[서영덕]Addiction or Infection of Young-Deok Seo

Addiction or Infection of Young-Deok Seo What a young artist Young-Deok Seo 

concerns is the human body. He offers and narrates stories based on substantial understanding and concerns about formation. The stories are inferred by molded motions and expressions of characters rather than conveyed by elucidative presentation. He is delivering stories of people’s lives through human figures. For him, man is essential and important as to no matter what is a sculpture or story. It, as expected, is man who is the motif in his work. His delivery room where various stories and men with diverse expressions are born is full of figures of the human body in different sizes. Male and female sculptures in various forms and postures which are head-sculptures, standing figures, busts, and torsos are brought together. This shows his deep and wide interests in formation of the human body. Most of them are nude sculptures, made by toiling to weld steel. They seem to be made by the way of carving, but, to be exact, by way of modelling. That is, the human bodies are not kneaded by rubbing and pressing lumps of iron, but completed by melting and linking them piece by piece. Young-Deok Seo, with his whole heart, follows conventional/legitimate production methods from beginning to the end, regards of such as drawing, modeling, casting, and welding. He does all the finishing touches by himself as well. 

 The human bodies, born through a series of complicated and intense process, as worthy as to be called birth pangs, look sunken as if they are addicted or infected by something unknown. So do their entire expressions and motions, each body part in detail, and facial expressions in particular. Meanwhile, the facial expressions, closing their mouth firmly and their eyes gently, look like a seeker. In fact, they are haggard like a seeker who has come through his long ascetic practice. They bear moderate expressions in which no excessive part is included as well as all earthly desires and passions are removed. However, they do not bear comfort at all. Among young men and women, it is obvious that men are especially enduring something scary and cruel, or are closing their eyes against the heartlessness and cruelty of the world. Sometimes, they are cruel, horrifying, and dreadful themselves. Some are with their heads chopped off or partly smashed. The head-sculpture of a young man, much bigger than its life-size being placed on the empty ground, suggests something afraid or unknown horror. Was it made so enormously huge as paradoxically to emphasize contemporary young men distorted and daunted? 

 These various expressions are able to be made because Young-Deok Seo uses chain and welding. For common molding cannot completely show the artist’s own formative concerns and stories. He can partly cast and combine them in the form of, so called, assemblage, at best, but cannot bail the story he wants to communicate. His sculptures are placed on the ground, attached to the wall, or hung on the ceiling. In another sense, they have numerous facets and are greatly experimental. They are all covered with chains. They are so called iron men. They are woven stitch by stitch. Seo wraps the bodies with fragments of chains which appear to be their skin cells. His sculptures are very spiritual work to be devoted to the basic form and to take a long time. The connection between welding and fragments of chains helps enable Young-Deok Seo’ work. They are coiling round the entire body, being in gear with each other as the world is intertwined and complicated. His work is so called ‘chain reaction’. It makes us think connections between people which are supposed to be placed on certain facets and coordinates no matter whether we want or not, and think dynamic relations with system which social members are supposed to have. It implies chain reaction invisible but inevitable to be affected by some incident or phenomenon. 

 Earning one’s bread and deciding on the career is not of recent occurrence not only for those who makes specialty of arts, but also for those of other fields. As industrial economics is on the whole depressed and the world is rapidly rearranged centering around the commercial capitalism, participation of the young in public affairs as well as the older generation becomes hardened. The unemployment of the young has become one of the serious social problems. Young-Deok Seo plainly satirizes, through depiction of the human body, the social reality that firmly sticks to the inside of social system or falls apart from it. It is chain which he chooses to describe the phenomenon and reality intertwined and wriggling so as to live through and to bear each other. Fragments of chains are fixed with pins. Every two of them are connected with sharing one pin. The fragments, stirring, tell us various stories with vivid expressions and shine differently depending on the angle at which light hits them. Undoubtedly, the objet is in fact not moving at all, but feels like stirring and showing different phases depending on the angle at which we see it. This leads us to reflect upon reality and critical situation in which diverse interests are crossing each other so densely and firmly that we cannot avoid them. 

