Jeon GiSuk Solo Exhibition, Afterimage-Incomplete Eyes, the Art of Doppelganger in Meaning

Jeon GiSuk Solo Exhibition, Afterimage

Incomplete Eyes, the Art of Doppelganger in Meaning

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect. He is confined to his room since he is unable to open the door and go out due to his short legs. He is also disconnected from the outside world as he can only speak an insect language. The Metamorphosis, a novella Franz Kafka published roughly 100 years ago, describes alienation from the point of view of someone who has become an insect. Artist Jeon Gi Suk interprets the event of metamorphosis in the novel from a slightly different viewpoint. “If I become another being, what will the world look like?” This is the question that triggered Jeon’s work. The new eyes she has adopted are those of an insect. Her images are segmented into numerous facets with each depicting partially repeating parts of the same image, almost as if they are being viewed through compound eyes. As Samsa felt, new eyes are not entirely inconvenient so much as they are unfamiliar. We become aware of these new eyes when we find ourselves suddenly facing them.

Jeon employs images captured in an insect’s eyes to experiment with new visual idioms. Meanwhile, images in her works are dependent on the gaze borrowed from the other who is far away from her both temporally and spatially. While traveling in France, she found someone's travel records in black-and-white photographic negatives from the 1930s. Those images enable viewers to catch a glimpse of the life of French people and the nature of France at the time with landscapes and figures documented on that film. She transfers these ancient images that are unfamiliar but arouse nostalgia to her scenes. An image is deconstructed and then divided and contained in a few segmented hexahedrons as if seen with the eyes of an insect. The images held in each hexahedron acquire new meaning as the original form is damaged through modification and repetition. A technique she has recently employed is to blur the boundaries and repeat images in part, breaking away from the division of images into segmented hexahedrons.

The splitting faces and repeating forms in Jeon’s recent works is reminiscent of futurist paintings by Giacomo Balla or Umberto Boccioni. This type of paintings was to represent mechanical mechanisms and speed as an affirmation of technology. The affirmation of technology and its development was borrowed from the most advanced visual medium of the time, film. However, Jeon’s work reflects on today’s deconstructed eyes distinguishable from that of 100 years ago, whereas the painterly form of futurism was to incarnate motion in a pictorial scene. Her images appear deconstructed as if seen through rolled or broken glass. This hallmark is also a formal feature of today’s visual images. The image generated by a digital display device today is made up of pixels, the smallest unit of a digital image. Information of independently divided images has no meaning in itself but becomes meaningful when the individual units are integrated. Images in her works appear deconstructed but amazingly, we are able to see the original images. And these vague images at last have a completed meaning when joined with the titles.

Her works such as <The Raft of Medusa> and <Les Meninas> clarify her intent or attempt to generate new meaning with the titles. She enables us to leave time travel by giving the titles of notable paintings to her images appropriated from photographs of the 1930s. She plays a joke on us while lending titles of classical works to photographic images by an unknown artist of the 1930s. She blends artistic authority with commonality by crossing classical paintings and photographic images by an unknown artists. And, we are aware that the artist who conveys such irony is in the present with us. A variety of individuals, the artist in history, an unknown person who took photographs, and the artist in the present are knit together in her works as a wide span of time is mixed in her pieces. Her works are predicated upon an intricate system as the viewpoints that are as complex as multilayered time on a flat surface. What draws our attention is that color and form are more simplified in her recent works. These works were painted in color sense and form that look like those of an ancient photograph as if reflecting her dying memories. Her thin, tender brushwork feels snug and dim.

Jeon digs up histories that were perhaps normal in the past and displays them as an event. Ordinary routines in <On My Way to Schoo>l and <Going Out> have faded over time, but they have become special events when she breathes new life into them. This is an exploration of the way that an event is remembered differently and documented in accordance with the differences of time and subject. The moments to which some French man lent meaning a long time ago are present again and deconstructed by the artist. While reconstructed images gain a new meaning, the previous meaning becomes blurred at the same time. She disassembles and deconstructs meaning lent by the subject in order to shatter the absoluteness of meaning. Each split image has become a freestanding individual, breaking away from its preexisting meaning. <Marseille Port> is a series making reference to this. Each little canvas itself is a work of art or they come together to make a whole. When they are each individual works, they don't have any special meaning, but multifarious interpretations are available as they become one. And we come to realize that the whole is shaped by each piece at the moment when one whole meaning is unveiled. What will happen if one changes their arrangement? Another scene will be revealed and it will have another meaning.

A title is a device to help us understand these comprehensively. However, the meaning the artist lends the work, namely the title, is fictional because we cannot check its inevitable relation with realities. After all, we become aware that any image has no fixed truthful meaning and the one who interprets the image fabricates its meaning. An object may have a completely different meaning when it is seen by another being’s eyes. And images can be differently interpreted according to each individual’s experience and emotion. The truth we realize is that there is no fixed meaning. The fixed meaning of a person in her work is deconstructed when the images of this figure repeat. She likens this to the art of doppelganger. Any repetition causes confusion in the value and meaning of the original images just as we cannot distinguish the authentic Sun Wukong from clones. With this we open up the gate of a new dimension. That is, even things that have their own value and authority like the originals may be constantly deconstructed and reconstructed. And the events left behind as memories or records are incomplete and cannot be depicted completely. They just remain as possibilities like the negative films that are not yet printed.

By Lee Soo, Art Critic