Liberated Yet Lonely Monsters
SunYoung Lee, Art Critic
Seoul, S.Korea
This essay is from the Exhibition "A Study of Human Mannerisms- Their Self-Indulgence In the Social Structure", Speedom Gallery, Kyang Myung City, South Korea in 2010
Modernity and primitivism, civilization and savagery coexist together in Eunkang Koh’s art, where colorful monsters live either on shelves or in boxes with bright black and white stripe backgrounds. Dominating various black and white patterned backgrounds support colorful and razzle-dazzle monster/creatures that reveal themselves in her pictures. These monsters have a combination of many different origins. They take their heterogeneity away and convert it into empathy through the transformation of their anatomical structures. The artificial patterned backgrounds are an illusionary attribute rather than a physical reality. It is more of a seductive reality, as Jean Baudrillard articulates, compared to the reality we believe in. Eunkang’s work is a product of simulation rather than realism. The relationship between background and creatures evades appropriate limitations and enters a symbolic world of transparency and weightlessness. Symbolic desire, underneath natural necessity circulates without the decision of quantity, direction, and speed within the symbolic network. The scholarly title, “ A Study Human Mannerisms--Their Self-Indulgence in the Social Structure” explains Eunkang Koh’s style very well: colorful, diverse, full of humor, and satire.
Koh illustrates human selfishness in a very humorous way: the creatures coil in their own holes. She uses coded patterns to portray this modern society. In her work, the creatures are in the center of their own universe, but at the same time, they do not realize that they are only a part of a whole picture as there are other creatures that are only slightly different in color or shape. It is a satire of individualism that her creatures show their individual personality, yet are stuck in their own solipsistic world. Monsters are positioned in each drawer in “Human Interaction” and they are very vibrant in comparison to the black and white illustrated drawers. The monsters are minding their own business: navigating, spying, crawling, etc. In “ We Always Think Outside of The Box”, creatures in patterned boxes have a combination of an elephant face with a human body, a human face with an octopus body, a human face with mantis arms and legs and an amphibian’s body, and a human figure with butterfly wings. They are covered with vivid and bright colors, which shows their diverse and different origins. “Everybody Is Different” emphasizes the diversity of the monster figures who inhabit holes. But, no principle of classification can be found to define this vision of the diversity. Koh arranges these creatures in a mechanical and disorderly way. “ Shelves” is a long horizontal work like a scroll painting. Creatures are sitting on shelves as if they are coming out of the vertical stripes. The stripes dominate the artwork like wallpaper. Yet the creatures and background have absolutely no relationship to each other.
In her work “ We All Carry Our Own Burden”, creatures are placed between complicated vertical strips and cubical boxes. The coding volatilizes the actual weight in the image, but the coded creatures cannot be completely free from the burden of their lives. Hardship only travels parallel from one creature to another in different levels of their lives. They are derived from the preaching of liberation from nature, humanity, history, and reality in a simulated society and still have to tolerate their everyday life just like humans in society. Along with creatures, black and white backdrops such as walls, drawers, shelves, and boxes possess totality and unity just like nature and tradition. These geometric ramifications are connected like nets but that does not mean that the creatures within the structures are communicating with each other. Creatures that reside in boxes and live very close to one another communicate indirectly and superficially. It reflects the structure of communication in modern society where we humans, network to build our relationships for career and business while not caring who our neighbors are, or what they do. In pre-modern society, neighbors used to have closer relationships with each other, while overall network of people had not yet been developed. Koh’s work reflects the habits of the modern life style.
A Modern society system has enabled large networks of people and post-modern society has achieved full control of these networks to direct and exploit human society. Traditionally, historical transitions, from pre-modernism to modernism and from modernism to post-modernism, modify organicism qualitatively. In Eunkang Koh’s work, various patterned houses are standardized and easily moved like boxes and tubes. Creatures are removed from their original shapes and are altered into various new hybrid forms. These formations reveal a loose and dissolute situation that delays transformation of established stability in the modern society. Creatures may choose their own boxes, which they protect and cover themselves. Monsters, who are buried in their solipsistic world, are integrated into their own shelters like snails. Their freedom of choice moves from ‘positioning individuals into the social order and building a system of stable and continuous relations that helps to construct social duty and responsibility’ into ‘destructive relativism and extreme subjectivity’ [1]. Structure forms change when one system is altered to another, and in Koh’s work, the more carefully the system is structured, the more distorted and strange shape the creatures become during the transition of the modernistic system.