 What is manifest in Young-Deok Seo’s work is repetition. It is such as of subject, material, and technique. Repetition of despair and pain, and that of possibility and hope, in particular, appear frequently. He continues such an action and thought through repetition and accumulation. He keeps drawing. He intrudes this and that established index in human society as if he carves constellations of hope. He shows expressions in random rather than in arrangement, but on the other hand he seems to set up an intense formative search. He made thousands of tiny fragments of chains into the figures at present by searing, melting, joining them with a welding rod. Young-Deok Seo sears men and indifferent world which is festered and decomposed. He wakes them up. He melts and lumps them. He sutures them like a surgeon. Remainder sentiments from wounds, tears, and pains drip as if the candle is running. He lets them fall. He is intensely confronted with indecent viruses of the older generation which encroach our souls, and with infectious germs of a mammonish age represented as commercial capitalism. He is struggling. 

 His human bodies are firm on the whole. However, they are helplessly melting down by being infected or caught by something. They are not solid. They look like a stout body at a swift glance, but stand with their inside sparse at a close distance. They are empty inside. Their surface is smoothed. When looking through the inside, they are seared, crushed, melted by welding. The once strongly connected chains are heated, seared, melted once more. They are extremely upset. Like dropsy, they appear to be irregular deposition. It says that they are infected by something and its transfer so rapidly occurs that the entire bodies are being rotten. They look undisturbed outwardly. It is critical situation in a dead-end that their insides are being burn and their bodies melt by infection of viruses. However, they present a phase of indifference in which they are had no choice but to be calm. They are haggard. Their cheekbone and lower jaw-bone are conspicuously and firmly manifest, shutting their mouth tight. It suggests inevitable critical situation, pretty rational abandonment which admits inevitableness. 

Young-Deok Seo’s model is a man in 30’s in South Korea. Seo tries to present the image of an anonymous young laborer in the heartless reality which drives him to an uncertain, hopeless life. It is paradoxical that he closes his eyes with his mouth shut, as if he is calm and rational. Helpless critical situation in a deadlock and overflowing silence due to being fed up with formidable life are perceived. His young men are sleeping in deep silence. Otherwise, they are bearing and being connected each other so dangerously enough to be broken down. It is a firm, deep silence of being. His bodies show different directions and orders, making, the opposites, things hard to be understood, and reality uneasy to be accepted, compatible with each other. The hard bodies are holding their own places, dashing this way and rush that, following each other. Revealing their bones and inside, their calm expressions thoroughly removed from all sentiments, and their facial expressions of haggard characters whose senses are under control, contain intellectual/manual workers as in the image of a man laborer in late 30’s in South Korea. There flows cold air. Eyes are closed. It could be abandonment or an expression of exhaust. Might they be seeking for salvation from the absolute being? What they looks like in the future, or considerations and thoughts about labor, reality of labor, and the limited situation that they cannot get a job, is reflected. This is also what the artist feels. Seo actually models it on a haggard man. It can be seen that the frontal bone, the cheekbone, and the lower jaw-bone are developed. It can also be seen that a man is looking back his past years over his 30’s before entering his 40’s and has complicated expressions in which various thoughts about ‘me in the past’, ‘me at present’ and ‘me in the future’ cross each other. It shows its inside and variously combines with the image on the opposite side. It is interesting that lights and shadows form various expressions. Hence, it seems full of worries and complicated thoughts. In Seo’s mind, there are as numerous stories about world as the bodies are overlapped and combined in various ways. 

 Seo’s stories are summarized as a large head-sculpture placed on the empty ground. Like deep silence of a monk, it is firmly placed, throwing away and hiding all the unnecessary sentiments. Seo’s is open towards the world and conveys his heart to every direction. It endures yearning for something that cannot be regained and completely lost. It shows an objective confrontation, not a subjective one, with firmness of society. He does not see a hope until he continues to sear steel one by one with a welding rod, looking back his pent-up anger, holding, melting, and mitigating his heart. Seo is worth to be applauded for his young devotion woven stitch by stitch. 

Park, Tcheon-Nahm (Head of Faculty of Art and Science, Sungkok Art Museum)

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