나를 찾지 마세요(2024)
안병남의 <사막에서>에 대한 단상
2024.2.8
김륜아(작가/아티스트)
기억에만 남고 사라져버린 것들은 어디에 있을까? 공사장이 되어버린 들판, 거기서 들리던 동물의 소리, 초면인 사람과 잠시 나누었던 대화들. 작은 기억 파편들은 머릿속을 유령처럼 떠돌다가 이따금 번쩍하고 찾아온다. 그렇게 된 기억에는 시간성이 없다. 그것은 과거이기도 하고 현재이기도 하고 미래이기도 하다. 실체를 잃어버린 기억은 작고 반짝이는 조각이 되어 영원히 움직이는 상태로 뇌를 부유한다. 창작을 하는 사람들은 보통 이런 잡힐 듯 잡히지 않는 것들을 잡아내고 싶어하고, 그것을 실체화한다. 흥미롭게도 안병남의 <사막에서>는 사냥감이 도망치면 도망치는 대로 내버려둔다. 작가는 사라진 것들의 꼬리를 따라가는 과정을 우리에게 보여줄 뿐이다. 그리고 그 과정이 우리가 잃어버린 것으로부터 느끼는 환상의 전부다. 잃어버린 것을 꼭 되찾아야 할까? 잃어버린 것을 되찾는다면 그로부터 오는 향수는 단숨에 사라져버릴 텐데. 안병남의 <사막에서>는 사막에 생겨나는 신기루처럼 실재하지 않지만 실재하는 것보다 더 강하게 사람을 매혹하는 것, 잃어버린 것을 쫓는 과정에서 오는 감각을 다루고 있다.
작가는 현실에 존재하는 몸뚱이를 지녔다. 작가는 땅에 발을 딛고 있다. 작가는 잃어버린 것들을 쫓기 위해 몸뚱이를 지우고 허구의 존재가 되기로 한다. 이야기, 소리, 무엇이든 나타나게 하는 마법의 초록색과 은색. 그것이면 충분하다. 영상은 어두운 공터에서 낭독을 하는 두 사람으로 시작한다. 먼저 말하는 남자는 다소 전형적인 사막을 배경으로 한 글의 서두를 읽는다. 뒤이어 말하는 남자는 반짝이는 플래시로 어둠을 가르며 대화문을 읽는다. 대화문은 어떤 한 나라에서 처음 만난 듯한 두 사람의 질의응답인데 배경이 사막인지는 알 수 없다. 답하는 이는 자아가 옅어 누구라도 대입될 수 있다. ‘그가 좋아하는 것은 파란색, 길바닥의 돌멩이, 자장가. 시를 쓴다고 하던데 글은 모른다. 영화를 만든다던데 계획은 없다…’ 이것으로 우리도 신기루를 볼 준비가 되었다.
낭독 장면 이후로 은박 가면을 쓰고 은박 새 장식이 달린 지팡이를 든 두 사람이 등장한다. 별 모양의 은박 가면을 쓴 남자가 모래 언덕에 벌러덩 누워있다. 남자는 마법을 부리듯 지팡이를 빙글빙글 돌린다. 남자는 아무 생각이 없을지도 모르겠지만, 우리는 어느새 남자를 사막에 누워 구조신호를 보내다 지쳐서 늘어진 것으로 보고 있다. 이때 여자의 목소리가 들린다. 여자의 목소리는 마치 그의 속마음 같다. 목소리에 따르면 그가 누워있는 곳은 원래 길 잃은 강아지들이 노니는 농지였다. 눈에 보이지 않지만 가까이 있는 것이 있다는 여자의 말은 남자의 기억 속 농지가 실체만 없을 뿐 지금도 존재하고 있다는 말처럼, 분명 한국의 근교 어딘가일 이곳이 동시에 기억과 상상이 섞인 어딘가일 수도 있다는 말처럼 들린다. 장면은 전환되고 남자는 갑자기 A씨가 길을 잃었다는 메시지를 받았다며 종이 나팔을 힘겹게 분다. 그가 무섭다던 개 짖는 소리와 비교하면 소리는 거의 들리지 않는다. 그가 A씨든 아니든 간에 잃어버린 길을 찾을 마음은 애초에 없었던 것 같다.
