Hidden threads

Alejandro Castellote

Duality is not an easy concept for Western cultures to assimilate. The juxtaposition of opposites and their incorporation into the way we relate to life is rather more complex and profound than the stereotype we tend to apply to Oriental thought. The identity forged between the self and the world which stems from Taoist philosophy, for instance, differs from the Western concept of identity which refers to the intrinsic characteristics of an individual. For Taoism, identity means an equality in which humans and nature are part of a whole, whereas in the West, an individual’s identity emphasises how he or she is different from others. One word, two meanings.

This awareness of being different as an individual, of being at the top of the natural hierarchy, is what triggers the yearning for knowledge and autonomy: that sacrosanct individual freedom, self-awareness and, consequently, belief in the hegemony of one’s own thought and culture. This attitude is different to Oriental meditation where the dissolution of the ego is a necessary step to attaining the superior level of consciousness that enables us to meld with the natural world around us.

The three treasures of Taoist ethics—compassion, frugality and humility—are contained in much of the work of Bohnchang Koo who, paradoxically, has acquired a powerful identity making him instantly recognisable in the substantial panorama of contemporary creation. If we swap the word frugality for sobriety or minimalism, it fits even better into the contemplative philosophy which often underlines his series, especially those he has developed in the last twenty years. Concepts like honesty, fragility or modesty, which characterise him as a person, are clearly transparent in his images. It might be defined as a symbiotic relationship between the artist and his work, which unfolds in a dual manner, adopting forms and creating narratives which appear to be the antithesis of the spirituality emerging from the series that have brought him international recognition. We have only to return to his first works as a student in Germany in the early Eighties and to those he produced on his return to Korea, to observe that sadness, frustration, anguish and pain are also a part of his personality. These are the feelings which, over the years, Bohnchang Koo poured into motley, chaotic, fragmented images imbued with a kind of formal and compositional expressionism that was decidedly visceral. Coinciding at this time are Polaroid self-portraits, street photography, exploration of the body, performative registers, installations, collages and experimentation with different kinds of photographic techniques. Now, in the present, all these fragments help, firstly, to compose an as yet incomplete mosaic of his identity as an artist and, secondly, to illustrate the vast and complex territory of his thought and the dimensions of his engagement with life.

His self-portraits contain that melodramatic drive we associate with the construction of identity during adolescence and youth, and the need to show himself in the process, underlining his presence in the world and exhibiting his desire to take to the limit his opposition to being led down the paths along which society is seeking to push him. This series of one-off Polaroid photographs is reminiscent of similar work by Taiwanese photographer, Chan Chao-Tang, illustrating his anguish and craving for freedom during the military dictatorship that ruled his country. It is no surprise that Koo should include him in an exhibition—Four Hidden Photographers—which he curated as director of the Daegu Biennale in 2008. Empathy and generosity, both personal and professional, are two further traits of his multi-faceted personality.

Between 1991 and 2002, in his series In the Beginning, Koo developed a reflection on human fate and uncertainty about the future. He presents a man’s body as if it were a fragmented canvas, using pieces of sensitized paper sewn together with black thread. It is a metaphor of our own fragmentation, but also of the scars – the multiple orifices the needle has made on the photographic paper – which life leaves on our skin. These are not self-portraits but a body which alludes metonymically to all bodies. A symbolic territory which supplies him with fertile terrain so his feelings can spread like a rhizome. Every fragment is a single imprint, each set is a unique individual which plunges one of the essences of photography into crisis: its reproducibility. The series highlights the universality of his art and its simultaneity with the works of other geographically-distant creators like Americans Mike and Doug Starn (The Starn Twins), whose photography has an extraordinary formal synchrony with this series by Koo. Just a few years ago, Guatemalan artist Luis González Palma presented a series of printed portraits on fragments of rice paper, sewn together with red thread, which allude to the construction of identity, the multiplicity of ego and the wounds we stitch up as we go through life. From different and distant places come similar solutions. Here, it is not about influences, but about synchronic drives that do not always overlap chronologically. This leads us to ponder the recurring trend of cataloguing authors by country and culture as if they were airtight compartments. We should therefore add universality to Koo’s creative profile – also evident in the vast number of friends he has made all over the world, whom he has enriched and by whom he himself has been nurtured.

In 1985, Koo finished his studies in Germany and returned to Seoul. The reunion with his city felt strange to him. The dissolution of the Taoist tradition in Korean society produced a feeling of alienation. The city was no longer a familiar place. He was a foreigner in Germany and now felt an outsider in his own land. At this point, he began work on Clandestine Pursuit in the Long Afternoon (1985-1990), a series divided into four-photo mosaics (in Korea, the number four is associated with death, as it is pronounced the same as the Chinese character which refers to it). Made entirely in black and white, Koo sets up a dialogue between unrelated photographs. It is his way of approaching the “confusion” of finding oneself submerged in a chaotic flow of images. At the time, Seoul was facing a rapid transformation, with its sights set on the celebration of the Olympic Games, and was revealing a previously unknown nationalism and excess of ambition in its bid to emulate its role model, the United States. After the civil war, the changes in South Korea had a clear aspirational component, but speed and anxiety turned its capital into a stressed city, steering its population to a visible state of alienation. South Korea’s Taoist sentiment of taking time for oneself had taken the form of securing more time to work. As Bohnchang Koo sees it, Taoist sense of time in South Korea has merely become leisure. Interestingly, he coincides here with Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean philosopher, also trained in Germany, who looks at the process of self-exploitation in which we are immersed when we make work our priority and believe it to be the way to personal fulfilment. A kind of alienation of one’s self.

