In Search of the Place Lost (By Lee Sun-young, Art Critic)

Mi Jung Bae¡¯s Love Map is a work of covering a place one has affection for and making it into a work of art. Interviews with dozens of people including ones who she does not know reflect her career, majoring in painting belatedly after graduating from the department of newspaper and broadcasting. Based on conversations with others including her acquaintances and strangers, this work reveals sympathy and antipathy, similarity and difference. However, there must be a gap formed when a third person reconstructs the space they have affection for. Discontinuity in space stands out. Temporality is also discontinuous. The separation flows in each direction at its own speed. Bae¡¯s painting is a forum where localized time collides with localized space. The senses and memories filling such localized time and space is also fragmentary. Humans, products of the senses and memories are similarly fated. They are depicted too small or fixed like an old photograph.
They have lost their character as a uomo universale. Space-time in her work appears as heterogeneous elements coexisting with each other, losing continuity. Elements of the scene remain floating and unsettled. From the gap viewers set about their conversation and imagination. The artist tries to ¡°revive what the viewers feel in space fully, but the gap in their eyes creates a distance in their relations and a new space.¡± (Artist¡¯s statement) The gap or difference is not a barrier between the artist and others but a stimulant and a creative element triggering conversation and imagination. This is why Bae¡¯s work does not represent places she comes to know through interviews, depending on the interviewee¡¯s memories. The places vary, including real spaces like her room, virtual space, and no longer existing space. The artist asked 20 interviewees about ¡®places they presently care about¡¯, not giving them much time to think.
Her request for an immediate replay was to remind them of such places unconsciously, not consciously. This question causes some who have never thought about this to think about such places. As in phenomenology, Bae¡¯s work explores the appearance of being in the conscious mind. The object of such appearance in her exhibition is none other than space. The landscape preserved in between the subjective and objective shows a phenomenological way of rejecting the choice of either subject or object. Monika Langer argues in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception ¡°A phenomenological way tends to be a description conceived to awaken our primal experience based on our reconstruction, evading any scientific account or analytic introspection.¡± While phenomenology concentrates on recovering a sense of wonder at the world, the space-time Bae regained is as bleak as the adjective included in her first solo show¡¯s title. A sense of loss is pervasive there, rather than being a space for memories. Conventional places that an individual belongs to have been lost due to modernization. However, abstract space replacing the place deconstructs individuals into anonymous atoms replaced by anyone.
Contemporary life is a journey exploring such places. Figures in her work do not seem to have happy memories. A place can match one¡¯s identity. The place in Love Map can be said to be decisive information to grasp another¡¯s identity. If we know a place someone likes, we can learn about them including their career, life, memories, dreams, and hopes. This may be a place one visited everyday as a child that brings back recollections of childhood and people they once knew. As one recollects Galaxy Express 999 on the overpass near Seoul Station, everyone has their own ideas and feelings about a place. At Shindorim Station, where I met Bae, I recalled A.D. 2000 from my childhood. A place one belongs to directs largely to the past, not the future. Only a few people recollect unknown places or a space like a coffin where they are placed at last. A place is rather inertial and conservative. A place where perception is entangled with memories generates diverse feelings such as bitterness, happiness, and longing.
As in Korea and other places that lack stability, place is often a space that has disappeared, or space away from a place in memory. As Henri Bergson states in Matter and Memory (Matiere et memoire), perception is not mere contact between spirit and object. Perception is imbued with image-recollection interpreting and completing the contact. Recollection is not an accurate representation but open to all possibilities. Bae¡¯s work marked by wide open space close to death reveals ¡®consciousness that is nothing except for being in relation with the world¡¯ (Jean-Francois Lyotard), as in phenomenology. Characters in space are beings open to all possibilities, but are ¡®beings only possible¡¯, and ¡®vivid being that stop being to exist as the true self¡¯ (Maurice Blanchot). The title of her first solo show, A Bleak Joy refers to an experience of deprivation and fulfillment connected like a Mobius strip.