가면의 두 사람은 초록색 천을 세워두고 그 위로 지팡이를 흔든다. 초록색 천은 그 위에 무엇이든 나타나게 할 수 있는 크로마키 천 같다. 주변이 은근히 비치는 가면과 지팡이의 새 장식은 언제든 그 은빛 안에 새로운 이미지를 불러올 것만 같다. 새 소리와 비슷한 무언가를 부르는 소리가 계속해서 들린다. 귀신을 부르는 원시 부족의 주술일까? 그들의 주술이 으레 그렇듯 이들은 현실에서 실제로 무얼 이루려는 속셈이 아니라 상징적인 행위를 하고 있다. 인간에게는 상징 행위가 필요하다. 현실에서 바꿀 수 있는 것보다 없는 것이 더 많으므로. 사냥감이 잡힐지 말지 몰라도 일단은 빌고 믿는다. 후에 사냥감이 진짜 잡혔던 아니던 그런 사사로운 일은 인간의 기록에 남지 않는다. 기록에 남은 것은 무언가를 바라던 과정, 즉 동굴 속 믿음의 흔적들이다. 두 사람의 주술적 행위 위로 나타나는 이미지들은 이전 장면들과 유기적으로 연결되어 마치 주술을 준비하고 시행하는 모습처럼 보인다. 그래서 마법이 성공하였느냐고? 그러게 내버려뒀을 리가. 불러낸 것이 손에 잡히는 순간 희미한 아름다움은 사라지고 무서운 현실이 찾아올 뿐인데.
“Do Not Look for Me (2024)”
Reflections on Byung Nam An’s In the Desert
2024.2.8
Kim Luna (Painter/Artist)
Where do the things that exist only in memory and then vanish go? A field that has become a construction site, the animal sounds once heard there, brief conversations with strangers. Small fragments of memory drift through the mind like ghosts, sometimes flashing back suddenly. Such memories are without temporality. They are at once past, present, and future. Stripped of substance, they become small glittering shards, floating endlessly in the brain. Creators often wish to seize these elusive fragments and give them form. Interestingly, Byung Nam An’s In the Desert lets the prey go if it runs. The artist simply shows us the process of following the tail of what has disappeared. And that process is the entirety of the illusion we feel toward what we have lost. Must the lost always be recovered? If it were, the nostalgia it carries would vanish at once. In the Desert deals with the sensations that arise from pursuing what has been lost—like a mirage in the desert, unreal yet more captivating than reality itself.
The artist possesses a physical body. The artist stands with feet on the ground. Yet to chase after the lost, the artist chooses to erase that body and become a fictional being. Story, sound, whatever may appear—the magic of green and silver is enough. The video begins with two people reciting in a dark open space. The first man reads the opening of a text set in a rather conventional desert. The second, cutting through the dark with a flashing light, reads a dialogue. It is a question-and-answer exchange between two people who seem to meet for the first time in some country; whether its setting is a desert is unclear. The respondent’s sense of self is so faint that anyone could take his place: He likes the color blue, stones on the roadside, lullabies. He says he writes poetry but does not know how to write. He says he makes films but has no plan… With this, we too are ready to see a mirage.
