虛·無·靜에 대한 동양과 서양 사상의 비교 고찰Comparative Approaches to Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence in the East & the West
2016 유교문화연구소 국제학술대회
▣ 일 시: 2016년 10월 7일 금요일 10:00~18:00
▣ 장 소: 성균관대학교 인문사회과학캠퍼스 국제관 9B 118(지하1층)
특히 이번 국제학술대회는 한·불 수교 130주년과 맞물려, 동양 사상에 대한 프랑스 철학자 및 예술가의 이해를 집중 조명합니다.
발표자
1. AHN, Byung-Ju : Korea, Emeritus of Eastern Philosophy, SungKyunKwan Univ.
안병주: 한국, 성균관대학교 명예교수
2. LEE, Myong-Hyun: Korea, Former Minister of Education/ Emeritus of Philosophy, Seoul National Univ.
이명현: 한국, 전 교육부장관, 서울대학교 철학과 명예교수
3. Soun-Gui KIM: France, Professor of Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Dijon
김순기: 프랑스, 멀티미디어 작가, 전 디종국립고등미술학교 교수
4. LEE, Jong-Kwan: Korea, Professor of Philosophy, SungKyunKwan Univ.
이종관: 한국, 성균관대학교 철학과 교수
5. Marc Froment MEURICE: USA, Professor of Vanderbilt Univ.
마크 프로망 모리스: 미국, 밴더빌트대학교 교수
6. Jean-Michel RABATÉ: France, Professor of University of Pennsylvania
쟝 미셀 라바테: 프랑스, 펜실베니아대학교 교수
7. SONG, Young-Bae: Korea, Emeritus of Philosophy, Seoul National Univ.
송영배: 한국, 서울대학교 철학과 명예교수
8. Wai-lim YIP: Taiwan, Emeritus of University of California, San Diego
葉維廉: 대만, 캘리포니아 샌디에고 대학교 명예교수
9. ZHANG, Rulun: China, Professor of Fudan Univ(复旦大學特聘敎授)
张汝伦: 중국, 복단대학 특빙교수
10. LEE, Ae-Ju: Korea, Emeritus of Physical Education, Seoul National Univ.
이애주: 한국, 서울대학교 명예교수
1. The Contending Site Octavio Paz’s warning: We are condemned to be modern [ We might now add "postmodern"]. We cannot (should not) dispense with technology and science. 'Turning back' is both impossible and unthinkable...[T]raditional societies must be defended if we wish to preserve diversity...The extinction of each marginal society and each ethnic and cultural difference signifies the extinction of a survival possibility for the entire species. With each society that disappears, destroyed or devoured by industrialization [We might now add the word "globalization"], a possibility of mankind disappears--not only the past but also the future. History has been, until now, plural: diverse visions of man, each with a distinct version of his past and his future. To preserve this diversity is to preserve a plurality of futures--which is to say life itself. What kind of intervention can we, as cultural workers, suggest as a possible measure to resist the eradication of diversity of cultures? I asked in my Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics (1993): "Are we to condone mapping a course for modern world culture, literature and history solely through the coding interests of the West, namely the appropriation of non-Western world in terms of the interest of multi-national or transnational corporatism, or TNC as charted out by the consumeroriented, goal-directed, instrumental reason of the post-Enlightenment West?" Should we allow us to be swept into the crushingly stark globalized culture dictated by the rules of the game largely dominated by the agenda of the TNC's? To avoid this catastrophe, we must maintain a tensional dialogue with the colonizing intruding ideologies of the West, maintain our works as antagonistic symbioses emerging from the inevitable ongoing conflicts between native sensibility and alien ideologies. It is against this fabric of concern that we want to see the work of Kim Soungui and her links with Daoism, Daoist-inspired Zen Buddhism, John Cage and Wittgenstein. Let me offer my reading of Daoism to expand on their congruence as well as to recast certain comments on her works by Cometti and by Jean-Luc Nancy.
