Kunst Forum Berlin Home
Ausstellung Paradoxical Landscape
Artist: Kyungchul Shin
3 - 18 Oct. 2020 Öffnungszeiten Do - Sa 16 - 19 Uhr
18.Oct Open Air Concert 3 pm
Artist: Kyungchul Shin Paradoxical Landscape Vague indications of forests or lake-lands rising from memory to the surface of the canvas, flat like reflections on the windows of a car or train, Kyungchul Shin’s “Paradoxical Landscapes” shimmer in an uncertain state. At first glance they seem the result of abrasion, the surface weathered away to reveal another material beneath. As such the surface of the canvas itself is the terrain and the landscape is sculptural, the regular ridges of the paint strokes like furrows in a field the textures ever more prominent in the otherwise implacable flatness. Another early impression is that of photographs such as those taken as a replacement for looking, because the recognition of the eternity of nature is suddenly overwhelming. The camera is pointed out towards the smearing landscape outside the window of a moving vehicle, photos more of a feeling than of a place, photos which reveal how different the camera mechanism is from a human eye. The moist eye is connected to the heart of the observer, while the photographic lens is merely lodged before the film or image sensor. Again, the crushing flatness of the technical image, brings out the dimensionality of our lived lives in gross contrast. The flatness, which has no equivalent in Nature, is able to stand in for, or, increasingly to replace Nature. This is the exquisite paradox in the conventional landscape, which emerged, as John Berger long ago observed, with the enclosure of the commons and private ownership of land. Land is reduced to a legal contract, lines scratched on paper. Shin’s landscapes seem to refer in this way to an encoded, de-natured domain, the terrain they evoke is the surface of a screen, of a mirror, an image sensor or of celluloid. This is landscape of the hyperindustrial condition where land has become a metaphor, and proprietary codes pervade the apparatus which produces every image. These are Hegelian landscapes in that they appear as the negative of gently interchangeable and homogenous pastel tones meant to soothe the surfaces of domesticated space. These rectangles of glowing hues bulge from the walls like lamps with nostalgic printed shades. They indicate Nature by its absence or negation. Unlike before, as Vilém Flusser observed, we went outside to exchange and be informed and went home to think and analyse, today we go home to exchange and be informed and go outside to think. Implied here is that the landscape is no longer the subject of contemplation but a context for introspection, for reflection. There is an ambivalence about these images, as if the photograph failed to reproduce what was intended and yet stubbornly refuses to be empty. Image technology cares less about what is in the image, than that an image is produced. But this emancipates the image, as was observed in the earliest photographs, to display not only space but time as well. The aleatory became the prize. The moment, faster than anyone could ever paint, the crushing flattening of time which only apparatus can produce, reveals us human beings as slow and as heavy with history as planets, biology merging with geology. Shin’s landscapes truly are like those which resurface from the past, as scenery in dreams, inchoate, with various memories seamlessly associated through the function of the unconscious, or some database analysis. Like an incomplete digitization, emanations of information, just enough to recognize something, produce a patina of meaning on a mood. Then becomes evident the significance of the single pigment uniting all the paintings of the series, the lustrous silver which picks up ambient light in the room and even indications of our own presence. We appear as nature in the surface of Shin’s landscapes. Our world worn through and through, through modernity, so inscribed with human activity that it becomes itself as Marshall McLuhan once claimed “an artwork” flips us out of our cognizant observer status into that of unconscious performers, our sentiments shimmering timorously on the verge of insignificance. The landscape paintings are paradoxical not only because it is we who have become the subject, but also that they are no longer static images, but sculptural, performative pieces which respond to the room and to the observer. In the Anthropocene, human activity becomes a force of nature, and that which we used to behold as other is ever more admittedly as inside of us as we are in it. We become the archetypal landscape of a million years before humanity existed, which we can only dream. For it is through the dream that the radical unity of ourselves and the planet becomes communicated uninhibited to our perception.
Dr. Baruch Gottlieb October 2020