After the recitation, two figures appear wearing silver foil masks and carrying staffs decorated with silver foil birds. A man in a star-shaped silver mask lies sprawled on a sand dune, twirling his staff as if casting a spell. He may have no thoughts at all, yet we soon perceive him as someone collapsed in the desert, worn out after sending rescue signals. Then comes a woman’s voice, sounding like his inner thoughts. According to her, the place where he lies was once farmland where lost puppies roamed. Her words—that something unseen is still nearby—sound as though the farmland in his memory still exists, lacking only substance, and that this place could simultaneously be a field on the outskirts of Korea and a mingling of memory and imagination. The scene shifts: the man suddenly says he has received a message that Person A has lost their way, and he blows into a paper trumpet with effort. Compared to the barking dogs he once feared, the sound is barely audible. Whether or not he himself is Person A, it seems he never intended to find the lost path in the first place.
The two masked figures set up a piece of green cloth and wave their staffs above it. The cloth resembles a chroma key screen, capable of conjuring anything upon it. The semi-transparency of the masks and the bird ornaments on the staffs seem ready at any moment to summon new images into their silvery surfaces. A sound like birdsong—or perhaps an incantation—continues to echo. Is it the ritual of a primitive tribe calling spirits? As with such rituals, their purpose is not to achieve something tangible in reality but to carry out symbolic acts. Humans need symbolic acts, because in reality there are far more things that cannot be changed than those that can. Whether or not the prey will be caught, one prays and believes. Later, whether the prey was actually captured is a trivial matter that leaves no trace in human records. What remains recorded is the act of wishing—the traces of belief inside the cave. The images that appear over their ritual-like performance connect organically with the earlier scenes, making the sequence look like the preparation and enactment of magic.
And did the magic succeed? Of course, it was left unresolved. The moment what was summoned becomes tangible, its faint beauty would vanish, and frightening reality would rush in instead.
Tunnel/Hole
2025.02.26
Written by Byoung Nam An
The language of "art," often feels fragile and delicate. It seems that the more one tries to define something, the more difficult it becomes. Since living in England, I have frequently tried to explain to people in Korea than England what is so different about the two places, and the more I try, the more my words seem to lose their way. The more I search for logic, the closer I get to contradiction. In many ways, life in a city, a product of modernization, is similar to life elsewhere, yet sometimes it feels entirely different. In the end, I may have put in a lot of effort to speak dramatically about the place I live because it is where I spend a significant amount of my life. Perhaps the difficulty in explaining these parts, which I find hard to express, can be untangled if I view it as a problem entangled in the complexities of people. Perspectives are all different, and could these different perspectives, when tangled together, form a single thread of logic or a single straight line that can be explained?
The difficulty of making art(’Misul’ which is a word used as the same meaning with fine art came from Japan to Korea among the history) seems to stem from the doubts and questions I direct toward myself. For example, having started making art at a rather late age, I somehow became capable of creating good paintings through self-learning, but I find myself never trusting or taking for granted what I create(maybe it is because of the missing part of the tradition in contemporary art field in South Korea). Instead, I continue to observe my own works as though I were observing someone else's(maybe this is the westernized view on the painting). I frequently ask myself, as though questioning another person, "How can this piece be explained or accepted by others, or even by myself?" Such difficult questions. If I had started pursuing art at a younger age, I might have shrugged off my difficulties with, "I was just born this way." Ironically, the longer I think and immerse myself in it, the deeper I fall into a labyrinth. It’s easy to say "relationships" are the most important, but the moment those words are spoken, I may be convinced, only to have that fragile belief shattered when confronted with more concrete and firm beliefs and questions.
Instead of focusing on what I dislike, I’ll first mention what I love: ambiguity, fragility, strangeness. These three qualities seem to define the space where beings of such nature can wander, and that space, I believe, is art. All those things that have been pushed out of the market, industry, or products, they drift in this space. One of my closest friends asked me in the 2020s what defines art, and I answered, "Well...," while suggesting that art((including performance or video) these days seems to be market-driven. The word ‘market’ is such a peculiar term. The moment the word ‘market-driven’ comes up, this writing begins to feel like a typical critique. Everything is interconnected, and if one form of relationship is exchange, then what is there to critique about it(market)? There are so many interpretations and layers in a single word like ‘market.’ Would it be right to blame on a farmer growing rice and say, "You’re a servant of capitalism!"? But the issue when bound by genre remains sharp: it is the isolation and suffering of the creator themselves.