Space encapsulating the body, and its crisis, reflects crisis of the subject. As a place becomes abstract, the subject also becomes abstract. No individuals are safe in an ever-changing abstract system. An abstract space thus appears neutral and anonymous yet bleak. Men in her work seem very anonymous, remote from each other without a friendly relationship, and wander in an uncertain space like an apparition that no longer exists in the world. The place in her work is too modified for those concerned with the place to recognize it. The titles of her works derive from interviews she had and a place¡¯s GPS information. The location information available from Google informs abstract coordinates indicating the position of contemporary people. The place in her work has no floor on which someone can stand firmly. The elements consisting of a landscape such as buildings and figures float like signifiers without meaning. All are floating and unsettled in the space, like in an abyss.
A clandestine place like a secret garden is not found in Love Map. The space they remember is attacked in all directions. The gap between abstract space and concrete place is maximized in Bae¡¯s work. Vanishing place-ness shares its fate with an abstract man. Of course, the artist has such a place. For her first solo show in 2011, A Bleak Joy she depicted bleak scenes in the redevelopment area of Shingil-dong, Seoul where her studio is located. She lived there for over 10 years after coming up to Seoul, and her young daughter will remember the place first. Her home she left after graduating from college is torn up and covered with cement by the four-river project, and the place where she lives now is a transitory space that might soon disappear. Trying to remember a place is for the artist herself an effort to lend a symbolic place to a fluid life.
In Go and Come Again Like This, depicting a redevelopment area near Jichuk Station, an apartment near the foot of a mountain is contrasted with a half-destroyed house in the foreground. In this place the collapsed remains and waste flowing down like earth and sand seem heterogeneous and complex, flamboyant and vibrant like a firecracker. Bae¡¯s formative depiction of the modification and destruction of a place is paradoxical. Probably because remembered space, or even its remains and traces, feel beautiful, characters look like icons in our nostalgia, addressed anonymously. In Where Can We Take a Rest! featuring an overpass linking Moonrae-dong to Shingil-dong, Seoul, things piled up in an empty space under the overpass combine with one carrying goods with his hands. It shows a place that has no space for relaxation.
Office workers also need a liberated district. In Escape from Reality Today also, one fishing in water flowing under a railway line is visible in a leisurely mood. A stream of water flowing across downtown is filled with nimble hues and touches. To the contrary, the stream flows down like filthy water under an overpass. The space is a place reflecting fantasies for escape from the reality of office workers commuting through the subway. In Ah! So Cozy a rooftop garden, a resting place for office workers is visible. In this work plants appear catastrophic as if being poured down on a building. The stage of many people¡¯s memories appears as floor like an abyss, floating signifiers, and abstract lines reminiscent of moving or disappearing can be seen. The lines underscore fluidity. They appear ever-changing and unfixed. An unrealistic space where all float presupposes change, be it in a good or bad direction, claiming there are no subjects or independent objective space-time. Reality or reality that passed is not in a stable structure, and transforms into a complex net.
Space is rapidly extinguished and created. As in real scenes, distinction between deconstruction and reconstruction is obscure. Its dynamism and instability is caused by its openness. There is no floor on the stage of memories, and any stage setting is variable. An abstract pattern in which splendid colors are entangled like a bunch of flowers is suggestive of spatial-temporality erupting like a spring, not temporary (or spatially) flowing like a river. In the book commenting on phenomenology of perception Monica Langer compares time with a spring from which water erupts rather than having distinguishable waves. Time is not a single line composed with images preserving separate moments and events but a net structure in which each body-subject¡¯s directivity overlaps.
In this context our present is not closed. The present rather transcends its scope. The subject as temporality discovers he is always within the world. A human being becomes temporality because one is at last ¡®open directivity¡¯. (Jean-Francois Lyotard) In phenomenological thought, time is not a chain of external events or internal states but a continuation of present forums interlocked. Each new present transforms a temporal net structure. Bae¡¯s Love Map has no space as a non-temporal, transcendental object, that is, present clarity. Space in the Love Map is being created and extinguished constantly. We experience space in the cycles of creation and extinction. This space experienced will be recontextualized by another experience. The form of painting turning time into space is also one of the effective elements enabling us to feel such transformation.