During his European stay in the Eighties, Bohnchang Koo travelled to different countries, taking colour photographs in the street. It is a habit he has continued to develop on his many journeys. Indeed, this exhibition draws essentially on his urban scenes, where neither the exact place nor the chronology matter. His gaze continues to dwell on the disarticulation between progress and the past, in surreal traces which reveal a latent chaos, common to all contemporary cities, whether it be Lima, Beijing, Tokyo, Paris or Seoul. He has the sensitivity to locate these signs in non-places in the urban landscape, creating a desolate poetics which voluntarily dispenses with the patina of beauty and the layer of empathy with what is depicted, that illuminates most of his series. His introspective process confronts the dissonance between his individual and his collective identity. As Lacan said, a subject finds his identity not within himself, but necessarily outside of himself. Awareness of identity only forms when a subject finds at least a part of his own self in the environment around him. This assertion can be contrasted with or complemented by that of Herodotus, who claimed, 2,500 years ago that we have gone out into every direction instead of entering into ourselves, which is where every enigma must be solved. In their duality, such perspectives are not incompatible, and identity, likewise, is not stable, but must be developed at every new stage in life.

That feeling of alienation, in the broadest sense, which Bohnchang Koo appears to have carried with him in his youth—both in Germany and Korea—is then expressed in explicit images during his European travels. It is perhaps a vestige of Germany’s Protestant iconoclasm where that which is written down has a definite value which exceeds the interpretative ambiguity promoted by certain images. Today, his urban photography continues to see the strangeness of those same places, but now talks less about the reality they depict and more about how they conceal it. Reality only appears as an imposture and as an imposter. They suggest a failed social project, quietly unveiling the alienation of individuals through their visual intermediaries: objects and scenes. The key to access their meaning lies not in what they represent or their figurative dimension, but is found “outside”, in Koo’s own memory and that of the spectator. Nor is it always accessible at all, because of the ephemeral and unstable character of individual and collective contexts. As Henri Bergson says in his book Matter and Memory, “there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we only retain a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images”. The marks left by reality are presented as masks which underscore the disarticulated fragments of the system, exhibiting them, not so they can be described, but so they can become metaphors and talk about other things. They operate as photographic ready-mades. All these visual metaphors contain a subtle veil of sadness, loneliness, decadence and confusion, which cuts across the different stages of Koo’s life and work. This formal transition in representation, which moves from the explicit to the symbolic, refers to his own maturity, to an interiorisation of Taoist duality, bringing photography into friction with its limits.

Of the themes running through his work, the passage of time and the ubiquitous decay preceding death are topics Koo has addressed from different perspectives right from the outset. Perhaps his most renowned series in this sense is Breath, produced in 1995 when his father was dying. These themes also permeate his most recent works, although the inexorable passing of time shares the spotlight with other issues, such as the review of the artistic and cultural traditions of South Korea, as in the Masks (Tal) and Vessels series. Both works put forward a kind of photographic taxonomy which connects critically with Korean history. The silent assertion of the identity of popular craftsmanship, usually accorded a lesser place in artistic practice, is especially significant. Vessels seeks to recover the authorship of those jars of irregular morphology, seized during the Japanese occupation. Koo’s Moon Jar vessels owe their name to the milky hues and forms of the porcelain enamel, redolent of the shape and colour of the moon. First manufactured during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), they were considered imperial ceramics during the fifteenth century. Many of these jars were then taken out of the country and sold to collectors and museums all over the world during the twentieth century. Bohnchang Koo has travelled to many countries to photograph them, struck by the stains and scratches which time has imprinted on their surfaces. Like elderly skin, marked and wrinkled with age. By patiently reuniting these jars in an exquisite photographic catalogue, he reclaims the identity of his culture and the value time adds to objects. A claim that adopts the dimension of a whisper, like the one that emerges from many of his meditative photographs.

His passion for collecting memory objects is split between physical ownership and that other kind of possession which is the capture of photographic images. Both methods are a way of expressing his respect for the past and the traces it leaves behind. This is another of the defining traits of his work and personality. Rather than the narcissistic exhibition of sensitivity found in the mannerism of some creators, Koo accepts that the coexistence of opposites does not constitute a contradiction, but is part of the natural order. From this perspective, the path of anguish management becomes easier to travel. This is the reason why his work increasingly erases his presence, making us feel empathy for those objects and their metaphorical settings without even asking ourselves about the hidden meaning they convey. Our memory and unconscious sensory experience provide the answer in the form of intuition, which is that which we do not know we know.