To Find a Meaning from Question and Coordinate

 

Lee Kwan Hoon_Director of Project Space SARUBIA

 

 

The latest trend of contemporary art, while taking more and more diversified shapes, shows the meaning of reproduction and repetition which is not so different from the past. The discrimination can only be created from how the artists edit the contents in there. The artist Jang Yong Sun keeps also verifying where he is heading in his itinerary of finding his own creative language, questioning constantly his identity and drawing the coordinate (Venn diagram).

 

Question(ideal) and coordinate(reality), Four years ago, this gap made the artist come out of the internal speculation and immersion to choose a new way of thoughts, to let the inner and outer world communicate and get expanded widely. The fruit of this transition has resulted in exhibitions such as 《On the road – Natural Monement》(Alternative-space Noon, 2017), 《Treasure N37°32’33.504"E126° 56.6604"》(ClayArch Gimhae Musuem, 2017), 《Crystallisation》(ClayArch Gimhae Musuem, 2018), 《Volatile Margins》(Space9, 2018), 《Epic of Insignificant life – Natural Monument》(DMZ, 2018), 《Where is your querencia?》(Cheongju Art Studio, 2019).

 

Jang Yong Sun witnesses phenomena of times he missed through indirect social experiences and finds the silent language in an emotional landscape full of contradiction. Silence is a sea of thoughts where we get absorbed into a bottomless depth just like a black hole. Sailing that sea, he finds the fragments missing or abused in the reality, and ignites them in an implicit form of light and expresses as if he writes a poem in the darkness. In this way, he questions the role of the art that heals deficient, repressed consciousness and quenches unconscious desire. The artist, as an individual being, wants to sense the paradoxical beauty in the contradiction of life and to share his codes with the world in an implicit language similar to a cipher.

 

From another viewpoint, the artist pursues the aesthetic value of the world in microscopic aspects, not in macroscopic ones. He captures, by chance or on purpose, easily overlooked subjects in daily life such as trivial things abandoned along the street, on a small alley, or in the field, and then transports them to a time and space he wants them to be, as if he collects living and nonliving things. In this process, the artist leads the work by assigning a momentary incident, contrasting a space and an agent, creating internal and external spatial structure, or allegorizing psychological discord between individual and society to a certain thing.

 

The evolution in his works during the latest years has been originated from the newly perceived change in the thoughts of the artist. Aren’t such steps of Jang Yong Sun the procedure of his instinctive perceptions emerging on the surface, after being long repressed by existing institutional education? It is just a beginning, but Jang Yong Sun is facing a touch point where he can create narrative factors based on the imagination that he can act by unconscious behavior anytime, anywhere, by himself and easily. On this border situation, he is rather focusing on the invisible phenomenon than insisting on material and form, and is thinking and inquiring the relation of ‘light, space and things.’

 

In the relation between question and coordinate set up by the artist himself, the creative doubt generated around time, space and environment has been the continuity of the intricate process like winding and unwinding thread. But through long deliberated thinking structure and the exhibitions experimenting and proving it, it has also been a turning point to solve the past conflict issues: the social structure between self and other, the shifting change of time and subjects, the structure and order dominating the society, the spatial collapse and the destruction of suspended time, etc.

 

The interesting is that question and coordinate let the artist experience the variable with different correlation term according to the number of cases, rather than the completeness as one image ; as a result, the perspective gets diversified and the vanishing point more and more abstract. Such thin and flexible cognitive change leads to an attitude to admit a question about identity which is the origin of artistic creation, or even to a situation to dream of a transfer of another trace. From a couple of ambiguous objets and scribbled drawings in his atelier, which hint even further changes, we can witness the artist’s situation where he is confronted with split desire for a different future from present. If this phenomenon can be a way to expand the horizon of thoughts and experiences and to ease the excessive desire thanks to self-criticism and recurrent self-consciousness about deconstructed languages, it will mean for the artist to have a different kind of artistic aura, while being all natural.