#more zoomed out angle under the cut. you canNOT make me do every form of this fucking thing

[front-facing-pokemon]

#more zoomed out angle under the cut. you canNOT make me do every form of this fucking thing #there's too many of them. this is gonna be a minior play-it-by-ear type situation. too many forms! too many forms #alcremie #i know it's alcremie but i always Want to spell it alcrémie for some reason #even though i think flabébé is the only pokémon with a diacritic in its name. despite the fact that the name of the series‚ pokémon‚ #is widely known for having a diacritic in its name

[junsojung-text]

“Kiss me Quick” by Sojung Jun Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Senses

Sohyun Ahn (Independent Curator)

As I go up the stairs traversing the café rather overly decorated with flowers, I encounter the glass door of the gallery. On the right of the door, it reads “ß” indicating left and “Gallery”, under which are shown the symbols prohibiting filming, recording, telephoning, eating and contact. Basically, in this space, only visual is allowed, meaning I have to put all my auditory, gustatory, and tactile senses to sleep and never use any means or tools to remember any images.  I think to myself that the arrow sign is not really necessary and that there are so many “NO” signs. A place that erases all the senses other than visual, interferes with our memory and excessively controls our experience… I am not just talking about this space, but most exhibition spaces are like that.

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The title of the exhibition is “Kiss me Quick”. The silhouette of the title’s type is very uneven, as if it had been zoomed in from an analog printing material. Maybe the letters were not cut out well, which explains the infiltration of other letters. Anyways, “Kiss me Quick” is a name of a cocktail mixing red fruit juice, apple juice, and sparkling water, etc. with vodka as base. Come to think of it, the sixth floor of the SongEun building is occupied by a vodka company. I imagined for a second the sparkling red bitter and sweet taste in my mouth, but I soon put aside my gustatory sense since it was banned in this space. [kısmıkwık]. It is a repetition of an aspirated sound “k” and short vowel “I”. I found it even awkward to say it out loud in an exhibition hall, but the sound of the title is surely piquant and sparkling. Given the fact that the title was named after a cocktail, it is like a self-contenting sound, just like scat in jazz. There are many cocktail names out there that are overly simple and infantile associated with colors and tastes of the liquor. Red lip or sweet kiss is a very banal description, but if the taste can be felt while pronouncing the word, then the titles seems to be appropriate. Now, I decide to put behind the thought of taste and focus on “looking” around the exhibition.

A dimlight is shed upon musical score no. 5. It’s a score for stringed instruments that was hand-drawn and cut into pieces and reassembled. So much traces of a hand for a music score. Also, phrases like “tap strings with the bow”, “with the high pressure of the bow” reminded me of sounds that clang like a percussion instrument or movements of the bow bouncing back and forth from the strings, even though I am a laymanin stringed instruments. The arrow in the score seems to indicate the flow of the music. However, this arrow, unlike the unnecessary one next to the “Gallery” type at the entrance, is very disruptive in its own. The performer can surely know the order of the next music with this arrow, but he or she doesn’t have to perform in the same order. The arrow transforms this musical score into a completely different one, from all the other scores premising a safe, parallel connection. No wonder I felt like I had to move to another place after playing a piece of this score, if I were to accurately play this musical score.  

Somewhere further below the musical note no. 5, on a lightless dark wall hung two pencil drawings. They were definitely drawn with eyes closed. That is because after a cluster of lines that are grouped into one mass, then appear the lines that make their way through to find another space, and again a group of lines follow, and then they overlap with one another. These lines are not preciselymoving towards a vanishing point, but are hesitant, wandering and falling as if strayingaround the desert with no visual references solely relying on their sense of touch. Then, they are disconnected and then connected again, just like before when a piece of sound/noise was played in the musical score and then moved onto the next piece with the help of an arrow.  With the visual dogmatism now gone, the tactile senses become a series of irregular fragments. So, I close my eyes. Now,fragmentsof sounds coming out from the speaker abound. These sounds come to an irregular halt, just like a blind man who is catching his breath after passing a district of a hustling city just before crossing the road, or a person trembling with fear that he might be going around in circles even after having gone numerous sand dunes in a dessert.

