Ipkyu Jang, Cut and Paste, 2019, Various objects, Dimensions variable © Ipkyu Jang

Until the early 16th century, the rhinoceros had long been considered a mysterious animal by Europeans since its disappearance from the continent many centuries ago. Then, in the early 16th century, a rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, transported by an Indian delegation. The news of this mysterious and strange animal spread throughout Europe by word of mouth.

Dürer’s Rhinoceros, a famous painting of the animal, was drawn by adding his imagination to the description by a merchant. With a body covered by armor-like shells, legs covered with scales, and spiny horns on the hip, Dürer’s Rhinoceros looks like a messy combination of image fragments replete with structural errors. The horn on the nose is no longer the only prominent characteristic of this animal.

For someone who has never seen the animal before, thick armor-like shells or colored spots on its skin described in the painting could offer more prominent characteristics than the horn. However, Dürer’s Rhinoceros was accepted as an absolute description of the animal over the next few centuries by Europeans. This episode serves to explain the illusion of the concept of an object, which is just a bundle of subjective perceptions.

In 《Who cut the nose of our cute elephant.》, Ipkyu Jang questions the universal idea that constitutes an object. What makes an elephant most elephant-like? Is the nose the only noticeable part of an elephant that makes you realize the animal when you close your eyes and touch it? The aggregate of time, languages, and various beliefs surrounding an object sticks tightly to the object and prevents other ways of interpretation of it.

Jang twists such dynamics between idea and concept. His inspiration for this project came by chance while he was “cutting” physical objects. Through the works, he expresses his desire to repeat digital media editing techniques such as “cut”, “copy”, and “paste” in the physical space.

In this series, the artist explores how the contemporary perceptual system has been altered by the logic of the digital world. His questions about our perception system, in which stereotypes about objects are formed, leads to the act of “cutting off” half of a chair, or the head of a broom.

Jang ironically attempts to imitate digital movements in the physical world using analog processes. Not only cutting and attaching parts of objects but also the process of selecting objects requires the physical movement of the artist. Unlike the smooth process of “surfing” the web, he collects physical items one after another by moving his body himself. For web surfing, you need to type in the keyword you want to find into the search box.

On the other hand, Jang’s search process is quite the opposite. He randomly runs into new objects for his works while wandering around flea markets and streets around his home without thinking about what he might find or what he wants to buy. It could be a chair with a shorter leg than the others or a stopped clock. He then freely transforms and rearranges the objects within the grids on the wall (cut and paste , 2019) or the frame of a picture (cable , 2019).

In his works, the endless contrast of the objects in the analog and digital worlds forms a cheerful trajectory. A cut-out corner of a hanger is put on the other side of the wall, completing the scene with the rest of the hanger as if they were its original shape and place. A cut-out handle of a broom is paired with the handles of other objects, and they are “pasting” their missing bodies from somewhere else (delete , 2020).

The results created by the repeated cuts, copies, and pastes occupy physical space in as flat shapes as possible. However, unlike the digital world that forms an absolute flat image on a smooth and flat screen, the objects in the three-dimensional world still have their physical presence. At first, the attached pieces of objects look flat regardless of the viewers’ position.

However, they soon pop out from the flat world and collide with the order of the physical space. The features of the edited objects vary with the viewers’ position, and cause malfunctions in both the physical and digital worlds.

References