Sang-Yong Sim

Going Deeper into the Garden of Scenopoeetes

From THE GARDEN OF SCENOPOEETES

Gallery Cha, 2010

1. Art as simple behavior of a morning bird

Today we witness unprecedented abuse of art. Already more than a century has passed since art ceased to mean excellent performance of instrumental work or to seek the ultimate truth. Now art has separated itself from the values it once relied upon―instrumental fullness, the search for truth, and experimentation of pure formal beauty―and has become something like a mixed-up diary of wandering souls, strangers to subjectivity, or inner nomads roaming about in an aimless life while embracing the excessive self, with the sentimental symptoms of chaos, dizziness, perplexity and sense of loss. Our post-post-modern art reminds us of the scene of someone who is not accustomed to using words and lacks technique, fumbling with words of mere emotional force such as skull, diamond, genital, corpse, schizophrenia, traffic accident, aids, various excrement. Reckless use of highly charged words, for example, excessive and naive venting of desires, voluntary ignorance of everything else, over-expression, and simulative effects illustrate to situation of contemporary art that is taking place now. Discourses that justify all sorts of emotional states and senses switching back and forth between an exploded unrecoverable situation and a point at the verge of explosion have now become established facts in colleges and art museums. "As always powerful sense of guilt―clear consciousness of the divided personality―requires a certain dramatic expression" (Dorothy L. Sayers).

Such tendencies are something we must clarify in order to determine the significance dwelling in Sujin Shin's recent manner of work. That is because Shin's art theory places weight not on excessive expression and language, but rather on the moderation of such aspects. She does not join the contemporary excitement of sentiment and emotion, or the abuse of language. Surprisingly, her motives came from a very small leaf; not monumental narration of dignified great nature or history overwhelming our being, or extravagant ideological framework dealing with the irrationality of civilization. How we, particularly our contemporary times, await the emergence of such gigantic discourse! But let us remember the words of Mephistopheles, the devil in Faust. He calls himself the "cost of existence that must be paid." This means the more extravagant one's existence is, the greater price he/she must pay. Observe how the excessiveness of the self and achievements of blown-up civilization are so often linked to demonic conclusion!

Of course, Sujin Shin's aesthetics of moderation is a method that pays the least, and is least linked to intellectual error or ethical evil. Nevertheless, this is only the beginning of comprehending her world of art. The essence of this world, which only speaks of a single leaf or leaves, is to go into the Garden of Scenopoeetes. Scenopoeetes is a bird that appears in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who makes signs on the ground by picking leaves of tree branches every morning and dropping them on the ground so that the sides with the lighter colors face upward. In this "insignificant" behavior the artist witnesses the simple but sufficient realization of art. This is because even this small act includes all the elements of even experimental art, such as symbolism and function, expression and material, motivation and action, and movement and reversal. Art is not something complex or extravagant, and it is not a means to charge language with gunpowder in an attempt to persuade or instigate others. Shin's idea of art has nothing to do with strategies to lure others into one's own plan by pulling on their heartstrings, possibilities of instigating the crowd, or gaining the capacity to create a "million-selling newspaper." The artist's faith in this de-expansive and anti-monumental form is subtle but solid.   

While paying attention so that her observations, discoveries, interpretations and actions do not exceed the boundaries of this small word, Sujin Shin goes further into the depths of the Garden of Scenopoeetes. And while doing so, she repeatedly examines and confirms the links of significance and potential forms of life which are immanent in this world. Thus, her interest in the world, implicated in the idea of managing the Garden of Scenopoeetes, is not about how far to expand the boundary of beauty, but how deep to pursue it.

2. A deep pattern of creativity

A single leaf, however, must not be defined as a mere symbol of a minimal boundary. This is because a single leaf is a complete organic microcosm in itself. It contains intimate mechanisms responding to sun light, adjusting water and nutrition, communicating with the roots and branches, and an aesthetic substance of form and material different from any other leaf. A single leaf thus becomes a powerful source of independent aesthetic experience as it desires, responds and determines within itself.   

Sujin Shin draws those microcosms delicately and processes them with fluid printmaking techniques, providing them with painterly substance. While ensuring diverse differences in density, she arranges them so that they are gathered or extended throughout the canvas or wall. The difference in density subsumes the difference of thickness, while forming a gentle variation of tone throughout the whole picture-plane. According to the artist's decision and emotion, trained by the printmaking media, which demands rational determination and plan, the process is carefully adjusted and tuned, subsequently creating a beautiful sea of calmly surging waves of tones, made up of the overlapping and dispersing of leaves on the canvas. The world obtained by arranging and overlapping identical but different microcosms according to an aesthetic algorithm is the realization of aesthetics of moderation, which firmly excludes all external drama, and only retains a certain intimate swaying of metaphor within.

The method of interactive installation used by the artist in her exhibition at Gallery CHA coincides with the meaning of the garden of Scenopoeetes in that it more actively searches for the aesthetic algorithm. By rearranging the numerous leaves installed variably on the large wall of the gallery in positions and shapes of their choice, spectators can share the experience of becoming the Scenopoeetes, or the subject of humble art. Ultimately, the spectator is not simply a guest invited to the garden of Scenopoeetes, but also the host. Thus perceiving and leaving empty places for the viewers should enable the artist to reduce the risk of the game of struggle amidst the oily and over-saturated visual vocabulary. In other words, it is not only a method to express strong opposition towards the abuse of art which has become widespread since modern art, but also a presentation of a new direction of art we should pursue.

Dorothy L. Sayers compares creativity or creative intellect to the "grain of the spiritual universe." It means that a certain deep pattern exists, even though today art has sufficiently deviated from a position where it can communicate such grain, and in fact faces a wall of disorientation and chaos. The grain of the spiritual universe in a way has something in common with the small leaf of Scenopoeetes mentioned by Sujin Shin. That is because our creativity and creative intellect cannot be completely irrelevant to a certain deep pattern implied in the insignificant behavior of a morning bird.