Boo Sze Yang Journey to the West V Journey to the West V, digital print on photo paper, 55 x 35 cm 2004

gallery zandari 370-3, Seokyo-dong, Mapo-gu 121-838 Seoul Korea (Republic) (city map) Send E-mail tel +82 2 323 4155 www.zandari.com

Landscapes in the Mist

A characteristic, paintings by Boo Sze Yang in this show have in common, must be the simultaneity of multimages layered on canvases. On the lowest layer of each paintings, images selected from the western traditional Masterpieces -such as Sleepers by Courbet, Blond Odalisque by Bucher, Michelangelo's David, Hercules Farnese, images from Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still series, and even a character from a Japanese animated television series Oh My Goddess!-are reproduced in a way that makes them look like blurred photo-images. Then, above those images, line drawings illustrating scenes from the famous 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West and identical images of a gigantic hand are overlapped. And finally on the utmost surface of the canvases we can find waterdrops running down as if on an invisible sheet of glass or dots-actually small circles when closely observed- scattered like constellations. The reason we need some time to get a certain impression of these paintings is that they demand such condition of viewing as we have to keep readjusting focus on each layer of images to recognize exactly what is represented there.
It was when, in history of western art, painters were getting realized that grasping distant and close views at the same time as they usually had done in a picture created and ordered by the central perspective is empirically impossible, that they started to take pains over the problem of the depth of pictorial space. Ever since the truth that a space of the central perspective is after all an ideological space, is realized, the problem how to overcome such a Catesian space has also become rather ideological or political than aesthetic one. Hence the necessity for remarking the identity and background of our artist: a Singaporean UK-educated modern-i.e. western(ized)- artist.
Let's looking at Journey to the West ? shortly. On the lowest layer of the images hardly recognizable Courbet's Sleepers is appearing – or perhaps disaapearing. Over that we see linedrawings in black or white, which illustrate one or two scenes from the novel. Above all those there is an image of a huge hand, enlarged and printed to make Benday dots noticeable. This very hand appears rather frequently on Boo's canvases, often reversed, enlarged, or rotated. It seems the original owner of it used to be Michelangelo's Adam in the Sistine chapel, who reaches his hand to that of God. Also reversed, enlarged, and rotated in a 90-degree arc, thus decontextualized hand, however, rather looks belonged to Buddha who made Sun Wukong smart for his self-indulgence. The monkey king, next to this hand, running away, is a part of the above-said linedrawing. Here we witness an odd encounter of two layers of images, play of meaning that makes Adam and Buddha interchangeable. But this kind of connection is not supposed to be arranged coherently. There also is another image we cannot easily locate on a network of meanings, so that remained apart: Courbet's homosexsual couple.
What matters here is not a surrealistic association of images and meanings, but the simultaneity of possibility and impossibility of taking a position in this, so called, post-colonialists era, with a memory of and still-remained reality of colonization. It is the dilemma of being an artist who is at the same time a Singaporean and a citizen of globalized Empire (something we, Koreans share with him) what is expressed on the layered images of his canvases. The order of layers mean nothing. That titles of his paintings come sometimes from the image at the bottom, other times from the one on the top seems to show us the intention not to privilege any certain layer.

In a movie Landscape in the Mist by Theo Angelopoulos, an enormous hand cut from a statue of one of leaders of deconstructed socialist system appears all the sudden in the air hung to a helicopter. The owner of the hand provably used to be Lenin, but in a context of film history that image succeeded the one of the statue of Christ, also hung to a helicopter, flying over Rome in one of two Fellini's early 60's masterpieces, La Dolce Vita . The floating–not appearing in splendor of divine solemnness- fragment of deconstructed ideology in the air doesn't necessarily mean a beginning of nihilism. If we could, freed from both delusions that the world can be coherently ordered under a single center and that the old center must be replaced to a new one, learn how to actively accept and maybe even participate the endless play of changing seat among multi-perspectives between the national and the global, the inner and the outer, etc, landscapes in the mist might come out as the countless possibilities. Boo Sze Yang's Magic-Eye-like canvases, demanding constant readjusting focus, could be read as one good instrument to show that kind of our current circumstances.

Chung Yookyung (Art History · Lector of Sungshin Women's University)

Boo Sze Yang's solo exhibition takes place in the style cube Zandari www.zandari.com from 15th Nov. to 29th Nov. 2005.

He is a painter from Singapore and a professor at the Nanyang art academy (university course) located in Singapore.

At 4:00 pm, SAT. 19th NOV, The artist's talk with Boo will hold at the style cube Zandari.