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Nomadism in Type, Nomadism in Consciousness
Sung Dong-hun's Works
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Don Quixote-2009, 2009, Iron, Speciality Compound Metal, Artificial Flower,
LED Lights, Stone, Bronze, 406x170x(h)255 |
Kho Chung-hwan, art critic
Don Quixote, the portrait or the portrait of an artist. Image of Don Quixote is what sculptor Sung Dong-hun reminds us of first. Don Quixote served as a momentum for him to get into the mainstream and various versions of Don Quixote have been made intensively especially since 1990's. Image of Don Quixote and nature of the mainstream, however, do not seem to conform or go well with each other, Don Quixote has been known as a representative character of anti-mainstream symbolizing dream and fancy, unreality and surrealism, satire on society, critique and even madness. The mainstream of sculpture system may have become flexible enough to embrace such unreality and insanity or may have quietly missed this temperament implicitly.
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Don Quixote-2009, 2009, Iron, Speciality
Compound Metal, Artificial Flower, LED Lights, Stone,
Bronze, 406x170x(h)255 |
As a result, at least in appearance, the sculptor's strategy to break through the mainstream of stubborn art with senseless, reckless and ignorant character worked anyway and It seems wise enough. (It would be more accurate expression to say that he was faithful to instinct rather than he was wise. Don Quixote has therefore marked as the self-portrait of the sculptor breaking through the times, and even positioned as a portrait of all the artists who are standing against the system. Moreover, this portrait easily gains our sympathy because the character awakens irrationality and madness in our deep inside, which is usually hold down as a abnormality being compared with normality of the system.
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I.
Don Quixote rides a horse in novel, but the sculptor's Don Quixote rides a cow from time to time. From the point of the history of civilization, horse connects with nomadic tribe and cow does with agricultural nation. Cow was an essential for farmers, and moreover was endowed with even religious meaning in traditional oriental society.
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Don Quixote-2009, 2009, Iron, Speciality Compound Metal, Artificial Flower,
LED Lights, Stone, Bronze, 406x170x(h)255 | For instance, in Hinduism, cows are considered as sacred animals and, in the Zen Sect of the Buddhism, cows are known as the metaphor of the Sibwoodo(十牛图).
Cows, that is, represent a symbol of human nature(眞我) being immanent in our heart. Sibwoodo describes ten steps of course man is searching for his true character which is represented as a cow and It comprises mythical epos in it, It would not be coincident that all the cows created by the sculptor are not tame but are reckless and wild cows.
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Into Brain, 2009, Special Cement, Iron, Stainless Steel,
Bronze, LED Lights, Tech-Machinery, 145x175x(h)235 | It is natural that true character is what has to become tame rather than what was tame already. In this way, with a character of clown riding on a wild cow, the sculptor breaks through the era of irrationality and madness and get his true character as well(or at least to aim).
Being transformed into a cow decorated with small and tiny artificial flowers, his cow became tame and beautiful significantly in his recent works. Nature of the sculptor has become supple recently? Probably yes. (the sculptor, cow and Don Quixote are all the same.) It is far from the cow with bone of scrap metal and body of cement, which was born from a pile of industrial waste. Judging from the change of material, the sculptor's works seem to have already touched field of the Pop-art and Kitsch developing from Neo-realism and Junk-art.
II.
Head, the kaleidoscope of consciousness. What is inside people's head? Sometimes we wonder what the hell people are thinking of. Andre Malraux says everybody has materials of aesthetic sense in his or her mind, he called it as the Museum of Imagination.
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Into Brain, 2009, Special Cement, Iron,
Stainless Steel, Bronze, LED Lights,
Tech-Machinery, 145x175x(h)235 | Marcel Proust opened new area of modernism novel with technique of stream of consciousness in which people's consciousness is not sequential or has not logical probability. How can we explain Schizophrenia in which several part of miscellaneous consciousness are simultaneously maldistributed and paranoia, the opposite idea, in which only one consciousness is clear while others are erasing completely? Is human beings animals of consciousness or physical animal?
Is human consciousness the product of the mind or the result of the body? Where and how all these unfamiliar and heterogeneous thoughts are coming from?
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Into Brain, 2009, Special Cement, Iron,
Stainless Steel, Bronze, LED Lights,
Tech-Machinery, 145x175x(h)235 | Did they belong to me from the beginning (inner inevitability) or were injected from outside and finally internalized in my mind? Thinking is leading to another thoughts endlessly.
It may sound ignorantly but you can open people's head and look into it If you wonder. Is too simple? However, Sung Dong-hoon put this ignorant method into practice first hand. He showed us what is inside people's head through a head which can be opened and shut. A sensor on the head works when audience is approaching and the head opens slowly by the pressure. Lots of part of political, economical, social and aesthetic thoughts which go across contemporary events are made into objects and hung inside the head.
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Into Brain, 2009, Special Cement, Iron,
Stainless Steel, Bronze, LED Lights,
Tech-Machinery, 145x175x(h)235 |
The head is opened and closed by participation of audience and it can be considered as realization of interaction, Also it can be regarded as actualization of Kinetic Art as these objects are moving. There are many moving sculptures like this among the artist's work. Some works are operating by pressure and some by electric motor. Though all these works are basically the products of the sculptor's thoughts of self-examination, this giant head is the portrait of the artist and at the same time a portrait of all of us. And it is also a portrait of all the modern men as the ideas are all the same. The lotus blossoms are supporting this head. It may be the artist's idea that anybody can be a Buddha if he contemplates his thoughts clearly or see his thoughts flowing. That is, we all are potentially secular Buddha in modern day.
III.