How many people around me, including myself, suffer mentally while engaging with art? How can we be freed from this? Is art something inside the system or outside it? Are artists being creative in relation to this structural issue? These are my questions.
Omok, a variation of the game of Go(considered as amateurism), is simpler and doesn’t require professional expertise or training. Therefore, it allows for more personal expression. I realized as a child while playing Omok that the best strategy for attack is defense. When focusing on defense, certain structures naturally arise, and then I inevitably gain the initiative to attack the counterpart. This attitude became my life’s approach, though I can’t say which came first—this attitude or my life itself. It is a form of ‘passive aggression’. During my military service, I had anger toward the system, but that anger was not rebellion—it was perfect compliance. 'Perfection' is an eerie concept. It’s about placing humans as functional industrial machines. Until I was a sergeant, I upheld that system perfectly, wanting to become a terrifying entity within that very system. To show the most perfect appearance, excluding emotions. But these days, I recall the deceptiveness of that attitude and feel a strong desire to go in the opposite direction. Of course, things can’t simply be divided this way. Absurd words that deceive the other party, like "You only care about yourself," or "This kind of work is common. Try to make something only you can do," etc. These words are like a net, swallowing the other person. But if I reverse these words, they can also apply to the other person themselves. I distrust loud, grand words and instead listen to quiet, subtle(silent) words from microscopic realms because I’m convinced that what is visible is only a small part of the whole. In the world of art, with only four or five categories—painting, video, installation, sculpture, and performance—those who seek something new often find themselves addicted to the dopamine rush of discovering something new to them but may not be new to others. These people are fundamentally narrow-minded and always ready to mock whatever they see. Perhaps I also have this trait. That’s why I must have the willingness to accept that even things that seem identical can be seen as different. Where does difference come from? Difference already exists, but whether it is visible or not is a matter of perception, so if we fail to recognize it, it is easily dismissed. Young men in Korea, with shaved heads and wearing stuborn glasses in the military, are completely different individuals. The difference between two works of art that appear identical must be found in the individual’s history. The background, context, and history of the artist—impossible as it may be—are all part of that context. Therefore, the conclusion of this thought is not about art itself, but about what lies beyond art.
I think of myself as not a perfect Christian (what is Christianity, after all?), but I attend church every weekend and spend time in worship(church service). Christians here are not the same as those in Korea, and the more I talk to the people here, the more I realize there are different kinds of Christians even within this group. The essence of being a Christian (I tend to trust a Platonist view that facts and opinions, as argued by Badiou, are distinct) is not found within the church group, but outside it. An artwork must become a tunnel that is directed toward the outside world.
Even with this thought about the outside world, I still take up the camera while painting and drawing(I’ve often admired people who, while painting, also create sculptures or take photographs. Part of the reason is that I didn’t want to face the difficulties of painting. For instance, the history of canvas and oil painting, or the history of art in Korea, is something I can't resolve or untangle, so I believed ignoring it would make it a non-issue). But with photography or filming, if you’re not careful, it directly leads to the act of shooting someone dead with a gun. I’ve already learned this, but more and more, I am realizing that most people feel burdened by being caught in a camera frame. The photographer(videographer)'s struggle to capture something new, beautiful, or strange, while the subject doesn’t want to be captured, is a tug of war. Even if you win this game, the discomfort doesn’t disappear. People who are mentally prepared are those who at least possess knowledge and information about the industry—performers, actors, singers, artists. I believe everyone who holds a camera bears this conflict in their hearts.
So, I’m a complex person, but that complexity is not because of me alone, but because of the family history, economic and climate crisis, actions, histories and conflicts in our society, politics, and people connected, or disconnected with me and the others.