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| 스킨 오브 사우스 코리아 Skins of S.Kr, 2004 |
'Fatal Beauty' : Rho Jae Oon's
Interventions in the Realm of Hypernarrative
by Moon Young-min / critic, artist
He says he wants to
display his works not only in art galleries as such but also in public spaces
such as a soccer field, cell phones, subway, airport lounges, and bus
terminals. He says the Internet is only a "theater", or a
"database" yet it is the most accessible way to approach his work.
How does he produce meaning?
Though collecting and
articulating images, texts, and sounds floating on the Internet, Rho Jae-oon inscribes the
meaning thus regenerated in the cyberspace. Though interactivity with users on
the Internet space this takes on a kind of perfomertive nature. At his Vimalaki
site(http://vimalaki.net), we confront the bright colors and simple designs
that convey a highly sophisticated visual sense. Fragmented photographs, sound
effects, commercial logos, and cartoon images from new relations with each
other through Rho's
graphic sensibility and dexterous digital skills. The appropriated images he
has assembled do not seem to have any hierarchy on the surface, and it is
possible to think that no particular relationship exists among them. However,
the images he has chosen and how he has arranged them are not random at all; in
fact, it soon becomes apparent that the images are highly deliberate outcome
through careful selection from an immense number of images and subsequent
digital imaging processes. They are fragmented images but certainly not
neutral.
In off-line exhibition
spaces and journal page, Rho
has shown high-resolution prints of the online images. Among them are stadium
scenes that resemble hard-edge geometric abstract paintings, the explosion of
the World Trade Center in New York City, pictures of Kim Hyun Hee, Dr.Song
Du-yul,1)
color swatches arranged in seemingly random pattern, female beauties from North
and South Korea, cartoon characters, and a skeleton; then there are images of a
cross and an airplane, made by altering the corporate logo of Hewlett-Packard,
floating above as if they are surveying all the other images. These are the
'skins' universally used in Korea that Rho downloaded from the Internet, and to
these he added the a series of images including the following: the buildings
Albert Speer designed for Nazis, the Park Chung Hee Stadium in Gumi, his
hometown, Star Wars 6: Death Star, the explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger, the Hubble telescope, the Korean bullet train KTX, Arnold
SchWartzneger, and various kinds of machinery, including power drills. The symbolic
efficacy of these images, such as My Sister is a Communist, reminds the viewer
of Andy Warhole, in terms of its obsession with the surface. However, the speed
and immateriality that one senses consistently in Rho's works make one realize that Worhol is a
"machine" from analog era. If Warhol turned tragic events and popular
stars shown on mass media into images with repetitive and semi-automated
process, Rho is
translating materials extracted from a random-access environment into objects
of memory.
Rho Jae Oon claims that
he uses the images of shoes and the explosion of the World Trade
Center without any
particular depth or meaning attached to them. He insists that what he does is
simply reformatting the size and manipulating the pixel and vectors. He also
insists that he takes images from the Internet without a particular reason, and
that all he does is turning them into skins or interface. However, the crisis
shown through such skins are scars; they are revealed as surface effects
exposing the causes.2)
In the same way, the skins that Rho uses seem to be the kind that are
disposable, but they let the viewer look inside the skin, or into the interior
of the fold. The skin that could denote the Korean culture or psyche, or the
ubiquity of the images, or the ambiguous nature of signs. To use the artist's
own metaphor, it is a patchwork of many images, like a sweater made of woven
materials, and among them the war is but a fragmentary image. The important
point is that the image of a war and the war are not same. Rho digitally processes the images of
historical events, Nazi architecture, the aspirations of those in power as
represented in media, the sophisticated commands of capitalism, and the
violence inherent in them. Complicity in the mechanism of such power,
scientific technology, and information appear as though it is neutral.3)
Rho's 3 Open Up
is a part of the trilogy on South
Korea. The first section of 3 Open Up is
entitled Factory. In this section, the viewer can hear the comments of the Blue
House officials on an official visit to North Korea while looking at
chicken and pig farms. However, what one sees on the screen are not animal
farms but satellite pictures of what are assumed to be the North Korean nuclear
arms manufacturing facilities and missile launch pads.
An interesting fact is
that the Internet is a communications technology originally created with the
devastation of a nuclear war in mind. It is an electronic communications tool
designed in 1969, the Cold War still waging then, so that the U.S. military
bases, defense industry, and universities could communicate closely in the
event that the U.S. is attacked with nuclear bombs.4)
Rho uses today's Internet, evolved from this origin,
and the montage technique, to suggest a discrepancy between the "missile
factory" images and the comments on a pig farm. By doing so he infiltrates
cyberspace so that anyone can see in a matter of seconds or minute, but
repeatedly at will, the Cold War politics and the North-South Korea's relations
with the United States.
