Imagine yourself standing in front of Hyangro Yoon’s works in her solo exhibition Blasted (Land) scape (Insa Art Space, October 1, 2014-October 31, 2014). Yes, you are in the exhibition space in the little basement floor of Insa Art Center, away from the bustling and narrow passage full of cars heading towards and moving out from the busy city center of Seoul. You must have walked past the old walls of Changdeokgung (palace) and entered the building through the hinged, rather big transparent glass door. Then you encountered the books, or, the copies of a book on the ground floor. You must have gone through the books before coming down to the basement. You might have picked up some images from upstairs already, which are now hung in front of you in scales ranging from 1:1(100%) to 1:6(600%) of the originals.
Images of the ‘blasted (land) scape.’ With enigmatic or cryptographic titles such as GE91-3,729, A-SS1-136, and S23-1,376, the images present assortments of certain features that look somewhat familiar yet strange and bizarre as well: you see some dots on sheets of paper; you witness lines that resemble some kind of contours; traces of quick movements; explosions; fluids of an unidentifiable kind; bubbles; currents of water; mysterious markings that share certain visual signatures; figures that might be flowers; what looks like a representation of the flow of air; flow of emotion, or something else. Whatever the origin of the images is or through whichever way they are produced, they are there with material presence: Printed and framed, they are hung on the walls of the exhibition space.
A step closer to the images, you try to figure out what is happening. In front of your eyes are apparently identical images. The only visible difference among the images is the size, which seems to follow a set order that can be possibly described as a regulated enlargement or blow-up. Other than the size, they look exactly the same, which makes you think that there must be something in this discernible identicalness. Time is ripe for throwing questions, then. Where did they come from? Do they represent anything? Is there any art historical reference taken by the artist? Above all, how are these images produced?
The answer for the first question might be found on the first floor where 2,652 ‘blasted’ images are shown in sequence via a two-channel video presentation. And you might have also guessed the origin of the images in the codified titles and the visual characteristics of the works. The images are originally from a series of Japanese manga titles that have been heavily circulated in Japan and Korea. About the second question, the issue of representation shall be discovered in the inner workings of you the viewer after you go through all three floors of the exhibition. The title of the exhibition can be a little hint in reflecting on the second question. In regard to the art historical reference, some might find the intended absence of the agents of actions in Yoon’s assortment of expressive gestures is similar to the notion of empty space in the Oriental paintings; others would sense that Yoon’s works share some visual characteristics of particular styles of Oriental paintings; given that the source material for Yoon’s works is Japanese manga titles, one might even consider that the artist is following a certain line of artists that work with a web of references that fall under the category of subculture.
Yet, what hits the retinae of you the viewer is not these simple speculations on the nature of the works. It is the unexpected identicalness of the images and their indiscernible fineness that shapes the experience of Yoon’s works in Blasted (Land) scape, which is deeply embedded in how they are processed and produced. In a way, it is the nature of the works that is present in a form of materiality. To examine it, one has to follow the passage through which the framed images in the exhibition space are produced, which involves a series of electrical charges, vaporization, injection and burst of chemicals, small-scale explosions, etc: The dots and lines on the sheets of paper in front of you are not the ones created by the very skillful hands of the artist but printed by a specific thermal inkjet printer that boasts a stunning 2,400 x 1,200 dpi(dots per inch) resolution and has an expansion package that enables the machine to adapt to the industry-standard image processing algorithm, along with a guaranteed durability of its prints up to 200 years.
Indeed, the whole series of works could not be conceived and materialized had it not been for the help of various imaging and printing devices, both in physical and non-physical terms. The dots and lines in Yoon’s works must have been initially a droplet of ink run from the tip of a pen held by one of the manga masters or someone at the production studios. After they had been created by hand at first, they were scanned and processed to be prepared for print publication. Once published in Japan, they were then brought to Korean publishers that rescanned them to substitute the original Japanese text with the translated Korean text. Either through a digital editing or through an analog cutting and pasting, the Korean versions of the original mangas were came into existence, which were then fed into printing machines that possibly used the offset printing technology, a technology that requires four different negatives to be produced before a set of paper is printed. The artist then scanned the Korean version of the mangas using a scanner equipped with the Digital Image Correction and Enhancement technology, feeding the resulting scanned images into Adobe Photoshop and InDesign to blast certain parts of the digital copies of the edited versions of the originals. For the publication for the exhibition, which is on display in the exhibition space on the ground floor, the artist had to send the processed images to the designers so that the whole series of works could be reproduced in the form of a publication, which is ironically done through offset printing. The color K of CMYK and another color element were used to make the color black look more thick on paper.
For the works in the basement floor, the final stage before they were detained in frames or the first stage of re-materialization after the whole process of scanning, blasting, and editing was the thermal inkjet printing in which the digital originals of the processed images were fed into a highly efficient printing machine. At the small nozzles attached to the printheads, the very dynamic and dangerous process involving small-scale explosions and the resulting burst of extremely small ink bubbles happened more than many thousand times at every single second while the images were being printed. Since the density of the highly controlled ink bubbles put on paper exceeds 1,200 dpi, your eyes cannot distinguish the difference between the identical images in different scales in the exhibition, under the condition that the digital originals of the images are also processed in a resolution setting beyond 1,200 dpi. Now, a mechanical error or some unknown technical failure might have created a glitch in this perfect circulation of images. Maybe it is the surface of the paper, which seems to be dead flat in our human eyes, that has generated some random variations. Or, it would be that flat empty space surrounded by the fine reproduction of the processed and blasted images where the true glitches, variations, or errors of reading what the artist calls landscape with parentheses lie.
Jaeyong Park