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| 본생경本生經 Jakata MIrrors (Mirrors of Previous Life), 2011 |
Rho Jae Oon
Rho Jae Oon's world is constructed of videos composed of data(images, news reports, film clips)extraced from the web. When the internet came to Korea in mid-1990s, there had been limited cultural exchange with the outside world, and it quickly became a utopian space for intellectuals and artists to transcend physical distance and other constraints. But the online environment soon mutated from a channel of communication between individuals to a dystopic sea flooded with information. In 2004 the artist mounted the exhibition 'Skin of South Korea'. which analyzed the facades of buildings, city blocks and towns throughout the country by extracting shared images filtered in real-time from online media.
The art critic and artist Park Chan-Kyong has described Rho's work as an open form of anti-capitalist post-authoritarianism that contests the originality of art, the authorship of artist and the art system at large. A firm believer in the democratic capabilities of internet, Rho established a film production company, based entirely online and publicly accessible, as an alternative means for producing film and video works presented in the white cube. All of the sound and images in his works are found materials from the internet and methodically edited together, without need of a camera or an auteur.
His solo show 'Mulian Mulian' at Atelier Hermes Seoul in 2011 not only featured an homage to classic film, but also materialized forms that expanded into drawing, painting, sculpture and intallation, relying on film mainly as a template for seeing the world. The exhibitin included Jakata MIrrors(2011), which is a sutra dealing with Buddha's past life. Starting from the idea of standing in the present and looking at one's previous life, the work constructed a space in which the audience sees its reflection through mirrors installed the the aspect ratio of film screens. Visualizing the world through various screen ratios in Western and Eastern films from the last century has become a fascinating subject of study for Rho. Presented at the old Seoul Station, the installation Strangers On A Train(2011) fuses history and modern transportation technology to show the continuous evolution in the properties of machine, speed and medium.
Rho collects film and video material from diverse sources. But of central interest to the artist is the depiction of Taoism and Buddhism in mid-twentieth-century films korea and Hong Kong. The theme is evident in the series of landscape drawings Braindead-Scape(2009), which present a metaphor for nature and civilization. These sketches of mountains with holes at their peaks suggest the decay of a diseased brain and by extension the destruction of both man amd environment. Fusing the Eastern concept of landscape with a mediation on the technological medium of film, the work proposes a natural disaster via filmic elements. Similarly, the musical composition Score of Aspect Ratios(2011) condenses the four phases of human life by means of twelve different aspect ratios and symbols such as the spiral, ladder, skull, diamond, dot and cross. For the work Rusty Network(2011), a sculptural rendering of the Chinese characters that denote 'The End' in the end credits of Hong Kong Films is suspended from the ceiling with metal chain. Through the filmic interpretation of the end as another beginning, and the notion of human karma as a cycle, Rho presents ontological issues of past and present, man, nature and civilization, life and death.
(Jung Hyun, Curator, Critic, 2013)
_'Art Cities of the Future', Phaidon, 2013