In another aspect, this
work asks the viewer to reflect on the question of the authenticity of the
images and our position on the question. Furthermore, it is a question of the
authenticity and truthfulness of historical narratives and representations. North Korea
knows only too well tat it is closely monitored by U.S satellite cameras. The
fact that North Korea
built nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities above-ground indicate that it
wants to mislead the world into thinking that there has been progress in its
nuclear weapons developments. In short, the factories are intended to be
exposed to satellites.5) The
images captured by satellites become news through media and the news causes
reactions. However, can one take at face value all the information one obtains
from the Internet search engines? Even if such information provided data bade
on an actual historical event, can we accept them as historical
"truth"? The prevalent use of satellite cameras, the Airborne Warning
and Control System(AWACS), and the obsession with visible objects prove that
they are driven by hegemonic impulses, and they are the phenomena of a new
Empire. Conversely, they suggest a fear of the world that is not visible. In
other words, what is shown on the screen could be nuclear facilities or pig
farms. In the North Korean missile scandal that recently re-emerged as hot
news, what the missile actually carried could be nuclear bomb or a satellite. Rho shows a nuclear arms
factory and calls it a pig farm; the discrepancy is so great that is comical.
But could it be that we have blind faith in CNN and Google, so-called reliable
media? Factory pulls the carpet from under our blind faith in mainstream media;
it ridicules our habit of blind faith, no matter how much we want to deny that
we have such faith, and it is a critical distancing with facetiousness.6)
The third section in 3
Open Up is Early Warning Aircraft. Again there is a discrepancy between image
and sound. On the soundtrack we hear a South Korean broadcaster discussing the
language difference between North and South Korea, and on screen is an
image of the latest U.S intelligence surveillance aircraft E-3 Sentry Airborne
Early Warning: AWACS.
The South Korean
broadcaster on the sound track is followed immediately by signal tones between
the E-3 operator and the U.S.
surveillance system symbolized by AWACS is an extension of pentagon's
surveillance, or 'PentaVision,'7) and it is a mechanism that has been
hardening the division between North and South Korea. It is what Virilio
calls the long-distance surveillance that compresses time and space.8) It is
also part of the strategy to keep war off the U.S. mainland. Within this context,
Rho's work shows the mechanism of south Korea 'Other-ing' North Korea and the U.S.
'Other-ing' both North and South
Korea.9)
Fatal Beauty is a montage
of photographs collected, again, from the Internet. They feature the members of
the North Korean cheerleading team10) and South Korean woman imitating their
style. The soundtrack has the yodel song "Beautiful Swiss Miss," a
peculiar but hilarious song, by Hong Eun Chul. In comparison to the other two
works in the trilogy, Fatal Beauty does not do so much critical distancing, and
it is quite sensual. It reflects on the reaction of the South Korean press and
male public's response to the woman's cheerleading team, and it provides a kind
of catharsis. To quote the artist himself, "a femme fatale in a movie
ultimately destroys and dismantles the masculine and patriarchal energy in the
repressed desire. In the same way the [cheerleading team] could put a crack in
our unconscious." It is said that when separated families meet their North
Koran family members, they "cannot doubt the tears despite all the
mistrusts and discords." In a similar manner, Rho does not at all doubt "the last
smiles of the North Korean cheerleading team and the smile of the South Korean
actress in response to them." Fatal Beauty refers to the smiles that
created this "uncontrollable flow and inundation." 11)
The data produces by Rho Jae-oon exist in
cyberspace, yet he also appropriates a dialectical existence that avoids the
visible network called the Internet, and that is the Osama Worm. Rho extracted Osama Worm
from "Becoming Osama Database," and it is "a network behind
network." As such it is a metaphor for all things that are considered a
viral today. On a world-wide level, for example, all al Qaeda data on the
Internet not picked up by the U.S intelligence are called "a realm that is
never picked up by any of the official surveillance." As if to visualize
the network that cannot be revealed despite its ubiquity, anonymity,
universality, and democratic nature, Rho made a
flimsy-looking abject called 'Osama Worm' that occupies particular zones and
moves about in Seoul.
Like the similes of the
beauties from the North and South
Korea that could "neither be defined
nor controlled, it is difficult to explain Osama Worm rationally, but could it
be that it is suggesting certain new possibilities?
Such complex and
multi-layered works of Rho
are new artistic expressions in the digital age, and in this regard his works
share similarity Chinese-American artist Paul Chan. For example, while Rho dealt with the Cold War politics on the Korean
peninsula, Chan made political commentary on the Republican hegemony in U.S
politics, and through their works they both dealt with other political issues,
such as the Iraq
war. Recently, Rho introduced his work in Bol, a
paper journal, in an issue that was devoted to Middle East.
There he visualized the relationship between media and political reality by
juxtaposing images and texts, which at times compliment and at other times
evoke each other. Paul Chan made a poster with the photographs he took in Baghdad and distributed them in forty cities, including New York City. Shortly
before the Bush administration's attack on Iraq, he had also introduces a
video featuring the caricatures of Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney with the
clips of the U.S military activities.