2. The Daoist Contemporariness Daoism is a root-awakening forward-looking horizon, which can be best characterized by the double meanings of the English word "Radical". On the one hand, it attacks the root questions of how language affects our conceptions, both of the world and of our selves as beings in the world, leading to opening up a new perception of total phenomena as an interweaving, inter-disclosing, and inter-defining entity free from the restriction and distortion of ideas, on the other, it offers us radical, avant-garde subversive strategies to retrieve and re-inscribe such a space in and out of which we are empowered to move freely. In the Daoist discourse, we often find words, phrases, statements, or stories of actions that take us by surprise, unconventional, strange forms of logic, or anti-logic, teasing language and rhetoric, including paradoxes and attacks by way of using off-norms to re-inscribe off-norms as possible norms, and challenging norms to expose their acceptance as absolute as treacherous. In the neo-Daoist developments, we find further the use of actions or activities to tease and assail the life-imprisoning institutions, including technique of shouting and beating in Chan (Zen) Buddhist gongan or koan. These language strategies and actions or activities of ancient China have anticipated and previewed the three stages of attack often used in Western avant-garde art events since the Dadaist movement, namely, TO DISTURB, TO DISLOCATE, and TO DESTROY. It is important to note that these triple stages of the Daoist attack are inseparable from their target vision of retrieving the free flow of Nature and humanity to the full. Without this understanding, all the “disturb-dislocate-destroy” attempts in avant-garde art movements since Dadaism, including deconstruction and poststructuralist attempts, will remain merely shock techniques as such. As we will see, Kim Soungui’s works follow similar strategies and her projections must be seen through this understanding as well. About this, more later. The Daoists began their project as a critique of the Naming System of the feudalistic Zhou Dynasty(12-6 B.C.). They felt that under this system (such as calling the Emperor the 'Son of Heaven', investing lords, fathers, and husbands with unchallenged power over subjects, sons, and wives) the birthrights of humans as natural beings were restricted and distorted. Politically, they intended to implode the so-called "Kingly Dao", the "Heavenly Dao" and the Naming System so that memories of the repressed, exiled and alienated natural self could be fully reawakened; thus leading to the recovery of full humanity. The Daoist Project is a counter-discourse to deframe the tyranny of language; it is at once political and aesthetic. This political critique of language opens up larger philosophical and aesthetic dimensions. From the very beginning, the Daoists believed that the totalizing compositional activity of all phenomena, changing and ongoing, is beyond human comprehension. All conscious efforts to generalize, formulate, classify and order it will result in some form of restriction and reduction. We impose these conceptions, which, by definition, must be partial and incomplete, upon total phenomena at the peril of losing touch with the concrete appeal of the totality of things. Meanwhile, the real world, quite without human supervision and explanation, is totally alive, self-generating, selfconditioning, self-transforming and self-complete (wuyan-duhua). Inherent in this recognition of the inadequacy of language is the acceptance of humans as limited and the rejection of the idea of seeing humans as preeminently the controller or orderer of things. To represent the original condition in which things and men can freely emerge, first and foremost, humans must understand their position in and relation to the Great Composition of Things. Humans, being only one form of being among a million others, have no prerogative to classify the cosmic scheme. We should understand that "Ducks' legs are short; lengthening them means pain. Cranes' legs are long; shortening them means suffering" (2:317). We must leave them as they are in nature. Each form of being has its own nature, has its own place; how can we take this as subject (principal) and that as object (subordinate)? How can we impose "our" viewpoint upon others as the right viewpoint, the only right viewpoint? "Not to discriminate this and that as the opposite is the essence of Dao. There you get to the Axis. There you attain the Center of the Ring to respond to the endless...Obliterate the distinctions and view things as things view things from both this and that (liangxing, to travel on two paths) (2:66) is called the Balance of Tao (2:70) It is not hard to realize that what is called this (the socalled subject, determining and dominating agent) is really also that (the socalled object, domininated and determined), for when I say this, is it no also that from your point of view? Thus, only when the subject retreats from its dominating position--i.e. not to put "I" in the primary position for aesthetic contemplation--can we allow the Free Flow of Nature to reassume itself. Phenomena do not need "I" to have their existences; they all have their own inner lives, activities and rhythms to affirm their authenticity as things. Authenticity or truth does not come from "I"; things possess their existences and their forms of beauty and truth before we name them. Subject and object, principal and subordinate, are categories of superficial demarcation. Subject and object, consciousness and phenomena inter-penetrate, inter-complement, inter-define, and inter-illuminate, appearing simultaneously, with humans corresponding to things, things corresponding to humans, things corresponding to things extending throughout the million phenomena. Accordingly, we must be aware that each of our perceptual acts, i.e., each of our makings of meaning is provisional and it has to wait for the presence of, and modification by, other angles, other perceptions, in order to be free from the fetters of naming, while using them. Aesthetically then, it offers a floating registering activity free from the domination of one parent subjectivity. It is no accident that most Chinese landscape paintings use aerial, mid-air, and ground perspectives simultaneously and freely. Front mountains, back mountains, front villages, back villages, bay in front of mountains, and bays behind mountains are seen simultaneously. This is because the viewers are not locked into only one viewing position. Instead they are allowed to change positions constantly to undo viewing restrictions, allowing several variations of knowledge to converge upon their consciousness. Take Fan Kuan's "Travellers in the Valley". In this large vertical hanging scroll, a caravan of travelers, appearing very small, emerge from the lower right corner with large trees behind them. This means that we are viewing this unit from a distance. But behind the trees, a very distant mountain now springs before our eyes, huge, majestic and immediate as if pressing upon our eyes. We are given to view the scene simultaneously from two distances and from several altitudes. Between the foreground and the background lies a diffusing mist, creating an emptiness out of its whiteness, an emptiness which has physicality in the real world. It is this whiteness, this void which helps to dissolve our otherwise locked-in sense of distances, engendering a free-floating registering activity. One may also notice that the speck of human existence , the travelers in the lower right corner, instead of dominating Nature, merges with, and has become part of the Total Composition of all phenomena. This strategy is paramount in Chinese landscape paintings. Witness, for example, this frame [Slide 2], which seems to suggest a perspective of the Western kind, but this is only a detail of the next painting by Dai Jin (1390-1460) [ Slide 3], in which we are drawn into Nature in is cosmic totality. Please remember this feeling of moving freely toward limitless space, which is closely related to the aesthetic-cultural staples of “jingjie 境界” (a world such as that evoked in Chinese poetry and painting), “fengfan 風範”( a mode or way of life that aspires to the free flow of Nature) ”and “xionghuai 胸懷( a bosom or sphere of consciousness that embraces “a million things, a million changes” in the free-floating space that allows one not to be locked into one hegemonic system” Let Nature be! A similar free-floating activity is reinvented in the poetic language in classical Chinese poetry. Language now can be used to avoid being locked into one stationery, restricted, subjectively dominated, directed and determined position; this is to be achieved by adjusting syntactical structures to allow objects and events to maintain their multiple spatial and temporal extensions, and by providing a gap between objects, events, or frames of meanings, an emptiness, a subversive space, so to speak, whereby one can move back and forth between or among them to evoke a larger sense of what is given so as to constantly remodify, and, at the same time, deframe and reframe anything that gets stuck. For example, although the Chinese language also have articles and personal pronouns, they are often dispensed with in poetry, opening up an indeterminate space for the reader to enter and re-inter for double to multiple perception. Then, there is the absence of connective elements (prepositions, conjunctions), and these, aided by the indeterminancy of parts of speech and no-tense declensions in verbs affords the reader a unique freedom to consort with the real-life world. These facts quite often leave the words in a loosely-committed relationship with the reader, who remains in a sort of middle ground between engaging with and disengaging from them. This syntactic freedom promotes a kind of prepredicative condition wherein words, like objects in the real-life world, are free from predetermined closures of relationship and meaning and offer themselves to us in an open space. Within this open space around them, we can move