good old bridges

(Old Bridges Re-trodden, Hanyang University Museum, Seoul, 26 November 2009 - 17 February 2010)

'Bridge' is one of the words that have the most metaphoric usage. It implies both parting and meeting. A bridge connects two different parts, but also when you cross a bridge, this means you leave one place off for another.

The exhibition Old Bridges Re-trodden brings us to the past when our ancestors built bridges reflecting the poetics and philosophy of life putting emphasis on the spontaneous harmony with nature. This show presents the works of photographer Jinyeon Choi who has documented the cultural heritage of Korea for the last 20 years. Among his photographs those of different bridges are what this exhibition is organised with.

SALGOZZI BRIDGE (PHOTO: HANYANG UNIVERSITY MUSEUM)

The photographic show coincides with the launch of archaeological excavations in the areas around the Salgozzi bridge to restore it to the original state. Built from 1420 to 1483, the stone bridge was designated as a historic site by the city of Seoul in 1967. It is 76 metres long, the longest existing bridge of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), and is characterised by its simplicity making the best of stone shapes as they were, without artificial banisters and other decorations.

PROCESSION FOR THE FUNERAL OF SOONJONG, JOSEON'S LAST KING,
ON THE SALGOZZI BRIDGE IN 1926 (PHOTO: OHMYNEWS)

In this exhibition you can find photographs featuring various bridges in palaces, fortresses and temples as well as natural brooks and rivers in Korea. In most Korean palaces, there are streams on the way to the Royal Office, running at a spot chosen by topographical divination as propitious for keeping off evil spirits. Every Buddhist temple has a bridge over a stream at the entrance, embodying a passage from this world of suffering towards the Buddhist elysium. A bridge across a pond alongside a gazebo is also a typical element of traditional Korean gardens made by the reclusive literati.

A BRIDGE MADE OF BRUSHWOOD (PHOTO: JINYEON CHOI'S OFFICIAL WEBSITE)

Some of the photographs in the show are the documentation of old bridges that have now disappeared due to modernising land development, of different appearances of bridges before and after repair work, and of traditional folk games of treading on bridges to forestall misfortune for a new year. Choi’s images, resulting out of his consistent concern with Korea’s heritage at the intersection of culture and nature, may not strike your eye at first glance for he captures these bridges in his photographs with little artistic flourishes. These modest and unpretentious photographs nonetheless have an effect of highlighting the bridge as an architectural form that has ample room for metaphors of life.

photography, its craft and concept

The role of photography in the works of many contemporary artists has less to do with documenting realities but more with deconstructing them. Seoul-born London-based artist Ayoung Kim draws on the unique position of photography at the lived border of reality and representation

Kim is concerned with how we confront and consume 'news' as a fleeting spectacle. She makes news clippings, mostly about crime scenes, from newspapers, TV and the Internet, and visits to take photographs of their actual locations or the places that her imagination associates the news with. Using the prints of these photographic images, she constructs a three-dimensional photomontage set like a popup book, and then re-photographs the restaged scenes. The title of each photograph is taken from a news headline.

ACCEPT NORTH KOREA INTO THE NUCLEAR CLUB OR BOMB IT NOW, 11 OCT, 2006 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

MAN HITS BUS ROOF AFTER 70FT DEATH PLUNGE, 29 MAY, 2007 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

BRITISH TEACHER FOUND BURIED IN BATHTUB OF SAND, 28 MARCH, 2007 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

STAGE SET FOR THE ABOVE BRITISH TEACHER FOUND... PIECE
(PHOTO: 32ND JOONGANG FINE ARTS PRIZE)

The scenes that Kim's final photographs delineate are concrete and convincing but with an unreal or even surreal atmosphere. Kim's method of montage reassembles photographs into a stage set and flattens them out again into a photograph. From the process of montage in which fragmented realities are put together into a new spatiotemporal frame emerge certain disparities of meanings between what really takes place and what is represented. We are often drawn to news not as knowledge of the world but as a represented spectacle. What Kim stages is our unconscious treatment of news by making a montage from our own perspectives of seeing the world. The effect of her photographs comes into play by oscillating between the two-dimensional surface and the three-dimensional substance.

News floods everyday, and much of it does not remain in our mind for a lasting moment. Kim takes hold of a transient spectacle of news by putting to use the intertwined dimensions of photographs as documents, materials and representations. Swinging between two-dimensional pictures and three-dimensional sculptures, what the artist produces is a photographic site where the discrepancies between the world as it is presented and the world as it is represented are made observable. She creates a site of meditation on the transforming terms of photography through a chain of presentation and representation.