Both artists are experts
in media techniques, sampling, and recycling; animation, graphic, and
photography to create rich and complex mixed-media image and sound networks.
Also, each maintain his own online database at www.time-image.co.kr, Rho's archive that is
progressively getting larger, users can see the images he collects and
processes. At paul chan's website, www.nationalphilistine.com, user can listen
to over 16 hours of voice recordings of the artist himself. The reading range
from excerpts from Adorno's philosophical texts to M.F.K. Fisher's cooking
recipes, from the famous passage to personal favorites. The website works of
these two artists actively utilize the same language, such as the hypertext and
other computer languages that in part give rise to the overflow of information,
and thereby intervene in the "hypernarrative." By doing so, they
visualize their attitudes and opinions and offer in their own ways an order and
meaning in the anarchic space called the Internet. They turn images of
catastrophe into cartoons and caricatures, subject them in Photoshop, and give
humorous twists to them. In doing so, they enjoy "the productive
possibilities of mutual contamination of the aesthetic and the political," 12) rather
than isolating the former from the latter.
According to Virillio, what succeeds the invention of the
nuclear bomb in the 21st century is the "information bomb." It has
the power to destroy peace among nations through information interactivity.
Assuming that the works of artists such as Rho and Chan are the products of a
war era, they are surely not as powerful and destructive as nuclear bombs.
However, we can say that they are, tar flight against the microscopic and
macroscopic political-economic influences that are forced upon us as the excess
of information and the capitalist Empire mesh with each other.
Notes
-------------------
1)
Kim Hyun Hee: A North Korean agent
arrested in connection with the 1987 bombing of a Korean Airlines flight KAL
858. Subsequently she was tried, sentenced to death, and then pardoned in 1990.
Recently, she was repeatedly refused to cooperate with the current government’s efforts to further investigate the case -- tr.
Song Du-yul: A Korean-German
sociologist. His name became a household word when he was arrested in 2003 on
charges of being a North Korean agent upon returning to Korea after 35 years
abroad, many of them in exile -- tr.
2)
Jan Tulir, "Review on inSite
2005," Artforum, Nov. 2005, 249.
3)
Ha Seung Woo, "Jabon ui
bunhal jeolryakgwa dong-asia ui seong(the Divisive Strategy of Capital and East
Asian Sexuality)," Trans: Asia Yeongsang Munhwa (Trans: Asian Film
Culture) (Seoul: Hyunsil Munwha Yeongu, 2006), 133, 141. Also see Lee Sun
Young, Review of Rho Jae Oon's exhibition: Skins of South Korea
4)
Through the 1970s and 1980s the
Internet technologies advanced and non-military use was expanded to a point
where today it is connected to personal computers and now increasingly to
cellular phones. Dennis Trinkle et al, The History Highway: A Guide to Internet
Resources (Armonk: M.E. Sharp, 1977), 3~4, as quoted in Tessa Morris-Suzuki,
The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History(London: Verso, 2005), 211.
5)
Bruce Cummings, Korea's Place in
the Sun(New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 481.
6)
I owe this interpretation to Kim
Suki.
7)
Bruce Cummings, War and Television
(New York: Verso), 1992.
8)
Paul Virilio, Information Bomb
(New York: Verso, 2000), 13.
9)
Kim Jang Un, "The Baroque
Scenario: Rho Jae Oon,"
10)
The North Korea cheerleading team,
consisting of 293 young women in their 20s, visited South Korea in the fail of
2002 for the Asian Games held in Busan. The beauty of these women immediately
became the focus of much of the press coverage, and they were promptly dubbed
"minyeo eungwondan," or a "knockout cheerleading team.' One
woman in particular became an instant popular star -- tr.
11)
Rho Jae Oon. His first solo
exhibition was entitled Skins of South Korea. The cyberspace in which the
images of the South Korea Trilogy are floating can be accessed from anywhere in
the world. However, they are perspective of South Koreans looking at North
Korea, created and consumed by South Koreans. What is only too clear but easy
to overlook is the fact that except for a very few elites in the highest
echelon, most of the people in North Korea probably do not have access to
computers or the Internet. This is the "digital divide" which
signifies the cyber world and marginalization. In other words, those who have
access to cyberspace will continue to have their voices heard among themselves
while those who do not will lose even their rights to speak as their
marginalization will continue. Some people have said that the digitalization of
the world will allow all people in the world to be connected through
cyberspace. However Olu Oguilbe dismisses this pro-media notion as being
unrealistic and premature. He has pointed out that the number of people who
still lack both computer equipment and access to the Internet are astronomical,
not only in Third World countries such as in Africa but also in United State.
See Olu Oquilbe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004), 149~153, 172.
12)
Scott Rothkopf, "Embedded in
the Culture," Artforum, June 2006.
13)
Virilio, Ibid, 653.
Translation: Kyung-hee
Lee
Moon Young-min (critic,
artist)
(2006)
(2006)