The subject ‘I’ is rather sturdier than it seems. We easily carry on our life cycle by eating, drinking, and sleeping; while flexibly operating the everyday by occasionally enjoying pastimes and gatherings. Conforming to the flow of time: ‘I’ do not attempt to defy the passage of time, and thus my sense of balance is appropriately tuned in to the timestream. Of course, someone might cause a stir in the calm inner side by questioning the ontology of the ‘I’ in the meanwhile, but despite the dilemma, or irrelevant to the dilemma, the daily routine of the ‘I’ helplessly continues.
After all, the subject ‘I’ and its sturdiness arise from the indifference to the ‘I’. It might be an outcome of a certain ideology. For instance, even in the situation in this city where nobody can rashly settle down, or the life as a tenant who continues to move in and out, which unfolds within the amplitude of numerous transitions; ‘I’ somehow adapts to this ever-changing environment and firmly continues to be ‘me’. Uncountable individuals scattered in the city guarantee the city’s circulation by exchanging positions with each other as terminals. And the city, anticipating to continue such circulation forever, reproduces dry places and dull landscapes that cannot be registered as special memories to the ‘I’ no more.
However, until when can ‘I’ be satisfied with such circulation? The question seems to be an onset for a protagonist carried along by a game of infinite loop to realise the minute difference in the repetition of time and to ultimately seek for a line of flight from the given now and here. But unlike in those typical narratives of loops, the ‘I’ has no luxury to imagine an ending that is different from the life cycle in the city and the mundane every day induced by it. Anyways ‘I’ belong to the city, and ‘I’ am excessively optimised to the cycle within. Yet it does not simply add up to a mode of pessimism. For example, in Junghwa Lee’s point of view, an infinite loop is not a closed circuit operated by an automated system, rather it is a principle structuring an ecosystem. Conforming to the flow of time may seem pessimistic. But during the process, moments of trivial experiences are stamped on the ‘I’ instead of being hastily volatilised, and ‘I’ (whether ‘I’ be aware of it or not) slowly transforms. In a sense, individuals do not exist as anonymous terminals, but rather they are reduced to fluid identities that are composed of (and being composed of at the very moment) experiences with and without forms.
In the end, Junghwa Lee, instead of trying to change the game, humbly admits the current ecosystem and confronts the ‘I’ who inhabits in the system as an object worth close observation. However, it is different from questioning the ontology of oneself. Both somehow attempt to make up for the indifference to the ‘I’, yet the former objectifies the ‘I’ as a specimen rather than withdrawing to the inner side of itself. An objectified gaze as such is not necessarily limited to the ‘I’: it strategically detours towards the beings that could be analogous to the ‘I’. Investigating the essence of ‘I’ does not matter to the artist. What is important to her is rather the way the flow of time and the trace of circulation caused by the timestream relate to the specimen ‘I’.
Case of cuckoo derived from the work of a bird watcher Edgar Change is an effective example. Cuckoos, for their survival, clandestinely lay eggs in other birds’ nests, while tree pipits, in order to discern their eggs from cuckoos’, transform the pattern of their eggs; and thus they coevolve in a way. In Lee’s video presented in the exhibition, Blue Eggs (2019), a male voice and a female voice each describe such process from one’s own point of view. While the male narrator keeps a rather objective perspective by reciting lines adapted from Edgar Chance’s notes, the female narrator obstinately calls the cuckoo ‘her’ and adheres to her present situation. The two narrators obviously share the premise of observing the objectified specimen. But as the video continues it becomes clearer that the female narrator is indeed the bird hatched in the tree pipits’ nest, or is assimilated to such bird, and thus the distance between her and her object becomes blunt. For example, cuckoos eating other birds’ eggs is simply an old nature of the species, yet the female voice describes it as a moment of embodying memories stamped on the egg. Therefore, “she laid different eggs in accordance with what she had eaten”.
As the observer’s viewpoint gets more disturbed, Blue Eggs becomes a sort of an essay film towed by the female’s narration. In other words, (as expatiated by a series of footages in the video that are filmed in Jurong Bird Park in Singapore, the lab of BRC¹, and Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve) the work appropriates the format of nature documentaries, but at the end, it is a confession of a flowing identity between ‘her’ and ‘her mother’ as a matter of fact. After all, the illustrations excerpted from Edgar Chance’s documents and the archive materials including footages filmed by the artist are not collected for the sake of documentation. They are rather arbitrarily combined and screened as a film in order to increase the resolution of the narrative. The formal transformation (from a nature documentary to an essay film) in the work hints at a specimen objectified for observation, such as the ambiguous status of a cuckoo. The existence of a cuckoo is objectively guaranteed by varieties of archives related to it, while simultaneously presented as a metaphoric being for the numerous ‘I’s which are divergently shaped within the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ecosystem, or the circulation system caused by the survival strategy, involving motifs of memories, experience and time.
