Hwang
Gyunghyun’s Landscapes: Facing the pharmakonic-logical overthrow
Kim Namsoo
(Dance Critic)
Translator by Art Concept
#1. “When
will the light be extinguished? / Perhaps darkness can be / more comforting actually/
that might be more liberating / life like filament (Segment sung by Kim Bum-soo
in the rap track “Filament”)
#2. “Light
is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light.” (Ursula K.
Le Guin, from her science fiction novel The
Left Hand of Darkness)
Here, in this city of Hwang Gyunghyun’s drawings,
the street scenes present a distinct characteristic. Perhaps this is not a street
in Seoul, but a nightscape of somewhere on Earth. The street grips the entire
city like a soot-like darkness. The pedestrians, folks indoors, people sitting
at the tables, and those exposed to darkness are all rendered into shadows. Perhaps
it is the other way around; perhaps the darkness has captured the street,
wringing the light from within the city. The light is being tortured. In any
case, all the passersby disperse towards an unclear existence the moment they
fade from sight, at which point the shadows appear to transform tacitly into
light again. It is a most uncanny sight, this serendipitous coexistence. As if
the light and shadows were always meant to be mutually compatible, the light
glows faintly only for the shadows to combust even more brightly. The resulting
visual manifestation is paradoxical, like some sort of photopsia. The conté
strokes in Hwang’s drawing directly affect such soft forms and shaky illusions
of the shadows. As can be seen, Hwang’s drawings particularly highlight the
dialectics between the lights and shadows molded from closed eyes or utter
darkness. The variable illusion of the drawing continues to operate without
interruption as long as the viewers peer into the drawing.
At one moment, the light seems to come aglow
all at once like a coiled serpent, only to lose its luminance in an instant as
if discouraged by the material feeling of the canvas surface. The repeatedly
blinking shadows also appear to be summoned by the very darkness whence they
originated. Yet just a moment later, rays of light from unidentifiable origins begin
to flood the street like spirits. When even the cosmic starlight from
lightyears away have grown dim, where do these lights come from? Have they
seeped in from the deep wells of darkness after hiding out in some corner of
the city?
The blinking lights in Hwang Gyunghyun’s
exhibition Animator appear dramatic
yet somehow nervous and anxious in the face of the power of darkness. Perhaps this
is due to the absence of the starlight transmitted from genesis and the
starlight of ethical foundation that illuminates our hearts. There is only the
cityscape to be seen, a city that is burning and in ashes at the same time,
while still maintaining its whole form. There is something unrealistic about it
all. Even so, the light, shadows, and the lurking darkness take the viewers by
surprise through their suspicious behavior. They collide yet assimilate with
each other, interchanging as if they were undergoing mutual osmosis. The
scenery evokes images of an insomniac alien wandering a foreign land. It’s like
walking towards a brightly lit night market without really knowing if the
experience is a dream, reality, or a dream within a dream. Having lost any
tangible substance, this mysterious spacetime comes creeping in the form of a
nightscape. The scene takes place somewhere either distant or deep down below,
settling into sediments that may perhaps appear in different colors. Here in
this abyssal bowel of the night, the strangers’ bodies are covered with shaking
lights and the shade of shadows. Each stroke of the conté is as rough and
wandering as atonal music. The routes are segmented and rejoined irrationally. Now
at this point, voices can be heard. It beckons, “oh light, even you are being
driven somewhere through the darkness. You kick off and fly, as if buoyantly
floating over the sea without a sturdy bed. Oh darkness, you are still, yet the
fastest, boasting your ‘speed of being.’”
Or is this a scenery of the anim? Anim here refers to
something sprite-like, something spiritual. Whether this work becomes light,
darkness, or some sort of medium in between, there are clearly spiritual
indications of the yin and the yang here. The artistic attempt to position such
multiple indicators is akin to the concept of yi jing (意境, “state of idea, aesthetic conception”) in
oriental painting. Ultimately, yi jing is
a mutually subjective landscape in which the objective world view of the
landscape joins the subjective world view of the xin jing (心境, “state of mind, mood.” This landscape exists
both inside and outside at the same time, reflecting a certain attitude
emotionally wounded from the scenery outside. Perhaps, then, what bides in that
wound can be referred to as the anim,
or other non-personified yet autonomous life forces such as mana, hau, kula, or gamang that recur in animist concepts. Without
a doubt, the black, white, light, color, metaphor, and material of this
painting oppose each other yet ultimately transcend into the state of
life-detecting poetics.
Through light, shadows, and darkness, Hwang
paints the landscape of the poetic elements of anim. This landscape is imbued with the judgment that the time of
modernity has been depleted while the center of gravity of self-consciousness
has vanished. With that special clock now out of order, a new mechanism to tell
time must arise. It is a subversive and decisive night.
Long are the hours of such nights for the
sleepless. Long are such roads for the weary.