* CROSS - New World or No World (3rd Seoul International Photography Festival, 1 December 2009 - 31 January 2010)
* The Cinematic_Montage (Seoul Museum of Art, 6 June - 4 October 2009)
* Ephemera, Ayoung Kim solo show (I-MYU, London, 24 July - 15 August 2009)

One who was a painter, missionary and ethnographer

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the museum in Korea, and among a series of events to celebrate this is an exhibition Cosmos in brushstrokes: the life and painting of Jeong Seon held by the National Museum of Korea commemorating the 250th anniversary of the death of the artist.

Often called the patron saint of painting, and also Gyeomjae, a pseudonym meaning 'to cultivate oneself humbly', the artist Jeong Seon (1676-1759) is a household name in Korea as one of the most influential landscape painters in the 18th century. He is renowned as the first Korean painter of the time to break from the Chinese tradition of idealised landscape and to develop his own realist approach. Based on sketching from nature in which he immersed himself, though, his paintings do not depict scenery as he saw it but in a way that captures its genuine essence. It is said that Mt. Geumgang that he represented looks more real than what it actually is before our eyes.

One of the highlights in the exhibition Cosmos in brushstrokes is an album that consists of his twenty-one paintings in various genres. It was kept in St. Ottilien Archabbey in Emming, Bavaria, Germany for 80 years. In 2006 the German Benedictine monastery gave the album back to Korea. It was returned to St. Benedict Waegwan Abbey in southern Korea on permanent loan. The conditions are that it should be stored safely in a proper facility and that the Korean abbey, not the Korean government, should have the right over it. The album is being shown to the public for the first time.

PANORAMIC VIEW OF MT. GEUMGANG'S INNER PARTS
IN JEONG SEON'S ALBUM (PHOTO: KBS)

The paintings were taken from Korea to Germany in 1925 by Nobert Weber (1870-1956), the abbot of St. Ottilien Archabbey. He visited Korea in 1911 and travelled all over the country for four months. He was keen on exploring the life and folk culture of ordinary Korean people like an ethnographer, if for a missionary purpose. His attitude was in tune with salvage ethnography, lamenting that many traditional cultural forms had already disappeared under the Japanese colonial rule and assuming that his pen and photographs could seize the last moments of what would be disappearing soon. From the field travels, he produced a journal, drawings and 290 photographs, which were published in a 400 page long book『Im Lande der Morgenstille』in 1915.

In 1925 he paid his second visit to Korea accompanied by a cinematographer, and recorded different parts of the country in a black-and-white silent film with the same title as the book, which amounts to 15km rolls and 116min runtime. One of what this film features is a potters' village formed by early Korean Catholics who fled from religious persecution and became potters and pottery dealers for a living. The film also spares nearly 10 minutes for a traditional Korean funeral which was commissioned by Weber himself. He had been much impressed by the funeral tradition encountered in his first visit to Korea, and written about it in detail for 10 pages in his book. He came to spend a large sum of money in arranging a whole village people to re-enact its entire process for filming. We can get a sense too in the film how he and his missionaries tried to get on with and assimilate into local communities.

NOBERT WEBER(second from left) AND HIS COLLEAGUES TREATED BY LOCAL PEOPLE WITH INDIVIDUAL TABLES OF MEAL (PHOTO: KBS)

During this travel, he came to Mt. Geumgang, and dazzled by its natural scenery, he made himself drawings and watercolours. It was there that he encountered Jeong Seon's landscapes. In a hotel where he stayed, a Japanese art dealer put on display a good few paintings of Mt. Geumgang for sale. Whereas Weber did not like Japanese paintings that were highly stylised, he appreciated Jeong Seon's as representing the Korean landscape in a very Korean way. He saw Jeong Seon's pictures capturing the aura of the whole mountain, not at the expense of detailed depiction of the scenery's elements in each own true space. It is believed that he hence purchased Jeong Seon's paintings, and brought them with him when he returned to his homeland.

The Missionary Museum of St. Ottilien Archabbey is one of the ten museums in Germany which house Korean art. It maintains a separate section displaying about 400 items from Korea. The existence of Jeong Seon's album here was first reported to academia in the 1970s by Korean art historian Yoo Joonyoung. After realising the album’s value, the German abbey strived to preserve its original state. In the 1980s some moth-eaten parts were repaired through a Benedictine nun who happened to work in the Institute of Book and Manuscript Conservation of the Bavarian State Library in Munich, which resulted in its current binding in indigo silk. Despite the persistent interest of art auctioneers such as Christie's and Sotheby's in the paintings, the friendship between Archabbot Jeremias Schröder and Father Seon Jihun at the two monasteries contributed to its repatriation to Korea in the end.