Many sociologists point out that the breakdown of the modern community has provoked social alienation. Disconnection from the roots of nature and tradition expresses sovereignty yet alienation. The creatures in Eunkang Koh’s work reiterates images of freedom and confinement. It is pleasant but desperate moment because various patterns are annexed into strips, which resemble prison bars. The extreme heterogeneity of the creatures is easily modified to suggest homogeneity. Koh’s work suggests abandonment yet visualizes how a system controls a whole society. The creatures look unique, but they are only one of many who are living within the structure of the system. As the black and white background has an appeal as one of many decorative wrapped containers in a factory, personality is implemented through consumption via mass consumption of the society. In Consumer Culture and Modernity, Don Slater states that consumers are a combination of freedom and desire, words that are completely opposite concepts. A universal form of a market benefits from this identity crisis, but the consumption driven by endless desire reinforces more identity crises at the same time. Uncertain consumers in Koh’s work reside in containers, boxes, and tubes that remind us of shopping bags and boxes.
It is a paradox that the more cautiously organized the market is, personal anomie becomes more prevalent in modern society. As Baudrillard states, consumers within a mass culture eventually will transcend limits of logic, destroying the social system. The pleasure from consumption is a temptation that causes us to momentarily forget about the repressive conditions of production that deepens de-humanization. Baudrillard points out that complex and profound temptations increase the importance of the process of systematic reproduction and social integration. Individualism in mass culture is illustrated like a caricature in Eunkang Koh’s work. The wildness of monsters, a production of “ an order that belongs only to its own”[2], is neutralized, which likely could be in primordial chaos. However, the madness of the monsters still remains within themselves. Especially consumption, which is implied through the monsters, is emphasized in her work in that the madness of them is “the absence of labor”[3]. These heterogeneous creatures are assimilated into the system through consumption. They are not an irreverent power trying to disintegrate classification or to violate taboos in the social order, but are a safe reversion within the system. Irrationality and violence, which symbolize monsters, are being tamed into a reasonable pursuit of self–understanding like a transition from a traditional society ruled by tyrants and royals to a modern society by civilians who value more communication and compromise. Albert Hirschman summarizes this transition in his book From Passions to Interests. Hirschman sees that the transition from war to peace as meaning nothing but a shifting from one bloodless battle to another in our lives.
Selfishness, which evokes competition and war, still operates even though the creatures are completely apart from each other in Koh’s work, “Shelves”. Don Slater suggests that modernity created cultural devastation and social alienation. He continues that it also deteriorated the concept of community and a truthful society and turns them into a nostalgic memory and a utopian dream through rationalities of economics. In other words, consumer culture is not understood as the liberation of individuality and development of society, but pathology of anomie. Slater states that consumer culture gives birth to mass production, but still remains as a very weak replaced concept, in which, as a replacement, we have lost in the modern social system. Modernity created anonymity, neglect, a free labor market, and an unstable status quo that previously was a monitored and stable community. However, these materialistic and superficial rationalities cannot create value, but wealth. The production of wealth also continued to generate poverty, exploitation, and instability. Don Slater says it is a combination of substantial success, technical development, and individual freedom in conjunction with self-understanding in liberalism. Freedom in this context means the freedom of individuality and choice in a free market.
As Suzi Gablik points out in her book Has Modernism Failed?, a society is a place to freely seek for something useful and good in an individual and modernistic way. Practical individualism sacrifices transcendent goals for individual pleasure and freedom. Transcendence is either excessively worshiped or devalued in capitalism, which is controlled by the financial markets. Art also follows this phenomenon like an up and down seesaw. In Koh’s work, these hybrids are a product of modernistic individualism based on reason and freedom, but also a heritage that stems from a dimmer side of modernity. Today, self-understanding and individualism are ruled by not the power of innumerable ways like An Invisible Hand by Adam Smith, but anarchism, and the unbalanced power of anarchism that is leaning toward dystopia rather than utopia. These colorful heterogeneous creatures and their black and white backdrops resemble the capitalistic market and the anonymous system of market value. ‘Human selfishness’, which is expressed as these stubborn monsters, is not a result of freedom, but a strategy of modernistic domination[4].
