| Delusive Human Images in a Chaotic Forest | |
| Delusive Human Images in a Chaotic Forest Cha Kyung-jin comes back again in ten years. What the artist brought are the weird masks replacing silhouettes of the substance. As if to give a monologue, Cha has engraved his awareness of existence in the masks. What he perceived, however, are insecure and distorted forms confined to a delusion like a jungle. The masks Cha created make us shudder as if we are in a completely alien environment. They also cause a mental conflict that makes us avoid any conversation. The masks the viewer has to face are symbolic of our wounded soul. The masks metamorphosed and distorted utter out thoughts in place of ourselves, attempting to approach us incessantly. Cha’s insidious masks take on the form of art, posing a question “Who are you?”. Masks are performing objects closely related to primitive festivals. In a festival that is a ritual for the Absolute, they have been used since antiquity for representing the unrealistic and the transcendental. In a magnificent ritual, people dream of encountering with a god, concealing themselves. In this ritual, they make use of music and dance to wake up their souls from a deep sleep, offering blood as a sacrifice to a deity. The mask is a device to dramatize the festival and is an outgrowth of a transcendental will to go beyond their existence. The word persona derived from the Greek for “mask,” referring to a “second self” or an “another image of the self”. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the persona is an inferior aspect of the unconscious or a dark side of the self. The persona is also the mask or appearance one presents in a connection with an outer world to carry out collective rules and roles, he added. The question I had when I first met Cha’s work is why he adheres to the mask. In this regard, Cha speaks without restraint of a tragic car accident he experienced as a child. The accident made him stick to his fortune’s wheel, tirelessly questioning himself about his own identity. It was in the early 1990s when he came back to his home Gunsan and there began his work in retirement after graduating from university. He carved facial expressions, conversing with gods there. The pathetic, empty look emerges in a long-necked headlike form rising out of the ground or trees. The spirit of his sculpture was derived from offshore of Gunsan in a state of solitude and detachment. His human figures were intended to convey his autobiographical monologue regarding such feelings as exclusion, alienation, longing, and passion. He presented these human figures to his 1996 solo exhibition at Kongpyong Art Center. While the human heads Cha exhibited at this show were voluminous lumps, after then, he explored the backside of existence. After completing his ‘excavation of civilizations’ he came up to Seoul. That probably means the return to his own proper way. His decision to plant and grow the seeds of his sculptural ideas, coming down from the god’s world to this mundane world, was an epochal turning point in his art. Since then, he has settled in Incheon, a port city like his hometown Gunsan and devoted his energies to visualizing the scent of primitive cultures. The Entity in a Mirror I witness the vestiges of hard breath left behind the masks at the Cha Kyung-jin’s studio after a desire disappeared. They are not masks but evocations of the outfit of history representing glory and shame. The masks with the hoary, antique-looking surfaces that seemed excavated in a primitive valley are the substances in a mirror objectified by themselves. “A work of art is a persona of the artist. An archetype as the artist’s persona manifests itself. Through an archetypal image in works of art, I look at the source of our existence lurked in the back of our unconsciousness. I gaze at our fear, insecurity, anguish, and grief.” (Artist’s Note) As speculated from Cha’s note, his sculptural works are the silhouettes of his self and the crusts of his existence. His masks reminiscent of aspects of African, Middle Eastern, and Indian cultures appear somewhat distorted or metamorphosed by his way of welding. Focusing primarily on the frontality of such masks, Cha explores the possibility of a new modeling quality. Especially in “The Shadow of Existence I” evaluated as his magnum opus, many of the lines weaved horizontally are an evocation of a suppressive and restrictive situation. The enormous mask form standing on the cobweb-shaped bottom lies in a desperate condition in which it can’t move any longer. While the cobweb here reflects an existential aspect, the mask is a manifestation of the fear of death, human’s existential insecurity, and alienation. In a general sense, that he lays emphasis on the mask as the shadow of an archetype, not on the human figure, reveals his intension to underline a sort of objecthood. That is to subjectify things or objects and may be an anthropomorphization of or a metaphor for objects. In “The Shadow of Existence II” a weird and dark situation is developed more dramatically. The mask-shaped form in an intricate structure reminiscent of a spider exudes the feelings of despair, fear, and grotesqueness. This work full of something eerie and grotesque is a mimesis of the entity while its mask form reflects another substance by lighting. Semantically, these three shadows of mimesis usher our visual experience to another sphere. The shadows cause our mental unrest in that they are not yet proved as the substance, while the masks make us return to our thoughts by certifying their archetypal existence. Appropriating the images of mask and spider, Cha Kyung-jin brings about our horrible, insecure, and delusive emotional response. His grotesque aesthetics reaches its apogee in “The House of a Being” made up of six large-scale masks arranged freely on the floor like war ruins. His sculptural features, spontaneity and grotesqueness, are further enhanced by an entanglement of masks and welding marks. These sculptural works reminiscent of ashes in a tomb are wrapped in a non-daily, surrealistic mood. Beyond Our Desire Cha’s serial works on display at the exhibition, independently or collectively, reflect his grotesque aesthetics and primitive modeling qualities. The masks appear as the persona belying their true self and representing a human desire for another personality. What he pursues through these masks is not absolute beauty but weirdness, ugliness, and paradox. The looks of these masks he creates by welding may be the source of our desire or nihility. In this context, Cha’s pieces are in a rather pessimistic atmosphere. These masks seem to advance toward the woods of life beyond any chaos. I obviously witness its specific case in the “The Frame of Coexistence”. His existential awareness in a disquieting, nihilistic situation is paradoxically enhanced by this hope beyond chaos. I express my sympathy with the Cha’s idea that a work of art is the mask of an artist. I critically see that his “Soul of the Wind” is the moonlight at night to soothe the shadow of our desire and his serial masks offer an occasion to look back over our existence in this chaotic world. That will be consistently verified by his passion for sculpture and a fierce look in his eyes. |
|
ARTIST Criticism