freely and approach them from various vantage points to achieve different shades of the same aesthetic moment. We are given to witness the acting-out of objects and events in cinematic visuality, and stand, as it were, at the threshold of various possible meanings. These “engaging-disengaging”, “framing-unframing” language strategies achieved by the gaps between objects or visual events made possible through asyntactical and paratactical structures in classical Chinese poetry or the free-floating perspectives through the diffusion of distances in Chinese paintings, it is apt to note here, have helped stimulate syntactical innovations by a huge number of modern American poets since Pound to use space breaks and syntactical breaks to achieve similar aesthetic effects of simultaneity, montage, and visual perspicuity, including elaborate extensions of these techniques in the juxtaposition of luminous cultural moments on a large scale (as in Pound’s Cantos ), leading to a polyphonic of orchestration of patterned energies. It is not an accident, therefore, to find various attempts by the Daoists and Daoist-inspired Zen Buddhists to break or blur boundaries to return to the prepredicative condition of things in their multiple extensions. Most people, Western people that have internalized Platonic-Aristotelian perceptual modes in particular, traditionally allow the subjectivity of their ego to dominate, mould and determine the contours of the million things as if they were authentic representations of the world, they are not; these representations belong only to the world of ideas, not the (w)holistic world that defies naming and representation. Here, the Daoist discussion of You 有 and Wu 無 is of utmost importance for understanding Cage, Wittgenstein, and Kim Soungui. Briefly, from the Daoist critique of the framing function of the Naming System comes the awareness that all concepts, political or otherwise, are not absolute and, in the last analysis, are merely linguistic constructions dominated by subjective interests implicated in distinctions, judgments and power hierarchy. They are limit-setting, privileging certain aspects to the exclusion of others. Take the concept of Beauty. Beauty is not absolute but relative; different periods hold different views; different cultures have different projections. Similarly, the concepts of being, nonbeing, before, behind, high, low, construction, destruction, strong, weak, male (as higher) female (as lower). Things before naming and language are totally equal and point to each other as inter-independent, inter-disclosing existences. Take You 有( for convenience, let us call it Being) and Wu 無 (Non-being). Straightly speaking, Being and Non-being are not stable things; everything in total phenomena, and human lives all are in an ongoing process of change. All things are in a state of Becoming, that is, always moving from the condition of Being continuously to the condition of Non-being. Because the Daoists view each of our perceptual acts, each of our makings of meaning as provisional, they understand that it has to wait for the presence of, and modification by, other angles, other perceptions, in order to be free from the fetters of naming and framing, while using them. What we call You 有/ Being is the domain circled out for inspection by way of the language activity of naming, defined position, defined direction, and defined meaning at the expense of the socalled irrelevant elements. Is the socalled Wu 無/ Nonbeing really nothing? We use the idea of beginning and end to define range. But to talk about "beginning" is inadequate, because there is always a "before" before another "before" of the beginning. We call it "beginning" only at the risk of cutting Time into sections. If we do not cut time into sections, there would be no "beginning" to speak of. We use the term "You 有/Being" and "Wu 無/Nonbeing". But there is always a "before" before the "before" of the beginning of “Wu 無/Nonbeing”. Shall we call any of the various stages "You 有/Being" or "Wu 無/Nonbeing"? "Being" and "Nonbeing" is born with our biased subjective interests. Suppose we take presence as Being, absence as Nonbeing. But a stage of absence does not mean that it will remain forever absent; it might disclose itself later. Shall we, then, rename it as "Being"? You 有 and Wu 無 are born through language and naming. Before naming and language, the million things are You 有 (concrete existence/ You 有 as defined by naming and language), but they are also Wu 無 (condition before naming and language which can also be You 有), a million forms synchronously coexist, free from the imprisonment of the defining You 有. From this horizon, Wu 無 / Nonbeing or Nothing is both empty and full. But imagination is not dead. After the language’s grip on us is deframed and the prison of mind is liberated, there is another activity through which we can repossess the Great You 大有/Being (communion and consort with the million things) and freely move into the Great Wu 大無 / Nobeing that is free from the imprisonment of the defining You 有. Once we