In another video, Through the Looking Glass (2018), the narrator’s point of view is again easily appropriated and dismissed by the artist. The narration of the video states the phenomenon of the coevolution between cuckoo and tree pipits which has already been mentioned in Blue Eggs in a relatively dry tone, and it sounds as if it is reporting the result of the artist’s research. However, in the objective information based on the material collected by the artist (or a log of cuckoo observation) hides a portent of the narrative that becomes full swing in Blue Eggs. For instance, the motif of memory is not only still valid, but cuckoo eggs that vary following the host birds including tree pipits are implied as media covertly representing memories. Therefore the images of cuckoo eggs juxtaposed with the narration in the video, excerpted from the egg collection of Natural History Museum at Tring, are not valued as historical records. Instead, they testify visual patterns of distinctive memories. Such research results (collected from the observer’s point of view), unlike museum archives that are systematically categorised, exist as fragmented materials that are yet structured into narratives. After all, the report unfolded throughout the work focuses on the “race between what deceives and what tries not to be deceived” surrounding the memories embedded on the eggs in a nest, and it can be compared to the race against the Red Queen² in Through the Looking-Glass. Such conclusion leads the viewers to the beginning of the story associated with cuckoo’s brood parasitism and eventually starts to call together the narrators of Blue Eggs.
As the artist’s observation continues, a cuckoo which has once been objectified as a specimen is renewed as a role model that does not look idly on one’s surrounding environment. Cuckoo’s brood parasitism involves not only the symbolic act of swallowing the host’s eggs, but also an obsessive observation that is accompanied beforehand. Without the act of observation, the memories of the ‘I’ will again be neglected and swept away along the flow of time. In this context, the artist insists to pose herself as an observer and establishes her own archive, while at the same time seeking for a methodology to transform the archive into a state of a narrative. In other words, the series of materials archived based on the observation is, instead of being stuffed as it is, embodied to the artist as it transforms into a pseudo-memory, and then uttered as a narrative to redefine the subject ‘I’ (via various narrators in the work). Eventually, an archive, a form representing the past, is a survival strategy for the artist to actively remember (not record) the flow of time, and a motivation to activate the present ‘I’.
Works such as Summer Clock(2018) and Why is the bedroom so cold?(2019) elaborate such narrative in syntaxes other than the video. The former arranges twenty-five images excerpted from the egg collection of Natural History Museum at Tring in the UK in a row on the wall of the gallery; and the series of images rewrites the established timestream (into a timeline composed of different memories represented by cuckoo eggs) by reflecting on how cuckoo the summer bird assimilates into a season. On the other hand, the latter is presented as a monument for the ‘dead eggs’ which failed to hatch because the embryo development came to stop. Irregularly stacked egg box panels referring to the incomplete embryo developments readily embrace all memories by visualising unwillingly forgotten memories that failed to join the timeline of Summer Clock. The works discover meaningful pieces of time within an infinite loop of the ‘I’ that unfolds in a specific ecosystem (or the lifecycle of the ‘I’), and thus suggests a possibility to accept the mundane differently. For a cuckoo who fiercely observes, embodies someone else’s memory, and attempts to parasitise in various ways during a season for her survival; time is always given as unlimited variables that motivate transformation of the ‘I’. As a result, the identity of the ‘I’ gets more ambiguous, but it becomes a motive to deny the suspicious hypotheses asserting that the subject ‘I’ is substantial. But the special memories stamped on such ‘I’ will eventually be passed on to different ‘I’s, or break away from the process repetitively to accelerate the circulation of the ecosystem. In other words, unless time suddenly stops to flow, ‘I’ will exist as the remnants of memories that could never be buried in oblivion.
¹ As an abbreviation of Breeding & Research Centre, the institution supports reproduction of birds by breeding endangered (or rare) species and incubating abandoned eggs, as well as documenting the process.
² As stated above, it is from the fiction Through the Looking-Glass, but also mentioned as a case of an evolutionary hypothesis called Red Queen Hypothesis. The hypotheses, referring to the race against the Red Queen, is devised to explain a situation in which a subject eventually dies out by failing to develop (evolve) while its competitor continuously develops (evolves).
Translated by Jinho Lim(out_sight) |