Torrents of the Exterior

Preface

When the bony branch sprouts new buds, that tender light of the bud turns people’s head. How green is the chlorophyllous leaf; the green with all kinds of mysterious colors. The green shade flickers through the shadows of the folded leaves. Nature is everywhere. Even in this crowded artificial fortress as well. Although the city seems like it has exceed the variability of the nature or it controls the nature totally. At least the scenery Sunghee Pae captures is from the programmed world. She seems to understand the figure of the rootless tree in the apartment advertisement as the architectural unit rather than nature. Silver magnolia, Palm tree and Cherry tree, the nameless trees are sorted by functions and sizes, and they will be duplicated, be installed and be controlled. The buildings and the trees are equally put together and become the gigantic structure that designs kitschy life. And then one moment, Pae withdraws the aerial viewpoint and goes under the tree. However, she never stays in the interior of the tree’s shadow— where the lights’ and the shadows’ temperature transfers to the skin. Rather she is fascinated with the grotesque skylines that the barren branches and wires entwines and creates. Only the monochromatic patterns and the unreachably isolated exterior will endlessly torrent.
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Sunghee Pae has been interested in the structure of the city and worked as if she was building a model or designing an architectural blue print. She got the idea from looking at the city that she daily employs in. However, where she actually casted her eyes were on the apartment advertisement that shows some virtual city images when she started her work. These images are insufficient to grasp the city—an aggregation of the inorganic matters such as living spaces and the infra facilities, and the organic matters such as animals and plants. However, it is a sufficient enough material to imagine the structure of an apartment, the main dwelling space of the urbanites. It is not difficult to think of the city discourse through apartments as it is the representational place where the modern hierarchical desire is projected. Pae focuses on the roadside trees along with the building as the main components of the apartment compound in the advertisement flyers. After, the apartments and the roadside trees — which represent the artificial and the nature—became a major subject of her work. Apartments abstracted as pure white cubes and road trees unified into one styles and sizes. Pae shows her work of searching individuality in the exhibition Plant Factory, by combining these two “units” that she discovered, outstretching from her previous attempts to create an abstract space.

Close up, or moving forward. There is a visible change in recent work of Pae; one of the easiest expressions to describe her work will be ‘becoming closer of the “physical distance”’. Her previous works mainly used the aerial viewpoint, however for the past 3years of her work introduced in this exhibition it seems like she close-up the object.  Urban Tree (2014-2015) has looking up point of view of a road tree. Beyond the shadows of bony tree branches and the electric wires intertwined, the barely contour of the building is visible. Pae also worked with the road tree before by capturing the subtle typological difference of it. At that time the tree was dealt as an independent unit. However this time the form of the branches and wires entwined as a single unit and cut by square frames is highlighted. The trees shown in the Urban Tree are different from the ones in the apartment advertisements. The fact that the artificial-utopian city images don’t have any electric wires infers that the subject of this work is not an abstract reproduction but an organic component of the city. Pae got out of the workroom and went out on the streets. To the artist who has been producing tree images based on the advertisement flyers, the road trees looked freshly new. The road trees entwined with the electric wires are not the trees of organic being but already the city’s artificial product itself.

However, in Urban Tree, did the artist really come close with the subject? Can it be considered as closer than before? Can it be a close-up from the aerial viewpoint? One certain thing is that the apartment flyers cannot be magnified, and even if it is magnified it would be only pixel images. This work is not a close-up of her previous work. Even so, there is a common sharing attitude between the two. Pae took a picture of a road tree viewed from the street, drew it monochromatically in a translucent paper and reversed its front and back. When the surface with the ink residue is covered, sleek and even body shows up. Pae only leaves the contour and the pattern of the figure. It is as if the object becomes anonymous, the one who observes it also becomes anonymous. Pae withdrew the aerial viewpoint and crawled under the tree. However, she never stays in the “interior” of the tree’s shadow— where the lights’ and the shadows’ temperature transfers to the skin. Rather she is fascinated with the patterns made by the barren branches and wires. Pae denies the own individual’s interior through the black screen which its painterly nature is eliminated. Also instead of looking into the chaotic desire, she blatantly suggests the concise projectile of the desire. Only the monochromatic patterns and the unreachably isolated “exterior” will endlessly torrent. As a result, there might not be a drastic physical distance of the time when she dealt with the apartment advertisement and the time she stood under a road tree.

In Forest (2016) the transparent square cases are filled with flat modeled road tree images and are neatly piled up to distinctively show Pae’s point of view of the exterior and the interior. The exhibition’s title Plant Factory is reminded by the look of standardized trees systematically concentrated. Also the look can be understood as Pae’s new way of combining her two important elements: the apartment and the road tree. Forest captures the moment when the interior or the inside is revealed for the first time in Pae’s work, when her work seemed to focus on the exterior of individual—individual-nonexistence or absence of internal— all along. The space that is filled with the single standard boxes associates with the division of the apartment space. Finally the interior has been exposed, but the space is occupied by the road tree, not the human being. As the city spaces are only composed of buildings and road trees and also as people are completely trapped by that structure, the interior alluded by the exterior is recognized as empty.

Pae stays in the exhibition hall and provides the extra unit of the Forest. The hand crafted multiplication of the units built by shabby materials not fit for gigantic city architectures implies temporality of the city. City’s anonymous architectures are built and demolished fast. Jungle (2015) is a drawing animation that shows the sky lines of the apartments that change slowly. The city sight that moves like waves or foams lumping and scattering shows the already long existed speculation of the modernity—which is the perpetuity in the temporality. Interesting fact is that Pae intentionally erases the “performativity” of the temporality that inevitably marks a trail in her work. She does it by covering the trails of hand movement, making the viewer’s body invisible and freeing the working process from the expertise. Indeed this kind of anonymity and indifference paradoxically comes from her long and prudent deliberation.

Kim Jung Hyun (Art critic & Independent curator)