ENGLISH

Our lady vengeance

Heaven Baek solo exhibition

October 31-December 1 , 2013

 





 What is a community? The term ‘community,’ which is spreading like an epidemic around us, seems to be at the center of the way of living pursued in the present Korean society. According to Derrida, what you see, what you feel, or what is visualized as the surface of society may not be the visualization of meaning itself, but rather a sign or the/an encoded representation of the absolute value of meaning and the passion for it. This heated enthusiasm for community is associated with Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement,’ which is by definition related to ‘lack’ and ‘disguise.’ It may raise the question: Contrary to the common belief, isn’t it rather the lack of community that made us so heavily inclined to the discourse of it? For Derrida, the supplement means the ‘representation’ of the ‘original,’ which has a system different from that of introduction of the original. He understands representation as a way of showing mythological or absolute meanings, and the signifier, although filled with meanings, needs supplements because it is actually empty. He argues that supplements create and represent images. Then, to follow this line of argument, is public art, or community-based art the manifestation of the will to temporarily represent a fictitious community by reconstructing the absent community? Or is it a disguise to conceal the lack? Is it to highlight the state of absence with decoration? The response to the enthusiasm for and the lack of community may bring forth totally different results in accordance with the artist’s attitude. Heaven Baek’s Our Lady Vengeance, asks about the fictitiousness of community through the form of cinema or quasi-cinema, produced by the artist who herself went inside a nameless village—or more precisely, made by the artist and the residents together, or solely by the residents, or even, starring the residents. At first glance, the work may seem to take the format of Maeul Film or Village Film that is now popular in Korea, but is closer to an attempt to destroy the meaning of community that has been hitherto exaggerated and politically abused.  




The Two Faces of Community 

Community is a concept that cannot be explained easily. Today, it is realized as an extremist form of pursuing its own interest. For example, the labor-government conflict in the recent Korean rail workers’ strike clearly showed that every community, whether big or small, exists in multi-layered relationships. Richard Sennet argues that modern working conditions have constantly undermined ways of cooperating with other people: “In principle, every modern organization is in favour of cooperation; in practice, the structure of modern organizations inhibits it.”  He explains that the reason why there are increasing needs for other forms of community or alternative ways of living different from those of the past, such as cooperation, solidarity, and union is that modern man has lost or degraded the skills of cooperation. This may leads to the more fundamental philosophical question. The conditions, meanings, and political demands relating to community are not irrelevant to the human pursuit of freedom. Noam Chomsky expands the issue of human free will even to anarchism: “For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him.”  Chomsky’s understanding of anarchism may seem to be a negation of community, but it should be understood more as the will to pursue a trans-regional or -national community with more active engagement in society, mutual respect, and kind consideration.




The earlier project of the artist, who looks like a bashful activist, would have been a process of experiencing the peculiarity of one of the communities in the region in which she intervened. In 2011, Baek embarked a five-month long project in Naechon-ri, Hongcheon-gun, Gangwon-do, Korea, which sarcastically described a housewives’ gathering as a pseudo-political party. In this Housewives Party (2011), private meetings and public issues are jumbled together. A similar kind of gathering recently appeared in a South Korean SBS TV documentary entitled The Last Power. It reported the old women’s rebellion in Gamgok village, Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea, where only men have been so far elected to be a village headman. Old female members of the village, who became increasingly displeased with the fact that village affairs were discussed and dealt with in a male-centered way, independently elected a young village headwoman and began to put themselves forward. They went so far as to meet the county headman to demand solutions. Without the help of the big symbol of politics, we know all too well about the merits and faults of power. Everyone agrees that a community belongs to its members who are actually living there, whether or not they have a confused and non-eloquent way of talking. Housewives Party shows that politics arises from the demands of everyday life. And the questions posed in the work, such as democracy, politics, everyday life, and a community of others, are expanded to her first solo exhibition at Insa Art Space, titled “Our Lady Vengeance.”

