The Heat, the Wind:

Eunji Cho’s Elemental Existentialism

Heejin Kim

(curator and critic in visual art)

Form Follows Flow

In the first page of Eunji Cho’s artist book Poem in Action, the following line is to be found: “Form Follows Flow.” All the forms that fill out this world morph along the chronological loop of formation, transformation and dissipation then again of formation. Thus every form that exists is essentially variable and atypical, and its original can adhere to any ‘flow.’ Perceiving this given template illustrating that every form adheres to the flow, art can only be in a dynamic state, and not in a static one. In this sense, art becomes a performative act where different elements switch their positions, move in action and operate relations. In this performative act, time becomes perceivable through bodies or things; it connects things that are usually considered to be separate but indeed that are one and inter-formative, such as the world and the being, life and everyday, the history and the present and form and flow. In other words, ‘art as time-based process’ is an act of articulating the order (or the flow) that is not visible in a specific (form of) sense. This is why art as time-based process is essentially an act of sensorial ritual performing life within life, and thus it is destined to reach the reflection on the existential meaning of being. Asserting the single line of “Form Follows Flow,” Cho formulates her creative and artistic consciousness toward the world, based on which she perceives the world as a flow and practices time via senses. And through her imaginative rendering of the line, as if it were a quotation addressed by a lump of mud, Cho indicates the fact that her creative and artistic consciousness is rather based on the universal ethics of nature than pretending it were a unique creation of hers. Cho is fundamentally a realist, who absorbs the waves that diverge every moment and acknowledges that what operates those waves originally is actually a thing.

Acts of Socio-Ecological Complicity

Within this conceptual framework, I consider that Cho’s specific interest lies in socio-ecological existence. Her Mud series that continued for around seven years from 2006 can be described as a chain of actions of lives in struggle for the sake of their socio-ecological existence within the peculiar ideological space dominated by capitalist and developmental growth. The artist exposes the erased or underestimated beings from distinct spaces and circumstances to the public sight. And through sustaining this act, she reinvigorates their as well as her own existential dignity. This how the artist willingly came to name this act to be a ‘complicity.’

It is highly probable that Cho’s accomplices are social, political, economic and cultural minorities. Still, in accordance with her intended deviation from anthropocentric perspectives, the accomplices range from dust, a barren dump of soil in a construction site, pieces of land sold at a give away price, a fictional, minor figure from a forgotten novel, stray dog trapped in a cage to the soil from a pit with traces of mass buried animals. The fact that the variety of these subjects isn’t confined to visual or tactile categories proves that the artist’s interest focuses on their socio-ecological value than their individual and existential physicality. Cho’s act of existential inter-complicity that describes socio-ecological values through exposing the impact of her objects’ existence appear in different aspects according to the individual texture of circumstances in which each is situated. She frees soil from the dump to fly away, while projecting a passionate story of love onto the land that is reduced to a mere piece of real estate condemned by a trivial cartographic measurement. She sings songs written in a flattened language, yet reawakens it presenting it with a new rhythm and melody. Cho is an excellent writer and her writing varies meticulously between script for actions, score for conductors, manifesto, oracle and oral notes. From her text entitled Poem in Action I discover the richness of performative elements and a relational formalistic character that poetry used to bear prior to its establishment as one of the prevalent literary genres. As such, Cho’s series of socio-ecological actions can become a rebellious political act disrupting the physiological discomfort that is created by the system confined in conventions as well as political and economical ideologies.

Elements and the Cycle of Life and Circulation

Cho’s artistic stance apparent in her work neighbors closer to the position of performing the logic of real in the state called nature, than to that of political resistance or ethical imperatives. It is comparable to the kind of stances where Laozi is perceived as an activist and ecological philosophy becomes one with social actions. Cho’s performances don’t surpass the level of interventions exposing and resuscitating flows. It is out of the same reason why one cannot recognize any linear structure or narrative end following the logic of cause and effect in her performance. Borrowing terms from art history, her acts are likely to be labeled as minimal in their stylistic outcome. But in fact, they are optimized acts reinserting the beings that were artificially isolated and ruptured from the orbit of life circulation back to the invisible cycle of life.

