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Hyun, Jung-Ah, cell embryo with seed, litho, 2002 | | |
Secret of Pandora
-Archive of time in a bottle
When I was a child, the laboratory at the elementary school used to be a space of wonder and fantasy where lines of labeled glass bottles stood in the cabinets. Those bottles containing fish, beetles, rabbits, and some unrecognizable bodies were stood still there then. Space of exhibition of Hyun, Jung-Ah, that represents the archive by collecting, preserving and classifying, gives us an impression as if we were in a laboratory such as. Recollecting the childhood's dream to be a "scientist", you look at her works and find cells, a scene from an episode of Greek myth, a faded photo, a lost toy being stuffed with time. And, like time being piled up, the bottles are arranged in layers as a vertical construction.
While we follow a way this construction guided us to, our memories of the laboratory suddenly leap to issues of this age, to our reality.
-Space of exhibition turned to be the box of Pandora
"The realm of God", as religious world keeps warning, area that shouldn't be touched nor opened nor peeped, has begun to be dissected by modern science. Human passion for science and technology, challenge for a new goal, a new hope on the one hand and a failure on the other appear on the structural aspect of Hyun, Jung-Ah's work vertically built up with individual stories. By designing a structure which seems stable and perilous at the same time, he shows wonder and dangerousness of the structure made by many social specimens in which we human are situated now. Bottles sealed individual times and stories within themselves are sometimes put in cubic boxes. Spectators in front of a installation, consist of boxes with one open side each stood to different directions, are to move around the work and observe.
Like Pandora who opened the box in spite of the prohibition, modern science opens a lot of boxes earlier forbidden to open by religion and society. And like Pandora had to pay for her curiosity, we've cost humanistic imagination, romantic fantasy, and other things for the new. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, we lost the rabbit and the cinnamon tree imagined to live there since early times. The artist warns us of the desolateness, moral problem of this exclusively-science-oriented age. The space of exhibition that contains stories of the artist is the box of Pandora and we never know what's in it until we open it. Spectators opening the door and entering into the space of the exhibition become Pandora at that moment.
-Hope that remains in the box of Pandora
After Pandora blew away every false things to the world, there remains a hope on the bottom of the box. Thanks to the hope, we can overcome hatred, anger and frustration. The basic unit that consists the life, cell is something micro, but involves many possibilities for future as the first of life.
Hyun, Jung-Ah put this micro unit of life in a bottle and labels it "hope". She wishes this cell to reproduce infinitely to become a new individual of hope, to motivate to regenerate the humanistic imagination. She hopes for a fantasy of creative source that not merely realistically records our life but makes it rich and meaningful: the infinitive reproduction of hope-cell. Just like speaking for that, her cell reproduced through print hung on the wall. A reproduction for warning of reproduction, is this a coincident? or an obvious intention? If I ask you, what is your answer?
Joung-Hoon Lee (Art Studies · Seoul Foundation for Art & Culture) |
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