<Hangdog> 2023

The Bird on the Roof Outside the Window

Ahn So Yeon

Art Critic

#1: Standing in the square are one statue of a 15th-century king and another of a 16th-century general. A pair of legendary beasts, created by carving away rock, are placed at the square’s edge, and I am sometimes greeted on the corner by sculptures with sleek, doll-like, touchable surfaces. In front of an old modern structure with a performing arts venue, I see a refined work of abstract contemporary sculpture; before that, cars and rows of people pass by. Children run across the square, and the people seem at times like sculptures themselves as they rest on benches. An unseasonably dressed man walks aimlessly, while a woman places pieces of paper into the hands of people passing. A large tree of indeterminate but considerable age sparkles in the light and wind, and pigeons arriving from someplace or other cast gray shadows in the air. The square is quite noisy, and it is also dull, like a lengthy silence.

#2 Foreground: On a flat wooden floor, improvisational forms stand in positions dictated by the earth’s gravity. Against the distant force (which has never been seen and can never be touched directly), I occupy space by standing on my two feet. In the midst of the shapes stretching over the ground, my eyes are first drawn to two that occupy a broad, gray area like rocks. This may be because of their size, but I also find myself curious about their color, which seems to give proof of their immense weight. Perhaps I sense in that moment a certain similarity of shape that their contour lines define.

And then there is the light: bringing a realization of the volume of three-dimensional space, light dangling from the ceiling or stood on the ground (resisting gravity), presenting itself as some kind of form. The two convey a powerful signal of attachment, providing the presence of some shape by revealing fully the different contradictions. On one hand, there is the rock surface with its thickness removed, redefining its own form; on the other, there is a rhetoric that personifies the artificial shape of the light shining on the object’s contours.

Very slowly, my eyes start to take in the (three-dimensional) directions revealed by each of the different shapes. Shapes facing forward with their back to something, shapes lying askew as they present the biggest outlines and broadest surface, shapes turning a truncated section toward the corner of the wall as if to conceal an incomplete contour, random shapes that create temporary movements in space through certain forces before dissipating—all these things evoke enigmatic “directions” that imply their own eras (time frames) and settings (spaces), like the disparate shapes on a public square.

The generally achromatic shapes seem somehow similar. Striving to reveal their monochrome bodies like lumps of flesh, the various forms appear like the ghosts of ones who died long ago. That may represent one reason for their having been presented like the sculptures (sculptural shapes) on a square. The independence of unitary shapes evoked by single colors relates to belief in the supernatural mana of sculptures rooted in the human form.

#3: Adhering closely to the flat floor of the hall even as they allude to the three-dimensional presence of gravity, directions, and color, the sculptural forms transport the scene into a wilder realm of sculptural imagination. In imagining the original forms that might exist (or have existed) somewhere for these shapes, we are reminded of the uncertainty of the forms presented before us now, as a temporal and spatial shift is attempted toward a more distant past. Perhaps they will suddenly appear in a certain form with or without memory in a time and place somewhere in the near future—much like the experience of this moment today.

#4 Original forms: There is an inherent contradiction in sculpture. It is constantly imitating (some original form), yet it never becomes the same (as the original), and it ends up serving as a different original (with a sense of loss). If we recall the inherent separation from and loss of an original shape that exists in the genetic birth (genesis) and death (extinction) of the human form, the contradiction becomes sculpture’s proof of itself.

Jihyun Jung buries the inner story like a monologue, importing the scene of a park where graves from different eras seem to be present in rows. It makes no difference if this is described as a “square.” The sculptures of the square, filling the space in a series that seems to recapitulate the beginning and ending in Marguerite Duras’s film Césarée (1979), are renewed over and over in the present landscape, without shying away from the contradictory sense of embracing both a vast human history and a personal experience of loss. The image of sculptures that Jung presents recalls (for me at least) the sculptures in the square that Duras captured. The anachronistic shapes made me aware of the body that was witnessing the reality of three-dimensional presence, which was rendered arbitrarily visible through their layering with certain bodies, objects, structures, places, movements, and narratives. That physical experience, which has been seen as belonging to the sculptor, relates to a fundamental feeling of nostalgia for human shapes through which we discover sculptures (or sculptural things) in parks and plazas.

#5 Riddle: Random, unrelated things occupy a single temporal and spatial setting. Like a secret, this happens separately for each of us, Jihyun Jung and myself. Through the sharing of these circumstances—“the shape on the roof across the way outside the window”—within the temporal gap of a dialogue, it is like waiting to see who will be first to detect that they might be different things with the same inner story.

The Last Worldee (2022) evokes parallels with Auguste Rodin’s Adam (1880–1881), where the suspiciously stretching limbs seem to recede endlessly from the original form. Possessing (or having possessed) two ears that appear excessively long when compared with the short limbs, Worldee has undergone its own “evolution” through a process of degraded replication with aluminum mesh and urethane foam, as well as the installation process through which it was placed upright on its stand. It has also gained a third support as it lowers its ear to connect with the right hand. In Adam, the right hand is almost identical to that of God in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (1511). Much like the power of the right hand that raises upright the long, drooping neck and limbs of an Adam who seems to be collapsing under the force of gravity, The Last Worldee uses its hand to (barely) secure a fragment that has “separated” from the contours of its disappearing form. It “exists there” as a representation of loss and absence, harboring (uncertain) memories of an original shape.