This story around Jeong Seon's album cannot be framed in the simple dichotomy between, on the one hand, the European missionary or coloniser appropriating and orientalising Asian culture, and on the other, the colonised and victimised people who claim the right over lost cultural treasures. It underlines history not as a monolithic entity but which individuals act upon from different standpoints. The life of the album so far speaks volumes about cross-cultural history, and there will be a lot more in its life from now on.

* KBS documentary on the repatriation of Jeong Seon's album
* Cosmos in brushstrokes: the life and painting of Jeong Seon (National Museum of Korea, Seoul, 8 September - 22 November 2009)

Skin in between conceptual and physical

(Ultra Skin, Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2o August - 30 September 2009)

When a curator mounting an exhibition about our skin mentions Didier Anzieu's『The Skin Ego』, Steven Conner's『The Book of Skin』, Franz Fanon's『Black Skin White Mask』, the list of references clearly indicates that his or her exhibition does not treat the skin just as a physical part of the body. The exhibition Ultra Skin is a philosophical, socio-cultural and anthropological exploration of the skin.

Among what fascinated me in this exhibition first are the works of Korean artist Jaehong Kim who presents the body as landscape. When viewed from a long distance, his realist paintings appear to depict desolate mountainous areas, but a closer look at them reveals that these are human bodies scarred and scratched by canon balls or barbed-wire entanglements. The body is his father-in-law whose life went through Japanese colonialism, the Korean War and the ideological divide between South and North Koreas. Kim carved the historical agony and tragedy of Korean people and their land as wounds onto the bodyscape.

FATHER - FENCE SERIES (PHOTO: COREANA MUSEUM OF ART)

Another artist who draws on the body as his canvas is Chinese artist Ni Haifeng living and working in Amsterdam. In his photographic works, his own body is painted and embellished with motifs of blooms and tendrils typical of Chinese porcelain, and with a sailing ship and pages from a voyage journal of the East India Company. Hinting at the fact that china exported to Europe through the Company's colonial trades became a vogue in the-18th-century Europe as 'exotic' and 'oriental' artefacts, Haifeng identifies himself with Chinese porcelain in relation to cultural identity and displacement in the 21st century.

SELF PORTRAIT AS A PART OF THE PORCELAIN EXPORT HISTORY SERIES (PHOTO: ARTIST)

Together with the two artists shown in the section of 'site of social meanings', the works of eighteen artists are divided into seven sections, namely, 'skin and self', 'site of social meanings', 'surface and shell', 'communication medium', 'microscopic views', and 'skin colour - difference and discrimination'. They all call attention to the skin's tactility and transformability, seeing it as a social medium through which we make bodily contact with the world creating and mediating social relations and on which the notions of beauty, gender and ethnicity are invoked and inscribed. The artists tackle a variety of skin-related matters in various materials, taking the skin as their artistic medium effective in turning what are thought to be alien issues into more intimate ones.

The skin has capacity and complexity due to its simultaneous relationship to our body and the world. The skin's location at the threshold between the exterior and interior of the body often produces the metaphor of surface. However, in the works of the artists in this exhibition, its inbetweenness is not simply an envelope or covering of the body demarcating it from the world, but is a physical terrain itself. It is a contested zone between reality and our perception, bringing to the body a sense of identity and territory defined and negotiated in the world. Furthermore the intensely porous experience of the world through the skin leads to a cornucopia of the ways of viewing and mapping the world in both cerebral and visceral terms.

The venue of this exhibition is a museum of a cosmetics company that is supposed to promote the romanticised skin under the banner of such taglines as "The skin is where a lady's power comes". For a corporate museum to throw food for thought to society through an art exhibition like Ultra Skin can be complimented as one of the ways to make good its social responsibilities. A final note, though, should address the exhibition title, which seems to me not to fully deliver its theme. An adjective seems missing between 'ultra' and 'skin'. Might the omission have been purposeful on the curator's part? Perhaps not. Still, it would be interesting to try coming up with a candidate word on your own: 'versatile', 'subjective', 'abstruse' or anything else?