realize that our thinking has been proceeding within the language frames defined by other people’s subjective interests with layers and layers of impediment to attain the Great Wu 大無, we will achieve a spatial mobility and sensitivity, moving into and out of language frames without being locked into the limiting range of others’ subjectivity. Cage shows that the socalled Silence, in fact, consists of countless minute tremblings; they are only excluded by the framed concept of Silence as having a boundary defined by socalled Sound. With the concept of Great Wu 大無, the Undifferentiated Whole, the Nature before being carved, Cage’s project becomes more poignant. It is not an accident that he calls for the “demilitarization of language”. Cometti’s characterization of Kim Soungui’s work as “abuses” of language ( about which, more later) to achieve the “wavering boundaries of sense and nonsense” and that she engages in Wittgenstein’s language games to arrive at “ an open networks of relations” (which is, by the way, also Cage’s “ Unimpeded Interpenetration”) can also now be reread as attempts to deframe the distortive, dominatory power structures and the hegemonic subjectively dominated but essentially reductive signifying system of the West. We must now alert the West that the term hundun 混沌 must not be translated as “chaos” (Cometti, Nancy) without qualification, because “chaos” is a term used to pitch against “order” ; hundun is the Great Wu 大無, the Undifferentiated Wholistic Composition of Things. Now this understanding will make Nancy’s statement more cogent, and fuller: “Kim experiences time as matter, before and after, left and right, yesterday and tomorrow, shore to shore, East and West, a simultaneity in which time means all time and all the time, always a presence.” In this Undifferentiated Wholistic Composition of Things, which is, of course, Nature in its full body and movement, the words like “Chance”, “Accident”, “Irrelevance” “Aleatoriness”, “Disorder” etc., do not exist; they were so called, often in the derogatory sense, because they were framed as such against what has been defined to be “normative”, as if anything deviating from this core has nothing “meaningful” to offer, but in reality, what is offered under the socalled Norm is the real Great Deviation from Nature whose socalled chance, accidental, irrelevant, aleatory, disorderly, constantly shifting performance and movements are, in fact, authentic pulsations of the world. In the words of Cage, “Art is not an attempt to bring order out of chaos…but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” Most of Kim Soungui’s works emanate from this all-inclusive awareness. Dao is not only to be found in our consort with the million things, it can be found in anything anywhere. As Guo Xiang, Zhuang Zi most important commentator, says, "Though different in sizes, when put into their self-sufficient selves, each object fulfilling its natural endowment, they all achieve the same easiness and freedom. Why even allow the idea of win and loss to interfere among them?" The million things before language-framing and value and hierarchy framing are immanently self-complete and sublime in their own right. Kim Soungui’s works allow things, often in their pristine state, to come to us, uninterfered as if were. Her art begins with this state of things as interrogation of established frames that her audience have internalized, empowering them to simultaneously see and consort with Dao in both "high" and "low" things, to leap and frisk among established value and meaning categories without being bogged down by them, and achieve a movement without depending on anything and an open bosom across which all things, self-attained, all things, unblocked, move about. We will comment more on this aspect later. For the moment, let us focus on the three pieces on show November 6,2004- March 6,2005 at the San Diego Museum under the rubric of “Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art in East Asia”. The series called “ Lunes” are photos taking from a pinhole camera in a sort of wuwei 無為( take no action) condition, allowing the shifting lights to act themselves out, with the kind of unpredictability in which there is no control of light, frame, timing ,climate, temperature, offering chance appearances that continue to surprise us, like the Great Wu condition of Nature following its built-in measure always true to itself. Against the shifting, but seemingly stable background of shadows, the moon/s move as calligraphic strokes across the limitless dark space. In the words of Guo Xiang, Zhuang Zi’s great commentator, “The Sage roams in the path of a million changes--a million things a million changes in accordance with the laws of a million changes. Changes are infinite, and so would be the Sage.” Similar richness and fullness can also be witnessed in “ Pap-Gre” and “Alea”. “Pap-Gre” is the video projection of the dances of a frog and a butterfly upon a traditional Korean jade-white moon vase where, in spite of , and perhaps because of the vague, but not