Carrying a loose sense of volume in its yellow urethane foam, Worldee (or its degraded copy) stands facing a large window with its back to the space’s interior. With even its simplest outlines blurred, the copy faces the yellow shape on the roof across the way, as it seems to imbue enigmatic meaning into the indeterminate large sphere. When Jihyun Jung casually spoke to me about the odd circumstances between them (which even he had been unaware of), he may have expected me to show some sincere belief in the two. I truly did believe that something was happening between them.

As I saw the yellow sphere on the roof across the way (pointed out by Jung), I thought of the man named Rodrigo in Duras’s story. It was similar to how I felt overwhelmed by the gaze of Maria, the only one to notice in the storm and darkness as Rodrigo concealed himself under a blanket on the roof after killing someone (his wife) one summer while a tempest raged all day long. When Maria stood at her hotel window that day, observing Rodrigo crouching like a “dead shape” under his brown blanket next to a chimney on the roof across the way, or when she rescued him from the roof, or when she tragically discovered him lying down as if sleeping after taking his own life in a wheat field—all of that may have stemmed from the (ennui-inspired) longing for the lost archetype of humanity.

For a long time, I tried to remember that as an episode of (enigmatic) sculptural perception. When I spoke about the yellow sphere on the roof outside the window, where The Last Worldee’s gaze was pointing, I sensed a real similarity between the two events. This was possible because the shape of the bird in black silhouette, glimpsed on the top of a building across the way early one morning, suddenly appeared to me like an image of sculptural imagination. Noting the bird on the roof outside the window, Rodrigo, and the yellow sphere, enigmatically concealing their original form. . . .

#6 Unspoken Words: One of Jihyun Jung’s oldest works is Unspoken Words (2009). Jung presents a striking landscape as “miscellaneous” sculptures are placed in the concealed extra space underneath a roof (a symbolic structure associated with the home) where a portion of the ceiling’s plasterboard has been torn away like some sort of doggy door. In effect, he has laid out a flattened landscape much like a curious sculpture park over the plasterboard near the roof.

For the sculpture’s support, the artist has arranged sculptural forms that yearn for original shapes through the deferral of loss. It is similar to that roof in the storm and darkness where Maria is slowly able to discern Rodrigo—someone she has never encountered before—as a dead form covered in a brown blanket.

#7 Skins and Bones: In Jihyun Jung: Hangdog, a state of tension and deferral is presented as the individual elements in these counterpoints of sculptural perception establish an incisive critical linkage through their mutual reflection. Examples of this include Park (2022), where only scraggly bones remain, and Torso from Afar (2022), which is created solely from excised skin. At first glance, they seem indifferent, like completely unrelated presences. But the situation changes as they take on a shared critical awareness of the skin and bones that each of them lacks.

Assembling pieces of metal piping and sticks from a park, Jihyun Jang combined them in simple ways to create random shapes inspiring organic imagination—which he gave the name of Park. Designed in an assemblage structure without volume, the timber sculpture appears to be an object serving as a signpost or fence in the park, but it finally sustains itself through the internal principles of sculpture, constructing an aesthetically shaped framework. In the context of Jihyun Jung: Hangdog, Park serves as a symbol physically dividing the space or guiding the movements of the human body. At the same time, it amplifies the visual experience through the internal structure of a three-dimensional reality from which volume has been stripped away.

If I may sprinkle in a bit of my own imagination and inferences, Torso from Afar may demonstrate its own existence as a shape by carrying over certain clues from Park. After acquiring details from someone’s 3D scan of the surface of a sculpture, Jung printed it out in segments as three-dimensional forms representing around 20MB of data without weight or thickness. The three-dimensional “original” behind this date was La Rivière (1938) by Aristide Maillol, a piece located in a Paris sculpture park. This reclining sculpture was cast in lead after the artist’s death; it was “cast” once again into immaterial data by someone else nearly a century later, and from there, it was sent on to Jihyun Jung and reemerged in a new form. The framework that was robustly present in the original La Rivière ended up “forgotten,” rendered unnecessary in this process of repeated replications. The result, with only its shell remaining, could barely be classified as a “torso,” bearing traces of an anonymous (boneless) human form.

#8 Gravestones: Is there another “sculpture” as enigmatic as Square (2023)? A bright light shines over a flat, rectangular stand, while fog billows regularly from a small mechanical device. The form boasts a sense of (false) volume like a sliver of cloud hanging in the sky. Intersecting with the many images that stand on the square, it is drawn by the invisible movements of the air, drifting further and further from the light as it roams languidly like a ghostly presence. The square seems like a noisy and tiresome graveyard, where the stones marking the dead condense complex units of time.

To me, sculpture is something that is distant from its original yet harbors memories of lack and loss, something that seems as though it would properly belong in a square or a graveyard. In the story, the character was able to discern “him” in the form huddled under a blanket on a roof in the torrential rains of a summer night. Ironically, the imaginative experience of discerning “it” as a lost original shape among the remnants of incomplete fragments appears all the clearer within yawning gaps of time and space.