Eroticism, desire, as a type of nature. Sculptor's work is as direct and honest as faithful to the nature. Repressed desire, especially sexual desire, is not the exception, either and he is not hesitating to express.
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Lover, 2009, Iron, Leather, 123x115x(h)121 | Eros is the theme of a recent giant reversed triangle shape of sculpture. This sculpture is a kind of reproduction of a couch and a similar work was once introduced before already. Lining of leather cushion is put on metallic body of the sculpture and we can sit in it actually. Concave shape of it looks similar to women's panties and bloomy bud. Some people remind shape of this sculpture of bull's head.
List of the objects naturally associated with the structure of the reversed triangle alludes to sexual relationships between men and women (for instance, like the relationship between Zeus transformed into a bull and Europe), particularly reminds us of women's sexual metaphors. There are many examples that shape of flower leaf in full bloom as well as women's panties hints sexual metaphors, for instance, the flower paintings of Georgia Okeeffe and the animation in the movie of the Wall of the director Alan Parker, and so on.
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Lover, 2009, Iron, Leather, 123x115x(h)121 |
Anyway the structure of reversed triangle, the concave out of it and, especially, its soft and friendly touch directly allude to woman's womb. I sit in it and I am embraced. And then go back, would rather want go back, to the source where I was originated from. All sexual activity is associated with such a desire to return to the root. So I am back into my mother's womb where I had originated from, and are facing with source of life and death itself there, Death is origin of life as darkness existed first prior to light. To love means to die. Thus, Georges Bataille called eroticism as a small death.
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Secret Garden, 2009, Iron, Lawn,
400x300x(h)320 | No matter what it is women's panties, flower bud or bull's head, the sculpture makes us face with original vitality embedded in the existence this way.
IV.
Artificial garden, care for nature and ecology. The sculptor creates a kind of artificial garden in the exhibition space. Trees, insects such as ants and beetles and reptiles like snakes are organically in good harmony. Tree could be the center of these sculptures, With its huge scale and the symbolic meaning of myths and magic, It has been one of the artist's main materials. As we are aware, tree is a typical symbol of nature and it symbolizes production and life due to its fruits. World-tree symbolizes origin of existence and tree emblematizes phallus to Freud.
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Secret Garden, 2009, Iron, Lawn, 400x300x(h)320 |
Because of these meanings of tree, trees have been transformed to various types in his recent works such as iron tree, structural works in the form of tree borrowed from the format of a kind of the similar excavation project and the Sound-Tree exhibited in the 2007 World Ceramics Biennale. In the excavation project, the artist dig a big hole in the form of trees deep in the earth and fills with cement inside later, He digs up the structure again in certain days like the case of excavation of ancient artifact or large fossil in archaeological research. The Sound-tree is a tree sculptures which obtained popularity. After creating sculpture in the form of a tree with stainless steel, he hung about 2,000 pieces of porcelain wind-bell on every branch. Trembling in the breeze, these wind-bells make a sound and harmony of sound made from the interaction of wind and wind-bell is almost fantastic.
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Secret Garden, 2009, Iron, Lawn, 400x300x(h)320 |
The sculptor's work, in this way, is developing from the fixed form of sculpture to other forms of sculptures covering power (Kinetic Art), sound (sound art) and light (light art). Reproduction of a deer and a goat is the case the artist introduced light in his works. Lights are equipped with a sculpture made with many small glass beads connected each other and ,due to the light transmission properties of glass bead, it produces quite and fantastic atmosphere.
This sculpture and the artificial flowers decorating the Flower-Cow hint that the sculptor's work is changing and evolving regularly. That is, they illustrate another point of formative possibility crossing the assembly and the dissolution together with awareness of organic relationships between the whole and the parts as is the case that repeat of a single unit finally creates a single structure.
There must be a momentum that the sculptor introduced a series of these works with an idea on the natural materials shown as trees, insects and animals and the idea on an artificial garden where the natural materials are in good harmony in, it probably seems to be caused by the Desert Project.
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The Mountain God, 2009, Iron, Beads, LED Lights,
140x63x(h)158 | The Desert Project, at least, must have influenced him on the process of expansion of material and changes in consciousness in any way and it can be considered as the momentum therefore. The International Desert Project which started first in 2006 was in progress in the way of doing works in a few deserts around Las Vegas and is scheduled to be in progress continuously in the Indian desert and the Gobi desert in China.
We feel sympathy for a kind of nomadism from this interest in natural material and ecology and from the Desert Project as a process to practice. Nomadism means to the sculptor practical moving abroad for various foreign projects, nature friendly and ecological meaning of practice logic of life and, most of all, the nomadism in consciousness.
A phase of it can be seen from a kind of pumpkin sculpture work. Pumpkin may seem at first a little bit strange but it was come out of practical and concrete logic of life and its process as it was cultivated in the artist's space used for both studio and home. It has something in common with that Don Quixote is representing a little crazy character, but it is working as a powerful mechanism to break through crazy and absurd time.
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The Dignified Pumpkin, 2009, Special Cement, Iron,
Stainless Steel, LED Lights, Tech-Machinery,
170x125x(h)204 | Anyway, it is true that the pumpkin and its support which looks like a foot of ritual vessel and person's heads hung on every edge of the pumpkin look strange. Besides, this strange looking sculpture is also rotating swayingly.
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Combination of heterogeneous things or meeting of unexpected things are shown but it is not new to his works. There could not be harmony without disharmony and friendliness without unfamiliarity. Disharmony is the principle precedent of harmony and friendliness comes from unfamiliarity. As nomadism in type and nomadism in consciousness are working as a practice logic to support the artist's work, Sung Dong-hun's future work will surely head for another new point. |
