JEAN RAH
나 진 숙
Fragments of Existence Reflected on the Inward Mirror
By Kho Chung-hwan, Art Critic
The show takes on a form of the welcome-home exhibit of Jean Rah who, as an artist of the 4th International Exchange Artists-in-Residence Program by the National Contemporary Museum of Art, Korea, took part in an exchange residence program in the Netherlands. Roughly reviewed, works on display, an extension of her 2005 one-person exhibition, demonstrate a combination of installations, paper castings and videos.
By adding to it a semantic interpretation of water, Rah stretches the boundaries of her art. Superficially, the meaning of water seems to reflect a topographical peculiarity of the Netherlands where she stayed. – large parts of its surface are actually below seal level and, more fundamentally, appears to be derived from her mental image. The water imagery in her pieces is likely to be the symbol for representing her inner unconsciousness.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Rah’s art is that she builds her work by putting together small units, as if in mosaics. To do this, Rah carved a variety of images on the flat surface of palm-scaled square pine board, plywood, or black rubber plate in bas-relief and then combined them from four directions. Although they are identical in size, the images carved on the surface are not the same with one another: some figurative images such as seeds, flowers, leaves, clouds, raindrops, birds, eggs, and the like are identifiable but some are abstractly represented or replaced with indented surfaces, just hinting at their intended shapes. Rah’s work in which all fragments are assembled together to form an entire shape. The shape itself, however, is not immutably completed but arbitrarily set, opening to possibilities of its change.
This series of pieces shows the organic relation of part to whole as the principle of the existence of the universe or her awareness of monad as the first thing that came into existence in the universe. In other words, Rah’s work refers to the world constructed with nomads and based on the heterogeneous elements in accord with one another.
This work resembles an aspect of everyday life. Everyday affairs repeat everyday and thus seem as the same, but remain any difference in itself. Rah’s work seems like a personal diary – namely as a chronicle of fragmental thoughts captured through everyday life, time and consciousness and furthermore, as a document of the fragments of desires and wounds derived from her unconsciousness.
Each image, after going through a self-reflective process, is read as the symbol for conveying connotations. The egg, for instance, suggests the source of existence while the bird is regarded as a metaphor for freedom and paradoxically implying the limit of existence. While a shellfish-shaped fossil is reminiscent of the landscape of high antiquity, the stylized pattern of clouds reminds us of the traditional imagery of Korea. The two main forces – yin and yang in the universe are equally felt in Rah’s work, along with a breeze blowing through our existence.
The imagery also feels like any surface embellishment of a terracotta wall, seemingly reconstructing a map of our consciousness. The process and an act of putting together her fragmental images are much the same as those of a puzzle.
Jean Rah also employs the method of so-called paper casting that stamps out those images by putting paper clay on the plate of above-mentioned designs. Rah exploits this technique to generate gentle textural effects of the surface typical of Hanji(Korean paper), evoking sympathy with traditional aesthetic sense of Korea. In terms of form, Rah’s work dissolves the boundary between art genres: her pieces manifested in low relief lie in the boundary between three-dimensional sculpture and two-dimensional painting, while works rendered by the paper-casting technique stand on the border of casting-based sculpture and plate-based printmaking.
By the penetration of videos into her art such attempt to blur the boundary is all the more intensified. The art object created by the use of paper casting is set on the wall, onto which water images with the sound are projected. The water video reveals or conceals the casting imagery on the wall. The imagery of water as a video reflects the two attributes of water: reflection and flow. Water is like the mirror reflecting subjective, psychological, internal, and unconscious mental images of the artist, instead of projecting her external imagery.
The inward imagery, which is the fragments of memory and thinking, comes up or goes down from the surface of water. The imagery, as did water, flows, sinks into oblivion and vanishes away with time. This proves and implies its existence with its faint vestiges. The artist makes use of the water imagery as a mirror to lead to her self-reflection and conveys the substance efficiently through the process of reconstructing the fragments of memory and thinking.
Jean Rah refers to the title of this exhibit as “The Wave of Breath, Water and Wind”. The wave here reveals her awareness of the structure of existence. The structure of existence appears to be multiple, multi-layer and polysemous rather than concise and unitary. The wave she comments has the similar connotation of Gills Deleuze’s ‘fold’.
A being is a conscious subject emerged from the surface of the fold and also an unconscious subject hidden under the fold as well. In other words, a being is a linguistic subject possible to summon to the inside of consciousness and a non-linguistic subject, subject of a desire impossible to summon to the inside of consciousness.
The texture of existence is closely associated with rhythm, movement, vitality and biorhythm. The artist discovers a clue to this rhythm in the breath of a being, the undulating surface of water and the wind flirting with leaves. The rhythm, as does a wave, spreads to the outside from the inside of existence and resonates to the inside from the outside of existence.
Jean Rah, exploring the theme of the wave of existence, fold and rhythm, conveys the joy of life and the resonance of all living things.
2006