Where the Origin of Image or the Idol is Being Destroyed
There are places where the ordinariness of the everyday life fills the space among the gathering of people from various backgrounds. They are having an assembly in a place that seems to be filled with something. There is a sense of peacefulness even in an event or a site where extreme protest and violent struggle are taking place. This is a place that exists but its existence is contestable. It is a place where a poet publishes a newly found facts or words, and a mathematician produces the unrevealed secret of the universe. Dream-like ideal studio space presents its brilliant artist with his muse. Children seems to have gathered to imagine a whole new world. The boat seems to run against the stream of the river towards somewhere. All these things give an appearance of being mesmerized or present themselves as the mesmerization itself. It is like a place where people of unclear identity have gathered. However, it is a scene from a world whose nature of conversation and interaction cannot be verified. On a day where strange light illuminates the surrounding and fishes fall from the blue sky, there may be strangers congregating outside. People grow together through facing a common problem and issue which come to their attention by chance. Encounters and conversations alerts oneself to evolve. Such individual’s evolution is not confined to just the individual; it leads to the growth of the species one belongs to, no matter how small the progress may be. It is an uncannily familiar landscape. A certain place in a person’s consciousness where vagueness and complication in life push one to go for a rest. There a transformation to another being takes place. This is place where the past, the present, and the future gather. It is a place where the air is filled with a certain sweetness and the soft liquid is brimming. Little islands of consciousness floating in the water come to grasp their own sense of being different from one another.
The sea, a meeting point of various rivers, is like an analogy to the flowing world that can be infinitely subdivided then fused back into one. This place where people have been drawn from where they thought they belonged to looks like a story in a season of an American TV series. When a new season of the series arrives, it will become another story like the way things flow into different directions in a way that it seems to be keeping up with its previous stream. Only the mind of a master artisan can continue on drawing the infinite process of decomposition. It is a place where iron-willed Hephaistos plays his magic in the atmosphere where nothing exists and freedom is all there is. Images work like a magic that transform things into a fateful entity gushing out extravagant light from a drop of liquid and bit of inorganic compounds. Like a constellation in the night sky, the image that is sensed through the torrent twist of impossible time and space is the true mystery.
Sang Yoon Yoon’s picture is a landscape of mixture where segregated images in the sea of information have gathered in one place. The image brings up people gathered in a floating city of the unknown. He thought of them, and that is how they come to their existence. Picturing the existence in the absence of the existence is a labor that must overcome the inevitable anxiety. The artist’s effort produces a beautiful and yet ominous landscape. The source of the image is unknowable and the ultimate end remains a mystery. These infinitely repeat, proliferate, and mutate themselves, even conjuring up fear. Yoon’s image which produces a space through coming together at an unfamiliar place by the eruption from God’s creation and forces of life resembles the world envisioned by the great French writer Möbius (Jean Giraud) like a mirror reflection. This place is another form of creation by Maurits Cornelis Escher. A distorted world where no boundary exists between the inside and the outside, the top and the bottom, the past, the present, and the future. This landscape reproduces the process of transformation of the structure and the perception through twisting the world like a Möbius strip. The real and the unreal weigh equal and the universe operates in accordance with a set rule. People in this space exist and do not exist at the same time. It is also a place where the West and the East mingle with each other. A world where an individual’s experience is not confined just to the individual but can be opened up as a universal one may look like this.
The experience of Sang Yoon Yoon is on the act of drawing a picture. It is simply the attitude of a master artist that digs deep into an absolutely ordinary theme and material. All mysteries bound by the image are presented here. This is the destiny of a painter and the fate of the image. One cannot reveal their origin. The fate of the picture by an artist is to cross the river of forgetfulness. The place resembling Venice creates a sense of anxiety through such resemblance. Perhaps this is an unknown place somewhere in the river of forgetfulness. Perhaps people are being carried away in the flow of this river by their own fate, unknowingly. People discuss and explain things on the artist’s talent, efforts, and passion, but it is difficult to arrive at a true understanding as the sentiments come from different places and times.
Gaston Bachelard argued that only a potent drop of water is necessary to create a world and dismantle the night. He also said that to every person there is a destiny of water. His contention is that such is a flowing image effecting the transformation of the actual beings as opposed to that of an unfinished dream through an empty destiny. People agree with Heracleitos’s idea that everything changes and never settles. The images created by the artist are no exception to being subjected to such fate. Sang Yoon Yoon’s images are the equal metaphor to Bachelard’s drop of water. As the world’s knowledge, data, and existences all gather in this place like the floating city of Alexandria, functioning like a library, this is a place, ironically, where the God no longer exists, and men are left to play His stead. It is a place where the labor and the images that create the world originate. A place that parts with all existing values. A place where all the horrendous illusions and oblivion come together. A landscape where all the customs of the world, the languages, the concepts, and the idols are being destroyed would probably look like this. The origin of the image or the destiny of the image rests on a place where beings are in constant motion.
Noam Kim (Art Director at Culture Station Seoul 284)