Artist Talk: August 11, 2011, 5:00 pm

Opening reception: August 11, 2011, 6:00pm

Suddenly, the images of the long gone past is projected...

Kim Noam, Director, Art Space Hue

Memory is a complicated, unstable thing. The artist walks around the city with her baby in the trolly. Suddenly, the images of the long gone past is projected in front of her; “I have a memory of a world of astonishment and awe since I was very young. That world captivated me (Michel Foucault).”

For the longest time, Lee Jinju had pushed her darkest childhood memories into oblivion. Today, as a professional artist who is happily married and has children of her own, Lee felt the need to elicit the memories and experiences. “This was and is possible,” she says, “the present is possible because I decided not to give into the terrible memories of my younger days. For me, it’s a brave act to make the timeless oblivion as a foundation for my future. Life itself will guide and help me stand up as I am now, providing me with the strength to carry on.” Time asperously pushes the past and the present, incubating the oblivion into the future. And this is where life gains the strength to be continued, and memory becomes the framework for it to happen.

One summer, a little girl gets abducted by a strange man and unwillingly led somewhere. She is told not to say anything, only follow the man’s lead. Her friends, who were supposed to be with her, are nowhere to be found at the moment. The few hours with the man whose face that the little girl still cannot remember, has left a trauma that haunted her for a long time. The similar incidents and events that the girl had experienced during those few hours still make the headlines today. Girls and women who live in this society... they wait for their memories and voices to return again.

Walter Benjamin, in his Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um 1900), begins the story with an uncertain, adolescent memory: “... In this dream, a ghost had appeared to me. I would have had a hard time describing the place where the specter went about its business. Still, it resembled a setting that was known to me, though likewise inaccessible.”

A familiar setting suddenly becomes a place full of awkwardness, just as if it’s a dream. People have disappeared, and things are left on their own, lingering in their place. The woman (the mother) waters the plants, washes her hair, gives birth to her child and breastfeeds it. She walks around the town. Dwelling in the city is a progressive life; at the same time it’s not a life, but it’s a product of shaken memories which begins its growth with its roots deep into the consciousness of the artist. People are unable to incorporate themselves into the life in the city, they wander around, in and out of the city. In the artist’s memory, the city is a place where differences and uncertainties collide, twisting and struggling one’s bodily form, as if one is at a slow and gradual construction site; at the same time, at a children’s playground.

Foucault, in his History of Sexuality (Hitoire de la Sexualité), states that the motivation for writing is an act of solving one’s curiosity, granting mercy to the pain of existence, or persistence repetition of things. This type of curiosity is not those that end in scientific discoveries, in which one seeks out through observations and procedures under a hypothesis; however, is a curiosity that sets one free. Curiosity is an undeniable desire of the existence. It is a power of the unexplainable world. Vague and unclear memories makes one hard to survive. Only poetic images revive those vague recollections.

These are the very compositions of Lee’s paintings. The experiences, emotions and feelings, and memories all appear here and there on the canvas, implying everything in which they could be interpreted into. The images and allusions are lonesome and anxious. The audience is in the process of witnessing the artist’s life where she is similar to a construction labourer working to make ends meet in a setting where reason and emotions stand for bricks and stones. It is a life which is completed with a daily dose of expressions made, with the freedom to quit whenever she pleases. The process of gathering the memories and disheveling them at will is a representation of the banal and unique character of the artist herself; meanwhile internalizing the tension in between.

The repeated depiction of watering is an act of filling the subject up, however, is also a way to confirm that the subject is empty. It is also an act of nurturing, the images of experiences and emotions which are ‘empty’, vague in form, and isolated.

Nevertheless, people ultimately return to language. People believe that language is a way in which everyday experiences and memories can be fulfilled to a more complete and meaningful life. Martin Heidegger, in his Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), states the “ideal, meaningful talk is a conclusion from the beginning.” In other words, returning to the foundation of what the dialogue is about means leaving what’s on the agenda incomplete.

Therefore, for some artists, the origin of creation also means ‘a place that ends before it even starts’. And the artists fails, somewhere in between where no one can define what the beginning or end is, and they rise up again. The artists does not experience or understand something new or fresh, they only bring back what was already there, interpreted in their own ways; and thus, repetition, and circulation. This routine is a special opportunity that has no relation whatsoever to the mundane realities in life, and it is also another type of routine.

Whether anyone other writers are very cliché is the place everyday. This place is pointless to repeat the experience and discourse. The writer is repeated among the other daily routine to think about. Remember the daily and dispose of distrust, and re-raising is growing. Contributors to the day across the tight pantyhose while only one who was forced to remove the reason the reality of the woman locked down bald head packing some motif of the tragedy. The language alone is not present. And the image should be the need to remember the artist’s life, rather than illusion as reality must appear on the front.