Cho’s work turns the dry existentialism of time-based, process art that originated from the western tradition of conceptual art in the 1970s to an elemental existentialism that combines primordial acts, practical sensorial experiences, social and ecological consciousness. This is the authentic point of departure that Cho’s work presents, from other activist practices or sentimental humanism. Her work bears a primordial texture that transcends the dimension of universal senses. This texture derives from the physiology, sentiments, tone and meaning of each element, from features created by the temporary forms and images or from the electromagnetic field emitted by atoms. Philosopher Sang-Hwan Kim calls it ‘incident of matters.’ In any case, it is clear that this primeval texture calls for forms and that the artist thoroughly follows the physiology of material texture to let her work connect to and become the flow of life.

The Heat, the Wind

In the current exhibition, the object of her complicity is human being. The elements that compose the world under the human skin are heat and wind. The heat indicates warmth, energy and breath residing in human temperature, while the wind corresponds to the source of force that puts human body in movement. This is not a literary or religious rhetoric, but a scientific statement. Inferring from the previously stated frame of elemental existentialism, The Heat, the Wind can be assumed to compose a complicity that aims for turning back humans to life by referring to the heat and the wind operating human bodies. Here, ‘human’ encompasses both groups of people, including the ones that appear in the work and the other as audience. As we well know by now, Cho’s acts require accomplices.

We can start with The Emotional Case of Fall & Revival I 2017. The artist’s perspective in the video repeats falling down. The sense nausea and vertigo provided by the video’s agitated image continues to linger in me, even after realizing that the effect is obtained by turning the panning shot of the landscape vertically. Its plot is not to be determined, yet it seems to be a physical reenactment of a series of sudden shocks. The highest ‘heat’ in the exhibition is emitted from the two-channel video of The Performers 2017. A landscape with an open and dark abyss and another with a mysterious puddle are juxtaposed. They reminisce about the landscape from The Emotional Case of Fall & Revival I. In the following scene, a few Southeast Asian figures in their middle age appear, captured by a camera that slips away caressing their faces from the front, partially showing their bodies and motions. Sharp looks, shaking eyes, saggy skin around their necks, lean fingers and melancholic hair, etc. show the hardships they had behind. A few words can be heard at times, but the artist intentionally slashes the details of interviews. As the perception gets blurred and languid to the viewers’ eyes, the performers start their pantomime and narration. The performance continues intensely reenacting abrupt moments of killing and the fear,  anxiety and indignity of approaching death. (I only experienced later from the artist that the performers in the video are survivors of massacres that took place in Indonesia and Cambodia some 40 or 50 years ago, along with the fact that the whole story and aftermath of these two historical incidents are not cleared yet.)

Knowledge and Non-Being

In The Performers different elements such as landscapes, bodies, movements, voices and language appear, but each of them are imperfect, either appearing with dug out holes or in incomprehensible states. This doesn’t indicate any imperfections of their shapes neither their damages but actually the imperfection of our knowledge. In this level, we are confronted with the issues of knowledge and non-being. The state of non-being is not equal to the state of nothingness, but it is a state of dullness blinded by wrong knowledge. While Cho focused on socio-ecologically erased or underestimated non-beings (or their state and value), in The Performers she concentrates on non-beings that are not only socio-politically but also perceptually blinded. Perceptual non-beings are at times results of mere ignorance and negligence, but most of times they are victims of distorted knowledge. The resulted non-beings deconstruct the distorted knowledge through transmitting their emotions and gestures – which is the only language left for them. Thus non-beings perform their elemental existence by means of primeval elements such as emotions and gestures.

