Denial of Letters, Viewed as Perceived
Kang, Seon-Hak (art critic)
Denial of languages could mean all-out negation of human thoughts, lives
and culture. As Kim obliterates those letters one by one, they get
translated into images. And deconstructing existing images and meanings,
while shuffling between texts and contexts, gives rise to new images and
meanings, negating conventional images and ways of lives, running
through hidden meaning of lives, and paving the way for a great leap to
a new life.
In a series of such blotting-out, what gets obliterated are always
letters, characters which are not natural, but artificial things.
Characters are the most artificial means of the human kind and also a
frame work to interpret the world, which brings us to the double meanings
found in this obliteration, i.e. not just the letters as a sign itself
but the inherent artificiality get blotted out. And the traces get
translated into images. The works that obliterates photos of newspapers
and articles can also be understood in the same vein. Letters are a
superior tool in understanding the world around us, but its superiority
sometimes interferes true understanding of the world, as they define
events, things, while getting in the way of further interpretation. Or
they may even manipulate things and events at the hands of people who
use them. Therefore, they should be understood just a paradigm, and not
necessarily reflecting truth. Perhaps it is such awareness that urges
Kim to keep obliterating letters in his works. Previously, his works
directly dealt with current events, but the mode has evolved to take a
more subtlety, by blotting out printed letters of such newspapers
instead, which can be interpreted in the same context. Then, what would
we eventually encounter if we kept deleting, blotting out the characters
and letters we invented? It would be just a pure existence. What’s
hidden and what’s revealed, and underneath the colors that hide them, we
would be able to see their traces. And this is what the artist attempts
to see and intended us to read, i.e. duality. As his works highlight
such duality of language and visual images, the depth and width of the
meanings in its shuffling between collages and décollages will totally
depend on viewers who perceive them,.
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