허진 Hurjin

Paintings from Absurdity, or Absurd Paintings

Shim Sang-yong (Art Critic)

Huh Jin’s Time, Its Cultural Shock In order to understand Huh Jin’s paintings properly, it is necessary to understand that not only their motives but also their ‘methods’ are not irrelevant to a series of history imposed by his time on his senses. In his book 《Personality》, professor Gorden Allport says that time, society and culture are combined to determine a sense of mission as well as styles for artists and that they provide the artists with not only the subject matters all to be depicted but also the methods of handling them. He further emphasizes that personality is determined by the cultural shock given to them. Of course, I do not mean that we should follow Cultural Determinism. However, we cannot find a way to approach Huh Jin’s paintings if we neglect his time and cultural shock (or shocking culture). Even 12 hours before I wrote this essay, 23 innocent kids had been burnt to death absurdly, and some 150 hours before then, Michael Jackson performed a variety show for the children in the global community, and (retroactively to some 200 hours before again) paintings worth 6 billion wons had been donated to politicians and A. Rodin of the Mediterranean had infiltrated into Seoul at last. We cannot but resist mentioning about such genuinely cultural(?) events as important. Unprecedented absurdities, ‘fast, fast’syndrome, spectacles, corrupt conglomerates and capital, globalization killing the sense of identity definitely... Looking back, the artist’s youth - and ours, too - started with the cruel May oppression and ended up with June 29 declaration when every possible concoction was mobilized. To us, culture has always been like that! Black lies and conciliations, vicious cycle of deceiving and being deceived, degraded history of politics, shameless capital and its parasites, and Most Revered Gang punished due to poverty and Mink Coat Lobby as an example of ‘not guilty because you are rich’, collapses of Sampung Department Store and Sungsoo grand bridge, explosions in Daegu and at Ahyun-dong... In a sense, we may be easily familiar with shocks as we are used to penicillin, and therefore, they might have become parts of our everyday life long ago. Despair is more dramatic in a process of false treatment. No-hae who has returned to the society which once tied him up declares suddenly that he is a spiritual sponsor of Suh Tae-ji. The names or titles or whatsoever which put up ‘the people’ in front of themselves are found in the lists of various award winners today. Tonsures continued one after another, but the tonsurers joined the National Assembly even before the hairs grew. Imprudence or shamelessness might be generously pardoned, but it is clear that an attitude has been formed by such an unbearable chaos as caused by them. We must confess that we can only be comforted by our history of sports represented by Chan-ho and Se-ri. Maybe, such an attitude towards shocks seems to be a more sheer essence than shocks themselves, and Huh Jin’s paintings at least agree to such a statement.

‘Accumulation without Exit’ I started this essay by mentioning about ‘Huh Jin’s time’ or a frame of his individuality, but actually it was an important fact. Lee Jong-soong has already explained his paintings as ‘separation and disintegration of the movements of men and history on the canvas’(1993), and Kim Bok-young labelled his paintings as ‘literal deconstructivism’(1998).I just wanted to refute such a deconstructivist’s view of Huh Jin’s paintings, or a customary reading of his paintings. If the view is of a limited phenomenology, the statement that Huh Jin’s images invoke a sense of deconstructivism may not be wrong. It may be correct that his images have almost always been assembled and disassembled, and that an irrelevant binomial confrontation has been frequently observed in each of them. Even if so, we may assume a position different from deconstructivists’ in consideration of some facts (which might have been overlooked). To conclude first, Huh Jin’s paintings are re-presentations of reality rather than deconstructive recomposition of reality. If we wish to understand his paintings better, we need to be reminded that deconstructivism was a starting point as well as the only reality in our modern and contemporary history. Look! our modern history from downfall of the kingdom through the colonial rule by the imperialists to the chaos about the trusteeship and our contemporary history from the Korean War to the IMF bailout program were characterized by lack of identity, fragmented sense of history, non-contextual accidents, globalism, etc. Various symptoms of the so-called deconstructivism were not the subjects of our discourse but our reality and conditions for our existence. To us, reality has always been fragmented without being arranged later. It has been an word deprived endlessly of signifie/signifiant as well as a dizzy aphorism of ideology/practice. In this context, Huh Jin’s behaviors seemingly professing deconstructivism are not deconstructed reality but re-presented reality. Heterogeneous things are registered, collaged equally, and overlapped regardless how much they are significant, which suggests that they are nothing more than re-presentations of the pathological phenomena of our society aiding and abetting the excessive inflow of the undigestable. Therefore, if Huh Jin’s works may be characterized by some palatable layout and composition, their original texts should be found not from his artificial deconstruction but from re-presentations of reality, namely layout and accumulation of ‘the things never lumped together’. Not from the voluntary deconstruction but from the accumulated reality perceived only as fragments. Furthermore, let’s pay attention to the concept of deconstruction that it is relative and conditional, too. Deconstruction should be preceded by a solid relational term, namely an orderly ‘converse’. The example is the golden age of enlightenment of which Habermas was reminded whenever he thought about an alternative. However,  no situation comparable to ‘pre-deconstruction’ as conversible term has existed in our modern and contemporary history. So, we cannot but raise a question for ourselves; “how on earth can we deconstruct the reality which has had neither form nor order, much less arranged? Thus, Huh Jin’s paintings should be understood not as formative manipulations of reality but as faithful readers of the reality or the deconstruction by itself. At this moment, let me take an example. The artist’s works produced around 1995 seemed to signify Samsung TV set ‘Beginning of the World’ and Hyundai automobile ‘Marcia’. He wanted to caricuture the trend that a bear does tricks but the sponsor collects the money or allegorize the economics of the Hollywood spectacles, or warn about the 21st century geo-politics of our global community predicted in Bosnia and made clear in Kosovo. Quite apparently, he intended to trace the conditions for his contemporary existence. His works were sympathies with the pain and accusations of it as well. However, Huh Jin’s images are too beautiful to be defined as painful, and too rhetoric to be dismissed as accuser’s heartless languages. They are pains but splendid pains, and accusations pleasing our eyes. At that time, the artist used such words as anger and thirst as topics, but his immoderate images too logical on the canvas to express excitement or anger would lead to an overfed awkwardness rather than thirst. His pain was beautiful and tearless one, and his accusations were most absurd ones not followed by a law-suit. Then, are all such things only an overissue of a syntax irrelevant to meaning? Are they improper uses of syntax or immature drifts between signifiant and signfier? Far from being so, I see that his images show the most valid syntax as well as firm coincidence between signfier and signifiant. The ground for my argument is simple but clear. In fact, our reality resembles his images. While semantics and syntax drift comfortably, everything acts doubly or triply. Let’s ask a question for ourselves. Is there a pain in our society at all? There is only an absurd and shameless pain. Pain and accusation which only acts on the condition that it will not disturb our shopping and appetite? Anyway, only the minnows - or the wing feathers - are accused. Thirst is concealed by GNP and rising/ falling stock index, while anger is sporadically handled only within the ghetto of aesthetics. Since our sociology is polished and lubricated to be sufficient always, both pain and accusation will dodge the truth pleasantly. 