The stains of lights and shadows in Hwang’s
work may represent the stance of the endless waiting or the transient stance
after everything is over but with nothing to come of it. The night stretches
out like a long highway, while the moment captured is like the darkness set
upon the eyes from being blinded by a flash of blazing light. Thus, under the
stains of light and shadows, the street testifies: “Our world must be born
anew. It is finally time for regeneration.” “Everything is over, but there are
no mechanisms to protect us from the temptations of life.”
This final night of modernity created by Hwang is vulnerable and
unfathomably long. Perhaps it hosts a hotel of infinity, depressingly filled
with endless rows of rooms. Short of breath, everyone wishes that anyone could
tell them that this too shall all come to an end. Such lonely, intangible
weight presses down upon this scenery, wherein similarly spontaneous rationales
are neutralized as quickly as their “speed of being.” In this irrefutably
dramatic night, the light and shadows prop each other up under the unconscious
material and immaterial impact of darkness that lingers in every corner of the
city. Darkness is the puppet master, hiding behind the façade of the
unconscious mind. With each pull on the string, the lights and shadows writhe
about until their extreme contact drives them to completely exchange their
phases with each other; the lights become shadows, and vice versa. It is like
the pharmakon; the beneficial can
become malignant, just as the malignant can be put to good use sometimes. Toxins
and medicines are two sides of the same coin, with each containing the whole.
Likewise, there is a taut tension like a burning filament between the borders
of light and shadows. This tension recognizes the pharmakon therein and soon expands, forcing each side to give way
to each other until they are ultimately switched over to the other side. It is
the inevitable realization of the improbable. This border feels like the
blinking filament before it is about to expire. Until it meets its eventual
demise, it is eternal. Therefore, Hwang makes the untouched white paper appear
to glow with blazing light or hold hands with the surrounding darkness
simultaneously.
#3. “So,
the speed of dark could be greater than the speed of light. If there always has
to be dark around the light, then it has to go out ahead of it.” (Elizabeth
Moon, Speed of Dark)
The power of darkness. The argument that
darkness has no speed, that it is merely an empty space void of light does not
float in non-Einsteinian amateur physics. Darkness is the most powerful.
The phenomenology of Hwang’s nightscape
suggests movement in darkness; as the city lights blindingly glow for a moment,
only to be seemingly caught up by the velocity of the dancing light yet also
commencing in the subtle but giant movements in darkness. The coy flow from
beneath that movement drives the conté powder to coat the light as creation, allowing
it to hatch. The night is a sort of an egg. The speed of dark presented by the
night in Hwang’s work incites all sorts of dreamy imaginations in the viewers,
leading them to believe that they have become poets. As we remain too confused
to see through this just yet, we merely and naively experience this as is.
Such transcendental image in Hwang’s work
gently overwhelms the audience while enabling them to experience the work
without having to use their thoughts. This somehow primordial yet urban, mythic
yet modern scene has already broken through its eggshell. Soon the picture
seeks all the way into the great earth lurking beneath the outer membrane of
this city, and even deep into the bare exfoliated flesh of the ground. It
shoves the groundlessness aside and digs in even deeper. The tendrils of the
charcoal appear ready to spring to cover the entire space from top to bottom,
and soon, the picture becomes night itself. Such is the way the night ambushes
the exhibitions space. It encompasses everything like in land art, just as the
night envelops the world.
How fast is the dark’s “speed of being,” that
it catches us off guard in the blink of an eye? This time, the dark vanishes
suddenly. Its place in the horizontal, left-to-right mural-like flow could not
be identified. The indicators of the sprits of yin and yang remain
unidentified, merely existing in their still status of “being,” enjoying the
fastest speed in cosmos with moderation. There are no interjections or any words
in between. They all join in along the way with their breath held, sticking
tightly onto the underbelly of the dark as if their lives depended on it. Yet,
the artists still take the rein over the indicators, offering a story written
in the language of darkness that whispers to the viewers from beneath the black
surface. Peering into the work, the viewers are mesmerized, as if possessed by
other spirits, engaging in the silence of the wild.
While the speed of dark in Hwang’s work at
first ostensibly appears like wanton explosion of light rays, a closer look
unveils that such light is already held in a “grip.” It is in such “grip-ness”
that we grow conscious of the spirits inhabiting the background of our world.
The lights and shadows of raving spirits are already beautiful patterns in
disarray, while the afterimage of the light burns within the darkness. The
painting is aware of the vertices upon which balance is achieved within its own
cosmos. At the very moment it deviates from the vertices, light and shadow
swaps their spots, floating around in the opposite domain.
Such vision of darkness exists in that painting, a darkness we have yet
come to know. Darkness is always there. In such context, dark is always there
before light. Hwang shows us that pharmakonic paradox. Oh Darkness, let there
be Light!