[1] Edward Shils Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1981)
[2] Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (Routledge, 2006)
[3] Ibid
[4] Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (Routledge, 2006)
Seoul, S.Korea
This essay is from the Exhibition "A Study of Human Mannerisms- Their Self-Indulgence In the Social Structure", Speedom Gallery, Kyang Myung City, South Korea in 2010
Modernity and primitivism, civilization and savagery coexist together in Eunkang Koh’s art, where colorful monsters live either on shelves or in boxes with bright black and white stripe backgrounds. Dominating various black and white patterned backgrounds support colorful and razzle-dazzle monster/creatures that reveal themselves in her pictures. These monsters have a combination of many different origins. They take their heterogeneity away and convert it into empathy through the transformation of their anatomical structures. The artificial patterned backgrounds are an illusionary attribute rather than a physical reality. It is more of a seductive reality, as Jean Baudrillard articulates, compared to the reality we believe in. Eunkang’s work is a product of simulation rather than realism. The relationship between background and creatures evades appropriate limitations and enters a symbolic world of transparency and weightlessness. Symbolic desire, underneath natural necessity circulates without the decision of quantity, direction, and speed within the symbolic network. The scholarly title, “ A Study Human Mannerisms--Their Self-Indulgence in the Social Structure” explains Eunkang Koh’s style very well: colorful, diverse, full of humor, and satire.
Koh illustrates human selfishness in a very humorous way: the creatures coil in their own holes. She uses coded patterns to portray this modern society. In her work, the creatures are in the center of their own universe, but at the same time, they do not realize that they are only a part of a whole picture as there are other creatures that are only slightly different in color or shape. It is a satire of individualism that her creatures show their individual personality, yet are stuck in their own solipsistic world. Monsters are positioned in each drawer in “Human Interaction” and they are very vibrant in comparison to the black and white illustrated drawers. The monsters are minding their own business: navigating, spying, crawling, etc. In “ We Always Think Outside of The Box”, creatures in patterned boxes have a combination of an elephant face with a human body, a human face with an octopus body, a human face with mantis arms and legs and an amphibian’s body, and a human figure with butterfly wings. They are covered with vivid and bright colors, which shows their diverse and different origins. “Everybody Is Different” emphasizes the diversity of the monster figures who inhabit holes. But, no principle of classification can be found to define this vision of the diversity. Koh arranges these creatures in a mechanical and disorderly way. “ Shelves” is a long horizontal work like a scroll painting. Creatures are sitting on shelves as if they are coming out of the vertical stripes. The stripes dominate the artwork like wallpaper. Yet the creatures and background have absolutely no relationship to each other.
In her work “ We All Carry Our Own Burden”, creatures are placed between complicated vertical strips and cubical boxes. The coding volatilizes the actual weight in the image, but the coded creatures cannot be completely free from the burden of their lives. Hardship only travels parallel from one creature to another in different levels of their lives. They are derived from the preaching of liberation from nature, humanity, history, and reality in a simulated society and still have to tolerate their everyday life just like humans in society. Along with creatures, black and white backdrops such as walls, drawers, shelves, and boxes possess totality and unity just like nature and tradition. These geometric ramifications are connected like nets but that does not mean that the creatures within the structures are communicating with each other. Creatures that reside in boxes and live very close to one another communicate indirectly and superficially. It reflects the structure of communication in modern society where we humans, network to build our relationships for career and business while not caring who our neighbors are, or what they do. In pre-modern society, neighbors used to have closer relationships with each other, while overall network of people had not yet been developed. Koh’s work reflects the habits of the modern life style.
A Modern society system has enabled large networks of people and post-modern society has achieved full control of these networks to direct and exploit human society. Traditionally, historical transitions, from pre-modernism to modernism and from modernism to post-modernism, modify organicism qualitatively. In Eunkang Koh’s work, various patterned houses are standardized and easily moved like boxes and tubes. Creatures are removed from their original shapes and are altered into various new hybrid forms. These formations reveal a loose and dissolute situation that delays transformation of established stability in the modern society. Creatures may choose their own boxes, which they protect and cover themselves. Monsters, who are buried in their solipsistic world, are integrated into their own shelters like snails. Their freedom of choice moves from ‘positioning individuals into the social order and building a system of stable and continuous relations that helps to construct social duty and responsibility’ into ‘destructive relativism and extreme subjectivity’ [1]. Structure forms change when one system is altered to another, and in Koh’s work, the more carefully the system is structured, the more distorted and strange shape the creatures become during the transition of the modernistic system.
