Lee Yeonsook (Rita)

1.

I’ve first seen Yun-hee Huh’s work on a monitor and it was a charcoal wall drawing. Fully occupying the entire wall, it was large and rough as much as it appeared amateurish, which fascinated me at first sight. The simple and symbolic images were described in a way remote from realistic representation. On one hand, they looked like remnants of an explosion of intense energy. On the other hand, they reminded me of certain scenes from an experimental comic book of strong expressionism. Only later at her studio, I could view the video documentation of her performance, ‘drawing and erasing’ the charcoal wall drawing. Then, the artist or her body in movement captivated my eyes more than the image itself. On top of a crane, wearing a dust-proof mask, she was unapologetically rubbing the ‘white wall’ with a piece of charcoal. Showing the artist from behind, the video gave even a sensation of liberation by ‘deteriorating’ the glorified museum into a dirty site of labor. However, after a few days, the work took the charcoal dust fallen onto the floor as the only trace of such ‘occupation’ and the moment of merciless decision of erasing the accomplished image came. After such a decision, both the wall drawing as a monument and the proof of the artist’s hard art labor was supposed to dissipate. Choosing to ‘erase’ it immediately, even aware of the effect, the artist seems to be a person who bets herself on this very ephemeral moment. Glaciers are melting, and images must dissipate. Unrepeatable events occur from the decision of ‘erasing,’ identifying the destiny of image in the same line with that of disappearing things. In this sense, the wall drawing that affirms the ‘momentariness’ and the performance of irreversible ‘erasure’ are surely not a typical work in the development of a painter. I only came to realize later on, that Huh indeed is a professional ‘amatuer’ of secondary forms, which could be categorized as ‘smaller pieces’ of such large-scaled works, rather than of ‘large works for walls.’ She is specifically so, à la Baudellaire, as one who never gets acquainted with the self but is capable of being surprised by the world each time like ‘a young child.’ If we could define a professional as sedentary and an amateur as an explorer, we could also explain her as an artist who is willing to explore as far as possible across the border of possibilities for painting as a medium. Not ceasing at charcoal wall drawing that includes performance of filling up a huge wall and erasing it, her oeuvre ranges from drawings and paintings depicting extinct flowers and plants to, tree leaf drawings that borrow the form of ‘diary’; and more formatively, digging pits and building houses, drawings that took rice rice sacks as canvas, and ‘vandalizing’ of ‘masters’’ books with her drawings and collages. Such works take up marginalized forms of drawing and are often depreciated as having less ‘depth’ as they are smaller and require less time in comparison to paintings; or of performance, which is repeatedly rejected to be categorized as ‘art’ because it can only briefly exist in specific time and space in its integrity; whereas wall paintings are usually erased because they are either doodles lacking artistic ‘value’ or ‘political’ propaganda. Such properties highly complicate their qualification as exchange value under capitalism in comparison to paintings on canvas, which are easier to preserve. In this sense, we could say they are marginalized simply out of the logic of the market than any other reason. Of course, Huh started painting with oil on canvas in recent years as a new experiment, yet interestingly, this old and ‘prestigious’ form has the shortest history in thirty-years’ span of her oeuvre, which makes its status not much different from her ‘leftover’ works. Therefore, the center of Huh’s practice is purely occupied by ‘margins’ that stay out of the dominant hierarchy. Likewise, in her interest in the most non-painterly forms and materials when she deals with the medium of painting there should be something that goes beyond simple taste, which cannot be but interpreted as a ‘perseverance’ on an existential level.

2.

As a ‘margin-friendly’ artist, Huh has been proposing to ‘live together’ with nature and engaged all of her possible ways of (artistic) ‘talking,’ from illustrating covers of Green Review, an ecologist magazine, to Leaf Diary where she documented her everyday according to naturalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau. This might be a destined path, because in recent decades, we are confronting the climate crisis as something that can neither be negated (“there is no such thing as climate crisis”) nor denied (“I am not aware climate crisis is real”). In the West, it has been a while since radical environmentalist and eco-feminist artists’ activism has established itself as a genre, while in South Korea it is not simple to rediscover the lineage of critical ecology. Nonetheless, Huh as well as the younger generation of artists who emerged relatively recently are attempting to foreground questions on the climate crisis that have been dropped back as ‘inevitable crisis’ so far. For example, a collective named ‘Climate Performer’^[1] launched in Summer 2022 and published their manifesto: “climate crisis is not a future image. It is about the actual sites of life. We, artists of Climate Performer, will testify employing each artistic language while confronting the climate crisis.” They have been in artistic practice through marches, speeches and singing. Huh doesn’t introduce herself as ‘ecologist artist’ or ‘environmental activist’ yet already has been constructing her own naturalist worldview since her years in Germany by means of life-art-practice such as writing poems, ‘decorating’ her diary (Yunhee’s Drawing, 1996), and building houses (Coffin House, 2001). An archival exhibition in retrospective of Huh’s previous works Dust and Hut (A. P. 23, Seoul, 2022) highlighted ecological questioning of the inherent relation between nature and humans, which has been present since Huh’s formative approaches, from a more actively ‘ecological artistic’ point of view. Indeed, this questioning has always been present in herself. In the artist’s notes for her solo exhibition Lost Forests (Gallery Meme, Seoul, 2022) she wrote: “I wished to intensify the images of local flowers that are now endangered. Exaggerating their beauty and vitality, I mourn their premature extinction. Remembering them, I wish to revisit the relation of human and nature.” The statement is in the same light with other works on the climate crisis she’s been continuing since 2008. For sure, Huh’s Disappearing Faces (2020) and The Last Flower (2022) series genuinely conveying traces of rough and ‘intense’ brush strokes and sketches that remind of shadow boxing are “vanishing mediators” adequate to extract the ‘vitality’ of extinct plants.

