Sejin Song, Work, 2023, Single-channel video, 22min 5sec. © Sejin Song

Behind, Behind, Behind....

Nayoun Koo (Art Critic)

“For this reason, whenever I experience tinnitus, I can sense that two worlds—time and memory—are connected.”
— Sejin Song, from Work(2023)

Thought does not take the form of language, nor does memory take the form of an image. The workings of thought and memory are merely converted into language or images; at their source, they are signals sent to us by the neurons of the brain. Behind what we call thought and what we call memory lie the metabolic operations of synapses and nerve cells. Because we cannot completely control these processes, we sometimes suffer from memory or become engulfed by thought.

How convenient it would be if, when confronted by a painful memory, we could dismiss it as nothing more than a normal result of neurotransmitters moving through the brain. If pain were a secretion, sorrow a form of fat, and grief bile. Yet because the body called “I” can only exist as something overwhelmingly complex, we must live carrying pain, sorrow, and grief like secretions that cannot be wiped away, fat that cannot be burned off, or bile whose absence itself causes illness.

Tinnitus becomes an important clue in Sejin Song’s solo exhibition 《Behind》 precisely because it is a symptom through which the pain, sorrow, and grief of separation manifest. The memory flickers in the form of images and language, yet it differs from our perception of present reality. Through ceaseless errors and distortions, it is repeatedly stored within the body and, without ever fully healing, suddenly flows backward into the present.

Memories that cannot be completely exhausted within us summon the present into the territory of memory, recombining and manipulating it like an illegal time traveler. Tinnitus therefore appears uncontrollably, remaining as a signal of pain connected to memories of the past. At the interface where the reverse side of reality meets the reverse side of memory, this develops into a strangely autobiographical form of science-fiction narrative. That narrative is Work.

The single-channel video Work begins from the idea that a symptom arising from individual experience may function as a signal detached from the five senses, and that this can be connected to an aspect of obsolete technology manifested through the inertia of accumulated memory. Song has long created relationships between insights and experiences that initially appear unrelated.

From his primary media of video and glass to subjects spanning mycelium and psychology, gaze and power, identity and media, new intersections emerge and mingle within his work, producing new meanings and contexts. In this exhibition, Work generates an endless displacement of image and language through the centrifugal force created when a subject crosses identity, memory, and dimensions. His narrative begins from the premise that memory can never be indexed with complete accuracy in reality.

Within memory, the data labeler fails to designate the image, and this uncertainty shifts into the context of modern history structured around Western, male, and white subjects.

In other words, technological innovation remains entangled with an outdated narrative of progress grounded in modern rationality, while the fact that such structures of domination remain deeply embedded in the infrastructure of advanced memory technologies overlaps with the deviation and tinnitus-like symptoms inevitably produced across personal memory and spatiotemporal dimensions. Song writes in his artist note:

Work(2023) indirectly tells the story of the arbitrary combination of images, photographs, language, and sound—encountered during extensive research into the “arbitrary” methods through which classifiers politically intervene by sorting datasets into linguistic categories in order to train AI for the lecture performance Aged Technology(2023)—by comparing them to the tinnitus the protagonist begins to hear after a breakup.

Sejin Song, Work, 2023, Single-channel video, 22min 5sec. © Sejin Song

In an artwork, the intensely personal is always prepared to combine with macro-history. Song’s methodology reveals the states of clarity and ambiguity encountered when reading the world through personal metaphor. The coexistence of fear and resilience within a vulnerable individual gradually becomes clearer within the work as it is renewed through a dialectical relationship with the time and space in which that individual lives.

For example, in Aged Technology(2023), the result of Song’s long-term research, tinnitus—also a symptom associated with aging—is juxtaposed with advanced technological systems that classify and train data using outdated standards. Tinnitus is a kind of malfunction embedded in the brain, itself a memory device, and it is difficult to cure while often producing chronic pain.

Likewise, the old standards and classifications embedded within data-driven AI technologies produce widespread oppression through “intentional errors” structured by deeply rooted prejudice. The outdated gaze embedded in AI is related to the power of the observer that shaped accumulated bodily data throughout medical history and continues to generate “intentional errors” even within the operations of cutting-edge technologies.

These errors legitimize oppression and violence by defending biased systems of classification and constructing a politics of exclusion. Technological tinnitus, as an “intentional error,” is deeply implicated in the reproduction of pain and the normalization of humiliation.

The work Behind, which shares its title with the exhibition, functions like a trailer for a worldview constructed through the endless spatiotemporal loop of a time traveler who is compelled to record images using a camera and film. The video includes vernacular images from across the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria that were collected during the Japanese colonial period for the purposes of colonial rule.

Under the extreme condition of colonial occupation, the gaze presupposes an archaic sense of superiority that imposes a narrative of humiliation. The time traveler in Song’s work is therefore simultaneously someone who produces pain, transmits pain, and remembers pain. These figures always exist “behind”: because they are hidden, and because they must remain hidden. Yet precisely because they remain behind, they can record everything and connect relationships and truths across those records. They exist like the “間”—the interval—between person, space, and time.

Song’s work likewise resembles the time traveler in that it observes and records what lies “between,” then connects, severs, and sutures those relations again. Through fiction, he peels back the hidden reverse sides that persist between visible things. To do so, he begins first with his own reverse side and opens it before us.

We therefore encounter his secretions that cannot be wiped away, his fat that cannot be burned, and his bile whose absence would cause illness, while also attending to the direction of the period and history toward which these elements attempt to reach, at times matching our steps to theirs. In this way, relationships between behind, behind, behind... emerge.

Thought and memory are temporarily inscribed upon the body through the surfaces of language and image, repeatedly fading again until they eventually disappear. Song seems to regard this process of transformation and forgetting as the reverse side he must feel his way through. At the same time, this means confronting, through a contemporary narrative, his discord with the aging histories excavated through his own experiences and body.

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