When the museum is an aesthetic technology

(Desire and Anesthesia, Kyungah Ham, Art Sonje Centre, Seoul, 22 August - 25 October 2009)

Artists who deal with the museum as a medium and a subject matter for their art are anything but a rare breed. This art practice can be traced back to the 1960s when what comes to be called 'institutional critique' emerged. In the early days of institutional critique, the artworks of the kind were marked by a temporary act of artists intervening into the collection, architecture and behind-the-scene routine of museums, often employing the trope of parody. Their purpose was to put the museum in the condition of an object of critique, to disclose what was normally hidden to the public view but embedded in the workings of the museum.

What artist Kyungah Ham wishes to manifest in her solo show Desire and Anesthesia is related to the idea of institutional critique. From a critical stance, she performs in her own way what huge Euro-American museums did. Over the last decade or so, she has stolen arguably petty things such as cups, dishes, knives and spoons from restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, airplanes, etc. in different places around the world. More precisely speaking, she stole a thing from one place and swapped it out for a similar thing from another. For instance, she secretly took away a cappuccino cup from the Starbucks Coffee in Korea, brought it to London and stealthily swapped it for a likewise coffee cup from Caffè Nero in London; she swapped a disposable plastic cup from in-flight conveniences of Air France for a gilt-lined ceramic cup from a Korean restaurant. These things that she has stolen or 'collected' are now exhibited in the form of a museum display. Inside a reflective spotlit glass case, the mock-museum display follows a typological method that places the same type of objects together. The aesthetic effect that the whole installation named Museum Display produces is so striking that the identity of these objects seems transformed from artefacts to artworks, and the history of a series of theft seems sanitised.

MUSEUM DISPLAY (PHOTO: WEEKLY HANKOOK)

MUSEUM DISPLAY (PHOTO: ARTIST)

The stolen collection is also featured in Ham's photographic works. In Switched Stolen Objects the photographs she took of each moment of her swapping acts are accompanied by text raising a question about the renowned museums, mentioning the Elgin marbles from Greek Parthenon kept in the British Museum in London, the Buddhist manuscript Jikji from the-14th-cenury Korea (the world's oldest print produced by movable metal-types) kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, for example. Steal Life Series consists of photographs in which Ham's objects are staged on a table like the-17th-century Dutch still lives, alluding to the period ethos in search of material abundance through colonial trades.

STEAL LIFE SERIES (PHOTO: ARTIST)

According to the artist's statement, the exhibition's title Desire and Anesthesia implies that the desire for power and wealth often deadens our guilty consciousness when we commit certain wrongful doings. When it comes to the museum, the title indicates the extent to which we are made to be indifferent to historical violence and plunder that the desire of those museums has caused because those behaviours are veiled under the pretense of art and culture. So, is Ham's art stimulating enough to get us awakened out of our insensibility to injustice?

The once avant-garde projects of institutional critique are now being picked up by many museums themselves in pursuit of self-reflection and reformation. It is not too much to say that to embrace the artist’s work that is critical of the museum has blossomed into a full-blown museological practice. This surely does not mean that the mega-museums have taken sufficient measures to perfectly straighten out the aftermath of their histories entangled in colonialism; there still remain the vested interests of the museums which cannot be legitimised. At least apparently the museums try to profess readiness to open themselves up to critical voices and to find a way to engage with the communities concerned. Along the changing attitude of the museums, the nature of artists' critique of museums has also shifted from merely revealing the problems of museums didactically to revealing that diverse perspectives are intrinsically intertwined in the museum undertakings.

In this respect, Ham's works are perhaps too straightforward to be of critical force. We all know that the possession of the Parthenon marbles and Korean manuscripts by the European museums is problematic. Her works of art seem to not really provoke issues regarding the premises and practices of the museums in an insightful way. What is rather brought into relief in Ham's art is her own act of stealing 'non-precious' things in the license of art that is intended to be controversial but ends up being a gentle parody of the museum. Furthermore, in the white-cube space that is nothing to do with what her critique turns towards, her art is in peril of being shown to appropriate the visual aesthetics of museum displays. While the artist's intention to criticise the big museums' misdoings runs out of steam in the gallery space, what nonetheless intrigues me in her works, particularly Museum Display, is that she demonstrates the museum as a kind of technology. Ham's consistent gathering seemingly trivial things and displaying them in an incommensurably aesthetic manner poses a question as to which is worth a place in the museum and what counts as knowledge in there. She performs the mechanism of museums that transforms something into what deserves the viewer's attention. This is effectively embodied in her material collection of everyday objects exhibited in the specific spatial composition, which makes her art operative as a commentary upon the museum.