The artist intentionally eliminated complementary information or subtitles from The Performers and blocked the perverted desire eager to ‘understand’ the narrative so to lead the viewers to a more active practice of obtaining the ‘knowledge.’ While the reasonable attempt to grasp the information around the incidents is made in vain, eyes and ears can entirely perceive the emotions and the narration mediated by the video. The artist takes up the position of examining, challenging, deconstructing and reconstructing the ‘knowledge,’ in contrast to the premise of certitude supported by conventional reportage or journalism. In this way, in The Performers the performance of non-beings in the video and the viewer’s performance in pursuit of knowledge can unfold simultaneously. The former is a life practiced by non-beings for obtaining existence, while the latter is a practice to finally approach the existence through critical as well as contemplative knowledge.

A Common Space of Agony

The Performers conveys two messages. The first one is about agony and the practice of time living through it. Living through agony doesn’t mean to flush it away to survive, but to keep the perception aware enough to stare at the wounds and to sense the passage of time through the entire body. If Cho’s work were about the aim to return humans to life referring to human heat and wind, then the heat would correspond to agony and the wind to the practice of time living through it. Non-beings gain their existence through agony, presenting the ones who perceive the heat and the wind with new existence.

As the trail of my thought reaches this point, the past three years’ time since Sewol Ferry incident that we lived through, overlaps. In that spring, as massive number of vivid lives perished in front of our eyes like a fraud, I was sharing a flat temporarily with Cho as if dragged by a certain destiny. Witnessing together the outrageous banality as well as the perverse violence of the government escaping from the responsibility following the incident was like a horrendous test challenging the limits of our sanity. Over the period, we went hiking together a single time. We kept walking neck and neck, sporadically talking, along the pathways that spread long like a blade-cut scar. After taking a break at a rock, we returned, just naturally. This visit to the mountains stayed in me as an extraordinary memory. When I recall now, I think it was through this hiking that our shattering rage could crystallize into agony glowing like seeds of pomegranate. In his book Destructive Character in Sociological Terms 2016, sociologist Hong-Jung Kim stated:

“what could be the answer in our age of destructive character, where everything seems to fall apart? Imagination is a force that promises a future, but destructive character cannot promise any future. Nevertheless, we can aim for a common space of agony through dragging out the things under destruction and recreation to visible and audible social spheres. This will depend on how we interpret and share agonies in our minds and how we discover new principles of practice from there. Thus destructive character yearns for witnessing the place where the social boils up to bore out new ways, where some unexpected seeds of hope could sprout despite of given reality.”

Practicing Life

To recapitulate à la Kim, Cho’s The Performers is a common space where Southeast Asian non-beings who practiced their fifty-something life and the non-beings here and now who kept on practicing the knowledge of life and the Other upon the ruins of mind over the last three years, can meet – like how the mountain hiking became a common place of agony for Cho and me.

Right on the third anniversary of that spring, I recall the iron vessel gushing out the tormenting moment between life and death, disclosed day by day by clothes and mobile phones that finally came up to the shore as remnants of the lost people. Some say we mourned enough. Some say it is too painful to watch it. Others say the families of victims transformed into a political group. Do we know that the victims practice the moments through testifying the agony? Can we know that to share that agony is the only principle of practicing our survival as well as of resurrecting our existential dignity?

Cho’s new work is loaded. It falls emitting heat, fluctuates and flows slowly. Her performance that used to sail away like a melody turned into a practice of life, far more complex and heavy. Yet her typical elemental existentialism is unchanged, that is free of notional and speculative loads. Her audacity of following the primal principles of life and circulation is also unchanged. The only difference is the temperature. Cho dictates that form follows flow and that they are ultimately one, yet for the form to become flow there exists agony as well as the practice of time detecting the nodes of agony. She once wrote, “For us, / It is life, / Not tears.” There is no healing. We can only share a slight sense of healing through a process where life practices every moment per new knowledge, to obtain existence and unveil dignity. In this sense, Cho might be a rebellious realist, probably one of the sharpest ones of our times. And it definitely looks like that The Heat, the Wind won’t be concluded as a single cry out in the throes of death.