An Uncontrolled Laugh from Absurdity The attempt to regard Hu Jin’s paintings as critical discourses about reality may have been motivated by some rampant perception of subject matters. Of course, Hu Jin tends to frown at his time driven mad by the delusion of power and wealth. And it is correct that he was determined to contain on his canvas all images captured in the net of such a viewpoint. However, we need to take into consideration not only the attributes of his objects but also their handling, layout and contextualization. 〈Anonymous Men - Modern 10 Longevity Symbols〉is a good example. Here, the symbols are dog, bowl, plastic container waste and sprayer. The long yearning for eternity might have been replaced with the short-lived everyday consumables. It is in the same context that the human history dotted with rises and falls is overlapped indifferently with 〈Animal Kingdom〉. Huh Jin’s figures who become more and more silhouettes or contours walk or run to some anonymous place, but their postures are all ambiguous with no sense of tension. Is the artist still invoking an escape from everyday life and present? Or does he dream of a flight from the earth being covered with dirty plastic containers? Anyway, the iconography of human beings or the subjects of escape and flight looks slow than swift. The motions in 〈Scud〉are slow quitely abnormally. Silhouettes wander or loiter slowly on the boundaries clearly divided by highlighted contours. In fact, Huh Jin’s figures always coexist on the ground of irony, and his past works where figures were treated as dead bodies were same. Biologically speaking, he depicted men like mummies, but their details were full of ironies. A shade of death was cast over the upper eyelids, while the lips were thick enough to look avaricious. The skin was completely corrupted, while the lower belly was still bulging. His past paintings showed some ironic rhetoric that avarice amuses itself on the iconography of dying, or that an atmosphere of funeral coexists with the most shallow motive of life. The die was not cast. The artist hesitates between escaping and staying, between life and death, between optimism and pessimism and between hope and despair. Here, his eyes are inevitably turned towards the rhetoric of absurdity itself. The result would be an uncontrolled laugh derived from undesired neutrality. The irony exists between desire of escape and inertia, between splendid pain and absurd accusation as well as in synchronization of pursuit and wandering, and in an uncontrolled laugh from such an absurdity. A tragedy handled in the most comic way, or the ‘absurdity’ of being sad but comically sad. An uncontrolled laugh leaks out of such an absurdity! Yes, Huh Jin’s paintings are motivated by a despair without exit, but they bring about an uncontrolled laugh or an inevitable self-ridiculing farce after all. If so, are the motives damaged? No, they are accusations. Accusation is the essence of painting. Such statements have continued to be reconfirmed in the history of painting beginning from Courbet and Daumier. The problem is that the paintings attempt to hold the justice of Supreme Court cheap in order to accuse the society seriously, and therefore, that they may fall down into third-class new-school dramas, trying to make the audience weep. A painting may accuse the world not as a serious judge but as the most absurd judge, and in the end, it may teach the society a logic through its own absurdity. A painting may invoke a pain through the most ironic situation rather than make tears well up in the audience. It is nothing but ‘an uncontrolled laugh from such an absurdity’ that we can meet from the symbols featured by Huh Jin’s images: rhetoric pain and accusation, ironic statements of escape and pursuit made out of obese body and awkward attitude, absurd and comic 10 longevity symbols represented by rhinoceros and elephant, toy-like small sets and instant beverage cans, and the tidy India ink surrounded by the milestones not playing their roles. The uncontrolled laugh which may well be regarded as a modern application of humor is an inevitable aesthetics of a time when a serious thing damaged cannot be replaced by another serious one.