Strolling through a forest of wonder

Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur-director renowned for his meditative and naturalist films like Where is the friend's home, Taste of cherry, The wind will carry us, sometimes presents himself as an artist and photographer. In 2005, he transformed one of the galleries in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London into something forestal. Titled Forest without leaves, the room was densely populated by tall pillars as tree trunks, and visitors were encouraged to enter this walkthrough installation. The trees were made up of huge hollow tubes completely wrapped up in life-size photographic images of bark, and were raised from the brown carpeted floor. Bringing nature into culture, Kiarostami poses a question as to what it means to bring things to the museum. By means of trees without substance, he might have noted that the museum is an artificial environment. The artificiality is not necessarily discreditable, though, when we lose our curiosity to observe attentively things around us. If things are framed and placed in the museum, we often regain the capacity to take a closer and more in-depth look at them.

FOREST WITHOUT LEAVES, ABBAS KIAROSTAMI (PHOTO © MUSEUMSCAPE)

Kiarostami’s use of forest echoes a fundamental element of interactions between the museum space and its spectator. The museum is a forest that holds mystery and discovery. Just as you should attend to space between lines when you read books, you should walk the space between exhibits in the museum that is as significant as the space that exhibits occupy. It is thus no wonder to find that a museum draws on the composition of forest, both as a metaphor and as an actuality, in structuring its space to provoke a sense of mystery and discovery, which is the case in the Hermès Museum in Seoul. This museum is part of the Maison Hermès Dosan Park, the luxury brand’s fourth flagship store in the world. Along with shopping areas, the store has an art gallery called the Atelier Hermès, and a museum named the Promenade.

PROMENADE AT THE HERMÉS(PHOTO: MARU)

The Promenade takes the form of forest designed by art director Hilton McConnico. It is constituted by columns sheathed in vibrato leather, which hints at the original specialty of the Hermès as a harness workshop. Whereas Kiarostami's trees were hollow, the leather-clad trees in the Promenade contain glass cases, and through the windows, we can look at exhibits inside the trees. What is displayed here comes from the historic collection of the Hermès. There are Hermès goods produced since the 19th century, such as a model pair of calfskin doll gloves made in 1938 which the city of Paris presented to the Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret of the UK, and a mini Mangeoire Corde in white swift calfskin from the S/S 2005 collection based on the Mangeoire bag made in 1949. There is also what the Hermès family has been collecting for inspiration. The collection ranges from a bronze horse statue of the Hellenism period, a dragon-engraved saddle from the 15th-century Tibet, a Parisian saddler's signboard called St. Eloi's Bouquet in the 19th century, shoes for mower-pulling horses made in Scotland in 1860, an iron spur with eight silver-inlaid arms from the 19th-century Mexico, and Japanese artist Takehiko Sanada’s sculpture made of horsehair in 2002. While strolling through the immersive forest, your view of the Hermès may move from a desire for a luxury brand to an interest in the workmanship of people who have established and developed what comes to attain the current standing of the brand. It is as if the historical collection in the basement symbolically props up what is going on with the Hermès today.

In a way, the Promenade greatly contributes to making the whole Maison Hermès as a museum-like place. After staying in this ethereal blue-green forest, go up to the Atelier Hermès and you will find changing exhibitions of cutting-edge contemporary art which the Hermès foundation supports as an art patron. Particularly when the Atelier puts on artworks produced site-specifically to the Hermès space, such as Daniel Buren's Filtres colorés: travail in situ (2006) and Jim Lambie's Nervous track (2009), the entire building, whose exterior is coated with serigraphic stripes of gold copper, becomes a work of art itself. All these spatial dimensions together with the artistic display of goods add up to the Maison Hermès that creates an impression of grandeur and refinement. What it thereby tries to attract is not merely consumers' money but their cultural mind. Don't be kept away on the ground that you are not well-off enough; you don't need to purchase an Hermès. Take "maison" as "musée" and simply enjoy the luxury of making your own discoveries from the forest of wonder.