committed, connection to the legendary inhabitants on the moon (jade rabbit, for example) , and possible associations with the dreamed butterfly and the short-vision frog in the well in different chapters of the Zhuangzi, both the vase and the dances take on a cosmic dimension where both the butterfly and the frog seem to have divested of all their mundane framed meanings and become self-contained beings with their full solemnity. “Alea” is “chance winning” as the word originally means in gambling. What began as the destruction of the artist’s chronological planning by an accident of the computer to the degree of inretrievability surprises her as the technological generated Alea reclaims itself by revealing a life of its own functioning in a process against her original plan but equally natural, acting unacting and unacting acting. Kim Soungui is also quite in tune with the Daoist interrogation of language as explained above. When we use language, we are already trapped in the agenda, both aesthetic and political, of others and must engage in the magnetic field of the war of languages. We must subvert the language at hand, that is, to breakthrough the limits of language, in particular, the preset meanings of the target language in which the speaker's own language is embedded, so as to return to the prepredicative moment, or the moment of our encounter with the world before reflection, before contamination by intellect and subjectivity. Kim is fully conversant with the Daoist and Daoist-inspired Zen Buddhists’ use of words, phrases, statements, or stories of actions that take us by surprise, unconventional, strange forms of logic, or anti-logic, teasing language and rhetoric, to make us startled and become aware of our internalizations of preset frames as absolute and unquestionable, thus, empower us to deframe them in the process. These strategies not only play an important role in Zen Buddhist mode of transmission of knowledge through Gongan ( or Koan), but also in the making of Chinese and Oriental taste. A higher level of art is often call Yipin 異品 (unusual, strange, untrammeled work) or Yipin 逸品 ( works that are out of this world). Kim Soungui uses these subversive techniques extensively in her Montagne c’est la mer, Tchouang-tseu et Wittgenstein. One must view this wonderful little book as her own Zhuangzi or her own Gongan or Koan, in which her playfulness, shocking answers, and clowning-teasing are not separable from the same Daoist vision of retrieving the free flow of Nature. Compare this gongan or koan: from Zen master Cao-shan Ben-zi Q : Eye and eyebrow: do they know each other? M : No. Q : Why no? M : Because they are in the same place. Q : So they are not divided? M : The eyebrow is not the eye. Q : What is the eye? M : What is correct? Q : What is the eyebrow? M : I have doubts. Q : Why doubts? M : If no doubts, then correct. to Kim’s sequence from her Montagne c’est la mer, Tchouang-tseu et Wittgenstein: Vers interroge Rouge: --Comment t’appelles-tu? --Rouge. --Ah! Mais, je ne te vois pas. --Je suis ici mais tu ne peux me voir, car je suis invisible. --Invisible! Ne m’as-tu pas dit que tu es Rouge? --Oui, mais quand je suis ici jen’ai plus de nom. C’est comme toi que je ne vois pas mais dont j’entends la voix. --Si tu te trouvais dans un tableau serais-tu toujours invisible et sans nom? -- Oui, meme si je suis partout, ici et la-ba. --Comment t’appeler quand tu n’es pas? --Rouge. --Ah! Meme le vide s’appelle Vide, dit Vers. On the surface, both read /act like being playful, but between knowing and not knowing, divided and not divided, name and no name, visible and invisible, one must relinquish these as merely linguistic constructions and conceptual frameworks. Quite often, such constructions--the modes of circling out their domains can be different in their contours of divisions. For the Daoists, Zen Buddhists and Kim Soungui, beginning, ending, being, nonbeing, life death etc., as explained above, are only provisional demarcations. In the working of the Great Change or the Great Wu , things are separate, each according to its natural endowment, but also together in their prelinguistic, prepredicative condition as inter-defining, inter-generating, inter-recognizing beings. The teasing of language is to drive the readers/ viewers to constantly revise their positions to rethink, to reflect, and as a result, re-recognize that words of vessels of imprisonment through which we cannot arrive at the moment of unblocked communion with a million things. Soungui Kim’s early art, such as using blatantly simple and self-explanatory things, or a few bits of language from the larger language which, by the stark fact of their randomness or seeming unconnectedness, ( See Ceci est du Rouge and the rest of series and Hier, aujourd’hui and demain), often has the effect of startling or teasing the audience into awareness, engendering a journey free and easy into the Great Wu 大有, into Nature’s working in all its senses and pulsations . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27 nov. 2004
Dear Wai-Lim Yip, Bonjour.