Of course, they––like many other examples of critical art––might be far from political actions on a direct level such as policy making, provision of education and information, and even electing presidents. However, as we well know, the world doesn’t change only through such direct actions, especially in a situation where most of us believe in change only through progressivism. If we could define all processes of progressing, modifying and producing, this might not be much different from the destructive process that conspires the ‘premature deaths’ of someone. The gesture of retrogression, ‘remembering’ and ‘retrospecting’ already disappeared objects is a struggle to stay connected with the unrealized past hopes and the last breaths of the ones who might have been preserved in pause somewhere in this world. This gesture is nothing as well as everything for the one who is aware that there is no other option left. For the easily concerned, Huh’s ‘retrospective’ tendency might appear as a dangerous melancholy that inclines toward the void, emptiness and death. But isn’t ‘mourning’ destined to be accompanied by such a process? Not being capable of letting go of the lost object from oneself to the extent of becoming one with it; the process where the separation of the self and the lost object becomes impossible. The state of melancholic unison with the lost object can derive from not only personal incidents like the loss of an affectionate family member, friend, or lover but also public incidents like political optimism and defeat, or tragedy as communal trauma. Perhaps it is also natural that new terms such as ‘ecological grief’ arose to indicate the helplessness sensed perceiving the climate crisis that cannot be stopped or fought against by mere individuals.

It is not easy to apply theoretical tools to Huh’s work that deals with disappearing things through methods of disappearance. In general, theory means an accomplished world view that spreads top-down and center-margin. Through theorization, it is easier for us to learn methods to limit meanings instead of keeping them endlessly open. What I could slowly grasp through observing Huh as an artist who repeatedly practices Deleuze’s ‘becoming-margin,’ was an almost complete lack of theoretical framework that would explain such existential modes of ‘weak’ life-work like hers. I rather believe that an artist’s depth derives from perseverance or impulse that one cannot even understand or get used to, instead of the ‘solemnity’ of the subject or form. As such, the ‘real reason’ why Huh is so much into extinct plants or the materiality of charcoal neither concerns me much nor turns into a matter to scrutinize. The problem is that the accordance of marginal form and simplistic––or even ‘sentimental’––choice of objects can be often explored as something valuable only within a very limited art historical categorization. One one edge of the axis, there is the poor category of still lives (specifically of women artists) and on the other, the overly loaded categorization of critical artistic practices (that focus on so-called social ‘problems.’) The former would be immune from specific prejudices that attempted to interpret masters like Georgia O’Keeffe within the narrow frame of ‘the expression of feminine sentimentality,’ while for the latter it will be hard to escape from the trap of obsessive pragmatism that evaluates the use of art as a tool for societal change. Under the analytic dominance framed by such ‘solid’ critical perspective, the ‘weak’ gesture that chooses to disappear along with disappearing things, the gesture as nothing as well as everything, would collapse with no resistance. Bringing this up, I am confessing my own hesitance, incapable of deducing an accomplished and singular ‘discursive study’ on Huh’s oeuvre.

However, I could still attempt to borrow words from the ones who were affectionate about especially disappearing, ‘weak’ things and identified themselves with them like how Huh does. Walter Benjamin, a 20th-century German ‘essayist’ and philosopher has once asserted the following in his “On the Concept of History” well known as “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

“The image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness––such as could arouse envy in us––only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak  messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.”^[2]

As the ones “expected on earth,” we were not expected out of no reason but we were so due to the “secret agreement” with the past generations. Probably the ones who perished passing unrealized and unfortunate hopes to us somewhere faraway must have wished and believed desperately that we will recognize their hopes. Recognizing unkept promises from the remnants of the past such as “a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days,” “an echo of now silent ones,” and “sisters they no longer recognize” and  responding to them means to take responsibility as the person expected from the past and to return it the messianic power that has been already latent in it.

In the end, Benjamin’s ‘weak power’ means a force that is able to respond to the responsibility already given over to us from the past but not from the future. Expanding it to a broader dimension––including animals, plants, and all life forms that existed on this globe––we can reach to the thought that Huh is not just representing disappearing glaciers and forests, endangered lives and fallen leaves simply on the dimension of ‘warning’ about the climate crisis. It would be rather an urgent response to the signals of emergency emitted by the disappearing ones toward a certain future. The ‘weak power’ of an artist wouldn’t be able to save each single body of them, yet it might be capable to give over to another future the crystallized utopian hopes as requested by ‘disappearing things’ to be returned. All these hypotheses are still latent and remain powerless as a possibility to be realized. But what could be done otherwise? As disappearing things bet all their hopes to us, we as well, ‘the expected ones,’ ought to bet all from us for the sake of their hopes. 

^[1] Instagram account of ‘Climate Performer’: https://www.instagram.com/climateperformer/

^[2] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. IV (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 389-390.