Dear Eunjoo,
Upon coming down the long flight of stairs under the high and deep ceiling, a dark gray door remains half open. Behind the door is a black cloth that’s even more grayish, spread out crammed. In opening the door and entering the space feeling uninvited, there’s a sense of chilliness in the light in the corridor that cuts across here where I stand, and there where the black cloth is spread out. It was raining that day. The commotion that uproariously welcomed everyone reminded me of an empty public roundtable where the speakers are already gone.
Rho and I had spent a year together in 2017, with this high and deep ceiling in between us. It’s not that I’m imbuing a certain meaning to time, but I’m mustering up thoughts that would not have been visible, had it not been for that time together. I don’t know if this makes sense, but the strange sights that unfolded behind the dark gray door that I had to face down at the end of the long flight of stairs continued in series on the other side of the white wall at Space Willing N Dealing in 2019. The rhythmic clusters in three or four, in gray tone that’s brighter and more refined than 2 years ago, present holes in planes, folded planes, wriggly lines and lumps (as if there is no such thing as depth and weight). At times, they’re overlapped. And just like two years ago, I never opened that door and entered the space, but I felt the illusion of space as if I’m standing outside of the door, never entering into the space. Should I refer to what I’m looking at as a still life with the sense of distance of landscape, or a landscape with relationship to still life? After all, distance and relationship have always conspired in one space without supplementing or verifying anything of each other.
It had been some time since I last saw Rho. At her solo exhibition at Space Willing N Dealing, the artist shyly told me that she’s put on a ‘shadow play’. On my way back home, I thought about what I’d seen at her show. Perhaps Rho was painting ‘illusions of objects’, or things that are invisible because we already saw them, or things that are visible because we haven’t seen them yet. I began exploring the thin line that connects between Rho’s shy ‘shadow play’ and my mumbling ‘illusion of objects’. At the artist talk, Rho distinguished ‘Walking’ and ‘Aside’ in the exhibition title with a hyphen. Perhaps ‘shadow’ and ‘illusion’ are spaces of unknown that are different from each other but can be connected with a hyphen, just like ‘Walking’ and ‘Aside’. Ah. So another invisible line has been drawn.
The objects in Rho’s scenes are unknown as to the origin of their shadows because they all receive non-uniform source of light. Some objects don’t cast any shadows and are thus questioned as to their three-dimensionality. If there was gravity in the paintings, it seemed as if it would be behind the wall that I’m looking at rather than the ground that I’m standing on, and if there was a light, it seemed like it would lie within the objects as opposed to outside of them. In Renaissance painting, illusion meant distortion of the senses and anamorphosis implied illusion through the distortion of space. Even today, the visual experience of painting doesn’t stagnate at the mere gesture of looking. The sensation of looking is related to other senses of the body. From spatial experience to intellect and emotions, we apply the comprehensive experience of the entire body to see that as this, or this as that. The spacetime connoted in the gesture of looking, which Rho stubbornly questions, inevitably reflects the human-produced civilization and environment. If so, then why is Rho transferring the site of visual experience from the 2-dimensional to the 3-dimensional, then again from 3-dimensional to 2-dimensional? What process of thought is she trying to lay out in this series of appropriation?
The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) distinguished the seen and seeing. He expressed the seen as ‘represented space’ and seeing as ‘space of representation’. We stay in space that’s measured and composed by the society, but we subjectively interpret and experience this space to repossess it. Therefore, our senses are (unavoidably) alienated in between the space we experience and the space we recognize, and finally through this isolation we (laboriously) come to perceive this space. The spaces directed by Rho are not ‘represented spaces’ that generate the symbolic index granted on objects by the city, but a ‘space of representation’ where Rho, who lives in the city, distinguishes the indexes that she perceives to recompose them into objects. The spatial illusion I had to experience in Walking-Aside, just as I did 2 years ago, must come from the twisting of distance and relations created when such ‘representing’ objects are continuously overlaid and stacked upon the ‘represented’ space. I’m (fruitlessly) trying to narrow down the margin of errors between what I have seen and what I am seeing, in search of a point of unified space and life. But the contradiction occurring from such error becomes more and more abstract, and we can no longer depend on one sense. As is with Rho’s title, I continue on again with one hyphen and infinite hyphens. I’m drawing another line in order to understand a world that cannot be explained anymore with a single sense. Perhaps we are repeatedly isolating and reuniting ourselves, mixing walking-aside-shadow-illusion-space-place-reproduction-thought-memory, separating them then connecting them back together.
While Rho has been questioning the forms of objects that compose the city in the last few years, Walking-Asideinvites us to think about how we perceive the world through such forms, and what the relationship is between such objects and our life. Lefebvre called such perceived space ‘spatial practice’, and asserted that only when an individual is “stripped bare and kicked out of oneself” through such isolation can he or she discover oneself through philosophical thoughts. Another fragment of memory just dawned upon me at the end of these thoughts. Henri Lefebvre’s book Production of Spacewas on Rho’s desk, behind the dark gray door. I should talk to her about that book one of these days.
Sincerely,
Enna Bae
Text by Enna Bae (Independent Curator)