First, I’d like to tell you that I ‘m very interested on your texts & poetry. I was happy to read them, specifically, “Why Taoisme today”, “Subversive starategies in Taoisme”. I’m interested on your analyse of language (very important, I think.) For your poems, it is more difficult for me: I feel the transcription of “Chinese mind” in English . But, I have to say, my knowledge on litterature is very poor, and, my english also, very poor ! As you feel, I suppose, that we have fundamentally common position about Taoïsme and actual time. So we will have good occasion to exchange together: we have, however, some difference of point of view which can due to our differenece of recherch field. For exemple, about the analyse on the question of langage. I ‘ll be happy to hear from you about John Cage who was very good freind of mine. Yes, Jean-Luc Nancy, good freind of mine also : we worked together many times. For exemple, 2 years ago, we realised one “dialogue” (visioconference & edited video film) that I presented in GwangJiu Biennale International in Korea : “Diversité des arts et la pratique pluraliste” For this Biennale, I realised also one “dialogue with Jacques Derrida : “ Y a-t-il, par dessus le marché, un art, à l’avenir de la mondialisation ?” Oh!, He is, since some days, in travel far away . I hope, he is happy to return to the Sky… He was so generous, friendly… I had one another film project with him… With Jean Pierre Cometti, I exchanged during many years: We have many commun point of view on Wittgenstein. For this occasion of San Diago exhibition, I’ll be very happy to hear (critics) from you about my work expose which are : 1) “Moons” : A serie of 12 photographies (60 cm / 80 cm each one) : I observed moons mouvements during one year (2003-32004). I used “Pin hole camera” technic, I conceived my own cameras. Pin hole camera is the origin and very primitif camera of photo. Black box with a very little pin hole which has no lens, so, I can’t control neither distace neither lighting, neither frame, neither, timing, neither precision of image. The weather and the temperature play important role, so, I have to find good timing. Important is receive (“shu”) the all condition offered by nature. It’s more then to decide to make image: something happens, and I try to receive with time and disponibility. One sort of game of hasard, of chemical process , of time and of atmosphere. Sometimes, I have to open the hole of camera very long time and wait & wait, until I feel, it’s O.K. So waiting image, I can take out to walking, even,forgetting. The moon is mouving alone, the Pin hole camera, staying on the place, but our globe is running, and me, floating. During this time image is forming. Very exiting for me. I’m always suprised with my images . I use this technic since 1987, so, now, my experience tell me what I have to do. Something happens evry day. It’s true, some subject is more adequate then the other. Observation of moons movement was the very interesting and good for this technic. 2) “Pap-Gre” : realization: 2000. video sculpture: Video projection on “Moon vase”. I use one white ceramic vase: very traditional Korean vase which name is “Moon vase”: which has the form of full moon . No function but to see, this vase was very appreciated by Korean poets. We can find this kind of vase from 16end -19 end AC. I interpret this vase (one kind of copy that I realized in Korea). On this “Moon vase”, one video projection: which images are : dance of two frogs and two butterflies floating. The rhythm of dance is important for me(timing & energy). Frogs and butterflies are conceived(created) by tree dimension- digital technic: Virtual animals images on white ceramic “Moon vase”. 3) “Aléa” : realization: 1999. Video installation: video projection on the wall. The video image is conceived (result) from the very aleatory & accidental process: one day, my computer had the big problem and lost my video editing work (worked during 6 months!). The problem was: my hard disk forgot the memory, so, I try to find them . When I, finally, “find” them, one another “accident “ produced: all images were completely mixing in disorder : It’s means that my computer cant not remember the order of liner & chronological time. Another word, past-present & future were anarchical mixing: what disorder it was, but so beautiful it was !!. I found this situation very interesting . So, I used this images edited by my computer became stupid & crazy. The sound was composed in same ways. For the projection, I conceived one furniture. One can move this furniture in which to find (inside ), video projector, player & speakers). So, one can move this furniture and project the video image on any place of wall and enjoy (I hope). I do video art since 1975, and realized many works : I enjoyed to conceive the very immaterial video images which are the “wave of the light and time”. Video is nothing but energy, as like to sound, different to the painting or sculpture. The energy is very emptiness! On the beginning time of my video experience, I realized the work technically very complicated…I enjoyed to give very compexe form of time & light. Now, I like very simple process, as like “Aléa”. I have nothing to do but to find and receive(“shu”). For to receive, it’s necessary to have empty eyes, empty mind (“hsü hsin”) I try…. - Yes, We need the translator. I’ll try to speak in Korean, but some times my French can help. For economize time I can prepare one shot text. Museum find one Korean student: I sent to her your last mail and ask to her to translate first. - About your introduction: yes, yes : “taoisme & art”. But, also, as I told you before, I’ll be very honor to receive your critics on my works that I present in Museum.Is-it possible ? We will have 45 minutes. We can, for exemple: 1) your introduction on Taoïsme & art, and your critics on my work (20 minutes) . After, I’ll reply to your introduction and critics (20 minutes). We will have 5 minutes for eventual questions from the public. It’s very short time. But I hope, to have the another occasion to continue to exchange with you.
Best, Kim Soun-Gui
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