 

Anti-Cinema or Post-Cinema: A Question about the Reality

This project began with the memory that the residents in Gaegem 2-dong, Jingu, Busan, where Lady Vengeance had been shot, had of this Korean film. Human memory is subject to flaws and errors: they remembered even the title wrongly, and the impression left on their minds was not the narrative of revenge and violence presented in the film, but only the fact that a very famous movie, starring a very famous actress, had been shot in their village. The artist gathers these fragmented recollections with the participation of the villagers. Each talks about his or her own memory, in which sometimes, Geumja, the name of the main character in the film, is mingled with Janggeum, another main character played by the same actress in one of the most popular Korean TV series. Baek finds herself more interested, not in the influence of the fictitiousness of cinema upon the identity of the village in reality, but in the process in which the subjects of the village assimilate the film, not as the other of the large-scale capitalist industry of filmmaking, but as a positive audience or witness. It is at this point where as the artist commented, the question of what kind of relationship the cinema as fiction can have with real life has meaning. 




For Jean-Luc Godard, movies are both telescope and microscope. He even adds that his life is a movie and he is himself a movie. The reason why he has to make a film is that to be himself, he needs to project myself outside. And one of the chief reasons why Baek produced Our Lady Vengeance, a deconstructive reinterpretation of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, is to explore how cinema can be related with reality. Derrida’s concept of deconstruction means to read the original work again in a new way. This should be understood as an approach different from representation. A deconstructive approach is to draw out new interpretations within the limits or boundary of the original text. A deconstructed text is different from an appropriation of the original, although having traces of it. What constitutes the identity of Gaegeum-dong, the background of the original movie as fiction makes the audience form an idea of the mythical structure of modern society. The subversive phenomenon that fiction controls reality seems to represent the poor life in reality in a roundabout way. The change of Geumja to Yeongja highlights that Baek’s Our Lady Vengeance has nothing to do with the theme of the original work, that is, the human feeling of revenge. And the text of Geumja who was deconstructed into Yeongja appears to reinforce the fictitiousness of community, rather than to represent the illusion of it. 




Our Lady Vengeance can be regarded as an anti- or post-cinema of the original. The process in which Geumja changed to Yeongja may not be solely due to a mere distortion of memory. This is because the memory of the residents who watched the shooting process is influenced by the conflicts between the filming staff and them, various collisions occurring during the filming period, and fortuitous accidents that would happen in the process to manipulate or control the reality to create a fictional world, and so on. Therefore, as the artist observed, the fact that the heroine’s name was changed from Geumja to Yeongja may summon another ‘reality.’ A ‘deterritorized cinema’ that escaped from the territory of cinema reaches the state of being away from the representation of cinema. While Sympathy for Lady Vengeance as a given event became the product of cultural industry like a readymade, Our Lady Vengeance, another movie completed with the various thoughts and views of those remembering the original film, turns into a reality represented by the so-called collective intelligence. Therefore, Our Lady Vengeance, screened on the first floor of Insa Art Space, as well as a video and a theatrical installation using objects on the second floor, could be regarded as a device to show the everyday life of the villagers and the paradoxical meaning of perspective, which are away from the inviolable representation of cinema. In addition, on the basement, the artist presents an independent space that is distinguished from the logical frame of the dialectic relationship between the original cinema and anti-cinema, and between the first and the second floor. The place, which has no bearing on this project, is dedicated to the relationship with Wonseo-dong where the exhibition is held. Baek also has a plan to create an event to float an advertising balloon during the exhibition period, which is to evoke reaction from the community with a deviant event that is out of the context of the village, as in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Exactly as the artist intended, the post-cinema of Our Lady Vengeance seems to succeed in presenting a new insight on reality. And even the excessive kindness to show the process of filmmaking, which may seem to put some limitations on the imagination of those who visit the exhibition, seems to serve as a strategic preparation to lay weight on the fictitious view of the world that controls reality now. 




Jung Hyun