Outside of the gray zone : Mihye Cha, Jin Han

 

 

Outside of the gray zone

: Mihye Cha, Jin Han 

2014. 04. 11 - 05. 31

Art Space Pool

Written by Eunbi Jo (Chief Curator, Art Space Pool)

 

Art Space Pool presents as its premier Pool production of 2014, the exhibition of Mihye Cha and Jin Han Outside of the gray zone: Mihye Cha and Jin Han (Apr.11- May.31.2014). Both artists discover with acute sense of view, the relation with the external world based on personal pain or experience and unique sensibility. Painting, drawing (Jin Han) and photograph, video installation (Mihye Cha) works including recent pieces extend the gap inexpressible in language, through formative expression.

 

Figures and landscpes that appear on their screen are commonly placed in uncertain time and space with no clue to lead the viewers. From these images ‘in the state of zero gravity’ where there is no concrete context or situation, we can find traces of wandering here and there. This attitude of seeking circuitously through the ambiguous borderline allows us to view the object from a sensuous dimension when perceiving invisible existence or state.

 

The Moment the Landscape Sings

If one tries to find a phrase that summarizes Jin Han’s attitude on art, it would be found from ‘The Flame of a Candle’ by Gaston Bachelard which the artist enjoys quoting: Every object on the table, each had its own faint halo. Her work lies in discovering the ‘halo’ created by distinctive movements found in the landscape, the object of observation. She discovers a sense of existence and manages to express it on a canvas. The artist had been observing her loved one’s long dreadful fight against illness and momentary became the witness of inescapable human tragedy and momentary beauty on each side of the simultaneity of life and death.

 

“The reason why I cannot take my eyes off of a landscape where the grasses and the rest of living things are yet to go asleep is probably because the realities to which I have intuitive perception of are ‘the moments when the most desperate situation in life is looked upon as wondrous.”

- From the artist’s note -

 

She remembers a specific moment of her childhood when she felt uneasy and nervous in front of a campfire which was dying down. Her strong fear of extinction that she felt then, now transformed itself to an active gesture that listens to the sound of the landscape. The active act of filling the ‘moments of nonexistence’ by constantly moving the wrist in front of the picture creates a musical rhythm. The neurosis of uneasiness and nervousness confers internal order on the canvas and makes a musical note. This process is, as the artist declares, like “a solo piece on the object of being drawn”. And this is close to a frank confession of an artist who faces the question asked in front of the canvas.

(...)

 

Outside of the gray zone

The works of Mihye Cha and Jin Han are outside and inside, reminding us of certain ‘dimness’ like a shadow. The common ground of both artists would be creating ‘images’ of the impossibility of distinction and suggesting shapes to the idea about the non-distinction. Samuel Beckett had expressed this gray-darkness with no distinction between darkness and light: “It is because there is not only darkness but also light our situation becomes inexplicable.” The gray as the empty space which is the base of all existence, is a vague concept difficult to define, to classify or distinguish. But this very characteristic allows ideas to sprout on the impossible distinction, thus determines the location of existence paradoxically. It means gray area can be the location. Therefore, the declarative noun announcing the title of the exhibition, the ‘outside’ of gray, penetrates the whole exhibition.

 

On the opening day of the exhibition, the roles of the audience and performer will be dissolved in and out of the venue. A performance combining dream images, ‘Position of the Dream’ (Mihye Cha), will be painted during the exhibition period, on the old wall of the storage outside the venue, making use of the trace left on the work, stimulating the artist’s imagination. It shows the starting context of Han’s art world, expanding from a specific object or phenomenon to the exterior, and further onto the relation with the others. The viewers would have emotional echoes in their personal contexts.