The sound rides and goes over the hill. It is a white hill, whose corners are edgy, made out of wood. I follow the sound that went past the hill to take a turn along the silhouettes of the hill. There feature two simple movements overlapping at the top and bottom. One is a person going around in circles, and the other is a hand moving along the corners of the hill. The movements inside the monitor are repeated over and over. This time, they do not hesitate. The movements are repeated in a stable and resigned manner, just like the footsteps of a blind man who has alreadyentered a desert.    

The light rides and goes over the hill. As I take a turn around the silhouette of the hill, now appears a structure of a forest whose top is blocked and the bottom is open. A person who is lost the middle of a dark forest desperately struggles to look for any sound and light coming from outside to escape. On the other hand, an able woodcutter knows how to read the light and the sound inside a forest.  He is adept in reading the ruggedness of the space through sounds and light just like braille: knowing where the sound and light go,  bump and come back and where they end up being absorbed and buried.

“Exhibition to the 3rd floor. Push”, it reads at the exit. Suddenly I come to myself again. What did I do till now in this dark room? I activated my appetite and felt around the space following the light and the sounds. My gustatory, auditory, and tactile senses once banned at the entrance have now all revived, and the only allowed visual sensation has now become inactivated with few minimal functions left.

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As I enter the hall on the 3rd floor, at my feet, I can see the forest that I had just seen. The light and the sounds go through the hole to flow into the upper floor. The text barely visible under the flown-in light includes secrets behind these unfamiliar spaces. The text beginning with “closes the eyes” illustrates the artist’s all forms of struggle to find the coordinates in a visually-limited state (<Metaphysical Dissection>(2017)). The invisible body is struggling hard to capture even the vague colors, play the saved images and capture the changes in speed in light of the experience. In the end, the artist seems to have realized that in orderto understand the space in a visually limited state relying on tactile sensations, she has to repeatedly read the gap between the space and her own body. That is, despite visual constraints, it is clear that gravity is in action, thus the body is used as a verticalaxis. To someone who cannot see, the angle between his body and the world becomes an important coordinate, and the space is constructed to allow an easy understanding of such coordinate. The slightly inclined boards grow larger and repetitive, and while moving forward by placing hands on each and every board one by one, one can easily reach a narrow hallway that leads us to another room. Images are projected on these incremental boards, but the movements of dancers in the images are all fragmented, and in between theseboards appear again the bits and pieces of drawing and musical scores. On the wall of a hallway leading to another room, feature repeated matte-white and glossy-white oblique lines that are inclined at a similar angle as the boards. These two types of white color are more distinct under a dim light than a strong light, and even if I completely close my eyes, I can feel around the space thanks to the different surface textures and move to the next space. At this point, a visitor, although he cannot see straight, has now learned his way to find the right path. .

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The video displayed on a slightly oblique screen is <Interval. Recess. Pause.>(2017). The title is the juxtaposition of words from 『Dictée』by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The voices of people are intermittent, vacillating and then suddenly dropped. Not only Theresa Hak Kyung Cha but also the characters in the video for some reason have become distant from the place of memory, and the colors, taste and touch felt in this distant place are reproduced in a language. However, why are they clinging to these indescribable difficult sensations rather than objective easy information when describing their experience back in the days? In fact our experience already has the answer.  The more quickly sensation is paralyzed, the more difficult to be described in language and relies on physical conditions, the longer they stay in your memory. These sensations are different from memories that had been intentionally stored by intelligence and called upon by language. That is whywhen we smell something, although the smell is very distinct and sharp, we really don’t have a clue as to why the smell is so distinct, so we try very hard to remember what the smell it is. A sensation always appears unexpectedly, drops suddenly and then disappears abruptly.  The performer in the video expresses this type of irresistible senses. A sensation that we cannot prevent from approaching us resembles a rainbow with its indistinct silhouette yet a strong, distinct existence.

