[소현우, sohyunwoo]Warriors crossing the culture of death

Warriors crossing the culture of death

                                                     Lee, Sunyoung (Art Critic)

Mighty arms with which characters, welded to boards of a stainless steel, are equipped connect opposing values such as lovely vs. violence; empathy vs. dyspathy; organic vs. mechanical.  ‘Cruel fairy tales’, a subtitle of the exhibition where 8 large welded pieces are displayed, reflects a paradoxical concept between ‘cruelty’ and ‘a fairy tale’.  Hyunwoo So, a sculptor of cruel fairy tales, has changed warmth, happiness, and love inherent in a fairy tale into a cynical black comedy.  Like a myth, however, which reflects the unconscious and the social ideology, a fairy tale is not the place where only warm and friendly environment exits, as a life goes.  A doll, or a like-human, and a weapon, or something artificial, have something in common; they can be pooled in that they are different from a human and nature; they are all common fantasy for kids and outcomes of materializing feminine and masculine fantasy.  In his works, characters and arms symbolize the violence heartlessly executed.  Above all, his working process itself is as cruel as the fairy tale is.  Although artworks could be tale-like in that they go for creation, not reality, it must be a cruel process that a steel quilt, a process of welding stainless steel boards, requires enormous physical labors.  His work is found to have an intensity that cannot be found in others, either simply inquiring a foundry to cast or assembling objet.  

Hyunwoo So says that a stainless steel as a material requires a set of artist’s sacrificing.  Namely, it indicates that the harder an artist works, the more artworks get clean, durable, and refined.  Such a process as similar as sacrificing is related with content that the artist intends rather than simply a course of labor for labor.  Characters as well as weapons must be as cool as metals, and they, as components that are not natural products, should show their attributes.  The parts, welded and connected, are fully exposed, thus showing the components assembled, as is a puzzle, and then the aspects of a cultural product.  Whatever a shape is, pieces of triangle become particles forming a same-quality but different-shape object, featuring that its debris tangle subsequent to any attack and survive again, as do Zombies.  Even in the process of killing others or sometimes being killed, character’s facial expressions are as same as those in a fairy tale, and the heartlessness doubles violence.  They reflect artist’s skeptical perspectives that it is not uncommon to kill one another in the modern society, urging indefinite competitiveness.  Characters in his work are other selves of humans who belong to the most upper echelon in an ecological chain.  Impersonated characters symbolize the most dangerous nature, humans.           

 

The seal on a strut has a gun on its head instead of a ball when it plays.  The horns of a mountain goat placed on the head of a lion, which roars with sharp teeth revealed, are assuming the phase that the predating and the predated are tangling.  The weapon, consisting of the body part, is a gun.  Unlike other works, which distinguish characters’ body from weapons, the work transforms a gun and the body part and then makes them connected each other.  Other than a lion and a seal, a Donald duck, a Pooh, a teddy bear, a nymph, a robot, and a bunny all come out as characters.  Mostly Originated from Hollywood called ‘a factory of dream,’ those characters are the very products fully integrated with capital.  The reality of violence inherent in the general characters loved by the public lies in the very products that come from large capitalists.  Through his work, he expresses the violence and the aggression of capital.  Characters play roles in visualizing the violence from capital.  Attached to characters, the arms are like guns, a Vulcan, a mortar, a rifle for hunting, and a machinegun, a few of which are even bigger than the size of characters.  They are similar with actual weapons, not the same as.  Characters and their guns made of cool metals exemplify human relationship configured among weapons, capital, and violence.  A bunny, a Donald duck, a nymph, and a teddy bear are so sky-high that they are likely to kill others.  Equipped with linear weapons looking an enormous penis, a robot with a slender body line and aggressive large feet has its weapons equivalent quality to that of its body part.      

 

Those works combined with characters and weapons are aiming at something, as the best defense is to attack in chaos where only individual interests are pursued.  But, one of them is aiming at itself.  Sitting feebly on a cushion while having a gun on its hand, Pooh, seemingly smiling though, is depressed.  It is dubious whether it is alive, or it is right prior to death, or it killed itself.  In this sense, the death existing under the culture where indefinite competition dominates does not distinguish between the injured and the injuring.  The structure of indefinite competition requiring enormous speed and powerful weapons in order to win others, who desire the same, extends to a globalized market and a daily life.  The modernization resulting in capitalism could not achieve both rationalism and freedom at the same time, much as expected in the early time of modernization.  On the contrary, rationalism tends to be irrationalism, and freedom tends to be confinement, as the contradiction of capitalism deepens over time.  Although the cute and fair machinery coming out in the work appears as the optimized tool for a certain function, it, hindered by ‘instrumental ways,’ removes a question ‘Why?’ referring as ‘a ultimate goal’.  Throughout a human history, tools have been arms, and vice versa.  Even today arms are one of the tools with highest value-added.           