Many sociologists point out that the breakdown of the modern community has provoked social alienation. Disconnection from the roots of nature and tradition expresses sovereignty yet alienation. The creatures in Eunkang Koh’s work reiterates images of freedom and confinement. It is pleasant but desperate moment because various patterns are annexed into strips, which resemble prison bars. The extreme heterogeneity of the creatures is easily modified to suggest homogeneity. Koh’s work suggests abandonment yet visualizes how a system controls a whole society. The creatures look unique, but they are only one of many who are living within the structure of the system. As the black and white background has an appeal as one of many decorative wrapped containers in a factory, personality is implemented through consumption via mass consumption of the society. In Consumer Culture and Modernity, Don Slater states that consumers are a combination of freedom and desire, words that are completely opposite concepts. A universal form of a market benefits from this identity crisis, but the consumption driven by endless desire reinforces more identity crises at the same time. Uncertain consumers in Koh’s work reside in containers, boxes, and tubes that remind us of shopping bags and boxes.
It is a paradox that the more cautiously organized the market is, personal anomie becomes more prevalent in modern society. As Baudrillard states, consumers within a mass culture eventually will transcend limits of logic, destroying the social system. The pleasure from consumption is a temptation that causes us to momentarily forget about the repressive conditions of production that deepens de-humanization. Baudrillard points out that complex and profound temptations increase the importance of the process of systematic reproduction and social integration. Individualism in mass culture is illustrated like a caricature in Eunkang Koh’s work. The wildness of monsters, a production of “ an order that belongs only to its own”[2], is neutralized, which likely could be in primordial chaos. However, the madness of the monsters still remains within themselves. Especially consumption, which is implied through the monsters, is emphasized in her work in that the madness of them is “the absence of labor”[3]. These heterogeneous creatures are assimilated into the system through consumption. They are not an irreverent power trying to disintegrate classification or to violate taboos in the social order, but are a safe reversion within the system. Irrationality and violence, which symbolize monsters, are being tamed into a reasonable pursuit of self–understanding like a transition from a traditional society ruled by tyrants and royals to a modern society by civilians who value more communication and compromise. Albert Hirschman summarizes this transition in his book From Passions to Interests. Hirschman sees that the transition from war to peace as meaning nothing but a shifting from one bloodless battle to another in our lives.
Selfishness, which evokes competition and war, still operates even though the creatures are completely apart from each other in Koh’s work, “Shelves”. Don Slater suggests that modernity created cultural devastation and social alienation. He continues that it also deteriorated the concept of community and a truthful society and turns them into a nostalgic memory and a utopian dream through rationalities of economics. In other words, consumer culture is not understood as the liberation of individuality and development of society, but pathology of anomie. Slater states that consumer culture gives birth to mass production, but still remains as a very weak replaced concept, in which, as a replacement, we have lost in the modern social system. Modernity created anonymity, neglect, a free labor market, and an unstable status quo that previously was a monitored and stable community. However, these materialistic and superficial rationalities cannot create value, but wealth. The production of wealth also continued to generate poverty, exploitation, and instability. Don Slater says it is a combination of substantial success, technical development, and individual freedom in conjunction with self-understanding in liberalism. Freedom in this context means the freedom of individuality and choice in a free market.
As Suzi Gablik points out in her book Has Modernism Failed?, a society is a place to freely seek for something useful and good in an individual and modernistic way. Practical individualism sacrifices transcendent goals for individual pleasure and freedom. Transcendence is either excessively worshiped or devalued in capitalism, which is controlled by the financial markets. Art also follows this phenomenon like an up and down seesaw. In Koh’s work, these hybrids are a product of modernistic individualism based on reason and freedom, but also a heritage that stems from a dimmer side of modernity. Today, self-understanding and individualism are ruled by not the power of innumerable ways like An Invisible Hand by Adam Smith, but anarchism, and the unbalanced power of anarchism that is leaning toward dystopia rather than utopia. These colorful heterogeneous creatures and their black and white backdrops resemble the capitalistic market and the anonymous system of market value. ‘Human selfishness’, which is expressed as these stubborn monsters, is not a result of freedom, but a strategy of modernistic domination[4].
[1] Edward Shils Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1981)
[2] Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (Routledge, 2006)
[3] Ibid
[4] Michel Foucault, History of Madness, (Routledge, 2006)