FILTRES COLORÉS: TRAVAIL IN SITU, DANIEL BUREN (PHOTO: YEIN SCHOOL)

NERVOUS TRACK, JIM LAMBIE (PHOTO: THE KOREA TIMES)

Skyspace in earthly grounds

(Skyspace, James Turrell, Shuim Museum, Seoul, 9 October 2008 - 5 January 2009)

James Turrell's Skyspace has been sited in diverse circumstances such as a deer shelter in Wakefield and a Quaker meetinghouse in Houston, not to mention many prestigious art museums. In each new place, the master of light and space has produced site-specific manifestations of his Skyspace. Turrell comes to another enchanting location, this time at the heart of Seoul, a huge metropolitan city studded with skyscrapers. It is a museum of funerary art called the Shuim Museum. This small museum is perched on the hillside overlooking the hustle and bustle of city roads and facing the scenic view of Mt. Inwang not far off, and the museum’s courtyard is where Turrell has placed a container box as a freestanding chamber for Skyspace. Entering this room, you can see nothing but wooden benches on all four sides, and an aperture in the ceiling. What you are invited to do here is simply to sit and view the sky through the hole overhead. At first glance, the rectangular opening presents a sort of two-dimensional canvas on which the sky portrays a spectrum of colour that changes with time and weather. The sky drops down to the same plane as the ceiling, and the vast depth of sky is flattened and framed. There is, however, more to what Turrell encourages visitors to do than the aesthetic appreciation of the sky at a certain distance. A clue for the more fundamental dimension of Skyspace can be found in what the Shuim Museum is for.

SKYSPACE, JAMES TURRELL (PHOTO © FLORIAN HOLZHERR)

The word "shuim" means 'rest' in Korean and the Museum specialises in material objects used in traditional funerary rites. The centrepiece of its exhibits is a wooden hearse to carry a coffin to a graveyard, and a small sedan chair to enshrine a memorial tablet. In the traditional Korean society, there used to be a hut called "gotjeeb" where funerary items were kept after use. While people tended to shun the "gotjeeb" because those materials were regarded as haunted by spirits, the Shuim Museum is a place to draw visitors to. Surprisingly enough, its director lives here. The three-storey museum is originally her private house built in a French manor house style. She turned her sweet home into a museum about death by showing her collection of funerary art to the public. You might think that the director is rather idiosyncratic in that she not only collects things for the deceased but also brings them into her living space. When you look at the museum exhibits, you would be again impressed to discover how visually splendid these death-related material objects are. It is partly due to the aesthetic way the curator displays them in a living room, in a dining room and even in a bathroom, but basically these objects are themselves colourful and amusing. The hearse, for example, is decorated with various wooden figurines, depicting people, animals, flowers, and mythical beings such as dragons, phoenixes and goblins, all of which are flamboyant in colours and forms with a witty and humoristic flavour. They were believed to keep the dead person company driving away demons and to protect the soul as it makes its way from the earthly world to the next world. As anthropologists have found out in different societies of the world, the emphasis of funeral traditions in many cases is laid on transition rather than separation, which is also the case in the Korean customs. The traditional Korean way of performing a funeral is derived from the notion that afterworld is not entirely severed from this world. It is out of this view that the hearse takes the form of a palanquin as a carriage from life towards afterlife, and simultaneously takes the form of a house as a temporary residence for the journey. The overall funeral is also a ceremony of contemplating upon not only mortality but also vitality in the atmosphere of solemnity and festivity at the same time.

HEARSE DISPLAY IN THE SHUIM MUSEUM (PHOTO: WEEKLY DONGA)

What resonates with Turrell's intention of engineering Skyspace is that the Museum holding materials for the living and for the dead all together is a spatial entity that facilitates perception beyond usual operation in a kind of interstitial state between the ordinary and the transcendental. His work is meant to be taken in silence and over time. Your first observation might be flat sky, but if you continue to watch the sky across the roof for a while, you begin to realise that the sky comes closer to you, and you are made to feel as if the sky is not something out there but embraces you as part of it. This heightens your own sense of being present in space and time. The purpose of Turrell’s art lies in the very immersive experience, not in only visual one, which engages the whole body. He makes his cube a vehicle to transport you into the continuous plane between the celestial and the terrestrial, and a platform to deconstruct usual ways of bodily perception. The spatial structure might look too simple to bring up such big questions as those about nature, eternity, sublimity, etc.; it might not necessarily evoke spiritual awakening in view of the Quaker ritual practice of "going inside and greeting the light" that Turrell deeply relates to. At least, the enclosure imposes some physical confines on your perception in terms of space and time, which ultimately frees you from being bound to everyday mundane realities. If reminded of its location at the Shuim Museum that is all about life and death, the opportunity of pseudo-meditative practice Turrell provides is all the more potent. The site-specific resonances could lead you to acutely observe the moments when the presence in space is turned into its lived experience inside your body in the flow of time. Turrell is a master because he materialises this in the most minimalist way; besides, he chooses a perfect place for it.

* Shuim Museum http://www.shuim.org/