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Finally <La Nave de Los Locos>(2016). A video installed in a skateboarding park-like space begins with a laser-close look at the painting with the same title of Hieronymus Bosch. The voice gives a hint about “you.” “This is what you tell me. The best option is not to be born. But if you are already born, not to be expelled is the best.”  This video is a letter sent to Cristina Peri Rossi, an exiled writer of the novel 『La Nave de Los Locos』. Whereas the two previous works dealt with our primary senses such as sound, light, taste, and touch, this video seems to have called upon so much information with language. The voice telling us the barbaric history where all the insane men were put together in each city and sent off on a boat to be sequestrated, suddenly reads out all these meaningless names of electronic displays, banners, and signboards, and the video points out for us each and every name of the streets the skateboarder goes through via Google Map. Moreover, it tells us the names, age, and stories of the exiled, deported and LGBT. Finally the artist tries to explain Bosch’s painting to a blind dancer in Barcelona, whose words are again translated intoCastilian, Catalan, and English. It may be quite natural for a visitor, who had groped around different dark spaces with limited senses to reach this work, finds it difficult to digest this saturated state of language.

However, if a visitor has faithfully followed the process of training (limited) senses that Sojung Jun had placed in different spaces, then he or she would be able to discover the sensuousorder that reconstructs all these abundant information. The artist zooms in on Bosch’s painting (in digital image) to the point that pixels are visible, and then allows the visitor to skim through the screen with a cursor pointing to a specific spot. This close-up was surely meant to take a closer at all the historic scenes, but it does not stop at a point when the image is most clearly visible, but goes on to the point of revealing pixels, implying that there is a hidden intention behind such attempt. This is similar to a movement of groping around the image with one’s fingertip and moving forward (the kind of pleasure felt when the pixels and the cross-shaped cursor overlap and disappear!). This tactile interpretation is soon translated into a movement of a skateboarder in Barcelona groping around the street floor. And the indistinctvoice reading out the signboards are translated into images with smudged colors. It is not about picking out only meaningful words, but the act of reading and feeling around all types and signs coming into our realm of vision is comparable to that of a blind man who has to feel around the spaces in between to move to a nearby place.  Having to do many translations to deliver a message to someone is also likened to the process of feeling around different ways towards communication. After all, all movements in this video are tactile recitation.  

Meanwhile, the exiled are subject to sympathy as they dream to “return to the times that cannot be returned to”. However, artist Sojung Jun shows sympathy (with the risk of causing ethical controversy) but also shows a long yearning for maximum level of tactile sensation that they could have felt. Those exiled, deprived of the right to stand on a solid and flat ground, need to develop a sense of touch and equilibrium tantamount to that of a surfer who can stand on the waves in the sea in order not to drown. Sojung Jun seems to improperly envy these exceptional senses of lesbian writer Christina Peri Rossi, who had exiled from Uruguay to Spain, the land of Catalans having claim their independence. The images of a blind dancer’s moves shot in infrared camera intuitively tell us that the dancer cannot see, and at the same time was a very careful way of expression chosen by the artist to opt for darkness, as she could not express someone’s disability under a bright light.  However, in Sojung Jun’s screen, we feel the gaze of sensation-driven people who indulge in the movements of dancers, who activate their senses of balance to the maximum and feel around the void in the dark. This is similar to the sensation of skateboarders taking the risk of groping around the ground even if no one really forces them to do so. The movements groping around the uneven and rugged space entail a risk of sudden fall and deprivation, making the audience to have butterflies in their stomach, but their spatial indulgence becomes the visual indulgence of Sojung Jun.

Eventually, Sojung Jun has translated all of these experimental, linguistic, historic, political and social records in an order based on senses. By the end of the exhibition, it is revealed that the title “Kiss me Quick” was a cocktail menu in the 『Le Paysan de Paris』written by Louis Aragon, and the letter types which seemed to have been wrongly cut from an analog printing materials were in fact from the menu. The title was translated into a taste by a chef, and the taste was translated again into a critic’s language. The text describing the experience of walking around blindfolded was translated into music of a composer, space of a scenographerand video of a cinematographer. And we witness the amazing rise of our senses in a feast of all these sounds, lights, colors, tastes, movements and languages. The moment we give up on the dogmatism of a single sensation or limit such sensation, all the other senses once oppressed come alive, and these awakened senses do not stop at just passively embracing external stimuli. These once banned senses invite in the stories of someone’s loss, constraints, disruption, and fall. We listen to the stories that start from the pressure spot of our skin, cochlea inside our ear, and the tip of our tongue. The reason why Sojung Jun cannot stop her indulgence in senses and why we cannot help but continue to follow on her indulgence is becausetheir stories continue to go on.

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