The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

166 Kibong Rhee There is no place In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. 1 Like many contemporary artists, for Kibong Rhee the limits of Western philosophy’s ‘grand narratives’ of representation and truth provide rich subject matter. Rhee’s recent installations use metaphysics as a basis for developing an ecological relationship between nature and human intervention in art. In a previous work entitled Bachelor: The dual body 2003, Rhee presented a leather-bound copy of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 text Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — which proposed the impossibility of truth or objective representation — trapped in an aquarium. Dense with the weight of history, this canonical text was affected by the natural element of water, while air jets produced currents inside the enclosure. The text and pages were therefore subject to the whim of the water’s currents. Curator Park Kyung-Mee’s suggestion of Rhee’s ‘free thinking acting upon objects’ is an apt metaphor for the effect of such processes employed by the artist. 2 Wittgenstein was keenly interested in the representation of everyday objects by the artificial framework of language or logic. He proposed that we should examine the world through sets of propositions or speculations in order to test the limits of representation: ‘In a proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment’. 3 With this in mind, we might approach Rhee’s works as an ongoing set of experiments or propositions about the world, mediated by our individual experiences, language and preconceptions. There is no place – Shallow cuts 2008, featured in APT6, is one such experiment. Walking into a seemingly empty room, we are arrested by the moving shadow of a willow tree behind a glass screen. A shadowy mist partially obscures its boughs. As though taken from its natural environment and placed within the gallery setting, the installation reiterates the workings of Rhee’s Bachelor: The dual body ; the artificial tree becomes subject to a ‘natural’ element, produced through the means of a mechanical fog machine. 4 Just as Wittgenstein exploited language’s artifice, Rhee is interested in making works that are as much about the disappearance or obscurity of objects as they are about their existence. Through the partial ‘vanishment’ of his objects in installations such as There is no place , Rhee asks us to consider the natural spaces we inhabit and how we affect them. The willow tree, for instance, is revered in traditional East Asian painting and poetry. In this work, our impression of the tree is mediated by a screen, which relates to the intuitive processes of the artist’s drawing practice. Human presence is positioned as diminutive against the natural world and its inherent mysteries. Rhee explains this relationship in his approach to drawing: The surfaces, in endless transformation and combustion, together with the quivering outline, disappear into a void, leaving behind the traces of a certain accumulation. This might be seen as a ‘pattern of slowness’, another kind of generative energy, of recurrent production and renewal, exerting influence on the totality of motion and flux known as life. 5 The flux or energy that Rhee exploits through his works suggest that logic alone cannot convince us of the objective reality of our surroundings. The artist’s engagement with his immediate environment and its contradictions — such as modernity’s insistent drive for progress and preoccupation with so much visual, often empty, stimulus — is crucial to our appreciation of his work: Our history is racing toward a better new world with an unbelievable speed. We used to be full of great expectations. However, we are now left with a great deal of negatives as well: The universe became filled with helpless images and symbols. Only empty feeling of non-existence and aimless, mindless acts prevail in the contemporary world. 6 Kibong Rhee persuades us to shift our concerns from the global (‘infinite’, philosophical questions) to the immediate (everyday locales, and the objects and experiences constituting our daily existence), prompting us to deepen our consideration of the objects occupying our lives. Donna McColm Endnotes 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, author’s preface, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. DF Pears and BF McGuinness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961, p.3. 2 Park Kyung-Mee, ‘When mind and matter meet: Towards minus entropy’, in Rhee Ki-Bong: About Vanishment II 1997 [exhibition catalogue], Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 1997, unpaginated. 3 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 4.031f, p.43. 4 This element of Rhee’s installation recalls the canonical work by Marcel Duchamp, The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even , also known as The large glass 1915–23. In the work, an ‘illuminating gas’ is secreted from the abstracted bride figure over her nine ‘bachelors’ below, instigating a schematic process of desire and non-fulfillment. 5 Kibong Rhee, in Rhee Ki-Bong: About Vanishment II 1997 , unpaginated. 6 Kibong Rhee, ‘Paint like a mirror, being erased by a painting’, Rhee Ki-Bong: Mind and Mirror [exhibition catalogue], Gallery Meegun, Seoul, 1992, unpaginated.