in front of them. They were the graves of “comfort women” for American G.I.s—women called “western princesses” or “Y-cabs” and despised in their own land.

Sometimes, some of those graves did not have any bones in them, after exhumation. Who knows why? The bodies might have left for somewhere far away. Nearby, pine trees were particularly green and their insides were particularly red. And it had nothing to do with whether it was sunset or not. Pine trees were blazing on the places where people had disappeared. As he suddenly realized this transference, he was overwhelmed by a keen sense of wonder.

Kim brought plastic chairs into his studio that “Western princesses” had been sitting on as they waited for American G.I.s. Bulgwangdong Totem is composed of these plastic chairs and plastic flowers, instead of the animals or plants found in ordinary totems. The flowers were in the shape of wreaths used for weddings and funerals. Objects acquire a new spirit over time and after use. In the Bulgwangdong Totem, the two unrelated objects—plastic chairs and plastic flowers—communicate with each other, as if they were originally a family. Heterogenous objects that look like they would find each other to be uncomfortable abruptly meet without difficulty and interact intimately. It is an imaginary locus in which Kim sets fire or enchants.

In Snout Nebula, everyday objects—candies, buttons, balloons, conch shells—hanging from a stick, are mounted on a cutting board. As the objects communicate with one another, the candies become closer to balloons, the buttons go farther away from conch shells. Through this process, the objects wander, losing or changing their meanings. These “stars” within the secular world are both chaos and an amalgamation of chaos and heaven.

This chaos and amalgamation roil together, leading to a state of ecstasy.
The image of Burna turning in the ‘Cosmic Dance’ series shows, through a single object, what is needed for the “action” leading to creation in Kim’s work. A tune and dance are both acts necessary for the change of a matter’s nature. Transference into another world is formed in this way.

Cart summarizes Kim’s unique ideas well. A colorfully decorated bier made by assembling carved pieces, sits atop a shopping cart. Traditionally, Koreans who died went to the other world, lying on a palanquin, a vehicle they might not have ridden while alive. By carefully observing Kim’s piece, we can find various living and dead people in the bier, including the Sewol Ferry victims. All living beings die only once—that is why life and death are absolute, never relative.

A bier is the palanquin carrying them. That bier is carried by a temporary instrument, a shopping cart. There are neither bearers nor funeral songs. That kind of death and the culture of death that bore intense lamentation died long ago. A symbol of tradition and of a market society confront bitterly in the work. Yet Cart does not explicitly protest: a five-colored bier is simply heading somewhere, like a soul.

Materialistic society is one overflowing with ecstasy—but at the same time, it is a society that has lost the archetypal state of ecstasy. The state of ecstasy that a capitalist society, flooded with advertisements, sex, media, shopping centers, fashion, and information, exudes is simultaneously a jam-packed desiring and emptiness. And what crowds confront in this state of ecstasy is solitude. Sangdon Kim’s state of ecstasy, the opposite of a market society, is saturated with a different kind of ecstasy.

Beginning from a primitive archetype, which Kim experienced as a child in Cheonhodong, he returns to the current archetype, after fierce struggles with reality. In this process, both a new transference and a burning dialektik emerge. A colorful excitement also originates. Kim is never just an observer in the process of his creative work; he is involved as a recorder and an actor.

Creative works that reconstruct a state of ecstasy as a lost archetype are rare. This state of social ecstasy that Sangdon Kim captures is a marvelous achievement in Korean art. This exhibit is a joyous opportunity to explore and confirm what are the coordinates of this state of ecstasy that Sangdon Kim is uniquely creating.

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Marip Suh (Art Critic)

References

• 《CHAOSMOS》