Species in the mercilessly competitive universe might have obtained the freedom from nature and from the slavery status if they have had the tools and furthermore been integrated with the tools.  However, it becomes recklessness that humans are pursuing only financial interests without asking the ultimate goal of a human life and obsessed with the instrumental rationalism to go for the interests.  No one has freedom under a continuous war.  Even a strong party has no exception.  In a consumption-oriented value system where the individual desires, remote, are satisfied as a society has been capitalized and monetized, thus removing civil and public values, an instinctive illusion called the law of jungle arises again that was regarded as that a human overcame through rationalism and democracy.  The combination of characters impersonated as if they are disguised with mighty weapons forms in a product, with the indifference and wariness to others coexisting.  In this sense, the works of Hyunwoo So symbolize the way a human exists in the modern capitalism.  Only a large festival or a war, necessarily followed by an amount of consumption, would make it possible for private ownership and its accumulation in production-centered capitalism to recover the declining margin.  Today, the festival tends to be the explosive consumption of a popular culture, and the war tends to be competition where only the best can survive.  Characters as main actors or actresses are representative icons of a current pop culture, and weapons mean omniscient tools for performing of war and competition.          

That a subject, equipped with powerful arms, or capital, looks very ‘cool’ would make it more ominous.  The characters’ faces fixed in the most typical expression seem to be heartless as if the characters mask.  The violence, aiming at other’s death, inadvertently and for amusement performed.  The bodies of characters that remind us of a clown’s costume in a puzzle, a clown who is the king of anarchists who rupture rules and regulations of the world, are deeply rooted in the public’s psychological structure where people fall in the catharsis on the hero’s relentless violence against the devil on a movie.  Sometimes, it is so materialized that hero’s weapons might look so beautiful and that we might sometimes forget them to be tools for killing of people.  Rather than characters carrying arms, the processes that arms are transforming into characters, or characters are transforming into arms are said to be perfect status of integration, as a stainless, a material characterized as a strong material attribute, readily returns to its property, if combining with characters, it finally turns to inorganic direction, or death.  It is understandable that falling behind competitors can result in the death and how severe are games, in which I would be killed unless killing other.  However, there are hedonistic factors that are two attributes to death.  In paradoxical ‘cruel fairy tales,’ a cruelty is often to be evolved into hedonism.     

  

Death, so strong as to lead all the existence, even including oneself, emerges in the way of resistant exchange system against a production-centered society, which is no better than the death pretending to be alive.  Rationalism has tried to clearly distinguish between life and death, but they are circulating in symbolical imagination of humanity.  Jean Baudrillard, an author of ‘Political economics and the death’, claims that death, was isolated because of the system, made from a modern political economics, unlike the political economics prior to modern age.  Death differs and is excluded from life.  Or, it begins sublimating in a constructive Eros that makes any relevant to one’s purpose.  The modern perspective on death thinks of it as decomposition or degradation while the symbolic perspective does as reversal and challenge.  From here, aspiration occurs on accidents or disasters disrupting rules of ordinary and routinely daily life, in which people cannot help living as if they are about to die.  In the works of Hyunwoo So, the characters of roughly welded and connected pieces instead of original attractiveness remind us of paradoxical heroes or anti-heroes, who consists of the homogeneity reversed, namely the connection of heterogeneous debris, rather than heroes,

 

Nuggets of debris, parallels exclusively setting borders where the logics of identity conflict, become a heterogeneous surface that bounces the equivalent driving forces to other’s attack back in a different direction.  In his work, ‘Mirror of Production’ by Jean Baudrillard was scattered, and has been re-crafted for the purpose of another exchange.  It either leads to indefinite extravagance of accumulated residual, an energy dominating others, or let the power attributable to death turn back to an attacker.  Baudrillard sees death as an implicit concept of political economics, but at the same time as an aspiration.  He claims that the desire of killing is often consistent with the desire either of killing oneself or of being gone away and that committing suicide and killing others are often interactive, citing Albert Camus’ saying that a human desires to live while to be nothing.  Death can be combined with Eros, as a masculine female robot shows in his work.  Baudrillard claims that committing suicide in the society where the death is handled negatively and managed is like judging a society in its own way and convicting of a crime by an individual’s reversal against the institutional decisions.  In this sense, a pooh, as an attacker sweeping all ahead, and a pooh, as a suicide terminating all by himself, are the outcomes of similar motives.  

The more logics of homogeneity are emphasized, the more resistance against the system intending to integrate a human gets.  Baudrillard even claims that a death motive in a society where life is recommended to be capitalized is a sole option, and adds that in the fine-tuned world where even death could be designed a sole lure is to turn back to normal after terminating all.  Granting death to oneself is said by him to fairly escape from surrounded life by governmental ideology.  All the death or the violence out of governmental monopoly is viewed as overturn against the governmental ideology.  Such a logic connects with very gloomy predict, but his predict, along with a simulation theory, lured the intelligent and artists in the age of post-modern.  In the very end of modern progressives, phenomena such as parades of death, which get more splendid and mighty in a pop culture daily consumed, and activities like terrorists’ suicide bombing existing in the peripheral area from world powers go beyond simple connection of cords called physical death and then come to symbolic dimension.  We should likely add an art, a process of agony and hedonism, onto the violent manners of a hot pop culture or symbolic activities like death as collateral against terror activities. His work borrows the forms of products such as a character and arms, at the same time exemplifying the collapse of a system based on a product exchange.  That is, he dramatically shows what a death motive means, the death that dubiously reveals in a crack among enormous desires facilitating mass production and consumption.