Min Sung-Hong
Written by: Kwon Taehyun
Title: You Must Pierce Things to Sew
Min Sung-Hong stitches things. He disassembles used furniture someone discarded in the streets to connect them to other objects or folds scrapped paintings and sews them together. As such, his works often involve sewing. Sewing is basically about connecting things. To be more specific, sewing is piercing through things to stitch different objects together instead of gluing them. The same is true when you string beads, sew something with a thread, or staple things together with a stapler. Piercing does not leave the original object as is. It damages the object and breaks it before connecting it with something. You pierce through a smooth surface and tear the layer that clearly divides the inside and outside, or what was implicit and explicit. As such, you've got to pierce through things first to sew them together.
The Exercise for Variability series, made by neatly folding decorative traditional Korean landscape paintings that were thrown away, has thin threads dangling here and there. If you follow the seams that continue outside the frame with your eyes, you can see stitches underneath the folds bulging forward. The physical properties of the series are particularly prominent as much as the composition of images, probably because of untidy threads hanging down from needle holes. Creases formed by folding the painting horizontally, vertically, or diagonally create physical depth in images and simultaneously make the front and lateral sides to something flat. They provide a three-dimensional quality to paintings in many aspects.
They also make viewers move. If you take a quick look at the series from the front, everyone realizes that they are landscape paintings, even though there are many parts in the image that you cannot see from the angle because of folds. This is probably because people have schemas of traditional landscape painting in their minds. We tend to see things based on our beliefs. Nevertheless, if you come close to the paintings and follow the seams pierced through needle holes and the folded surface of the landscape with your eyes, you will find nothing natural about the visual representation of mountains while recognizing the folds.
This way, viewers move their bodies and feel the depth of the folds to engage with the creases on the surface. Here, you can reflect on the internal and external issues as you did with folds and piercings. You can also approach this issue in a more three-dimensional manner through Deleuze's concept of "pli" or folds. The pli concept has many variations, as explained in numerous books by Deleuze, and it is the essential allegory of his ontological thoughts because Deleuze compares the dynamics of dormancy and currentness with folds. Sensing the possibility of unfolding paper or discovering creases when you unfold it—Even if you don't examine such a complex concept, you can see that folding one side of things is equivalent to unfolding from the other side. This implies that folded parts are unfolded, and unfolded parts are folded.
Based on this idea, the outside world is no longer something fixed but a movement of folds comprising the interior of things. Thus, folds create interiority and exteriority at the same time. Meanwhile, the issue of the inside and the outside in Exercise for Variability is not only addressed through folds but also through another element that Min drew over the landscape painting he picked up from the street. He drew a net of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines with a ballpoint pen. The net is a recurring form in Min's paintings. The art critic Kim Hongki described the net that blurs the boundary between the inside and the outside world as "a self-contradictory fence" in connection with Min's other work, Running Fence[LEXCODE1] , which reappears here. The net provides translucent visibility, blocking the way but allowing you to see the other side. There are openings, but it also makes you recognize the barrier on the surface. It is like a device intended to block and open simultaneously. If you slightly change the perspective, however, you can also see many small holes created by thin lines intertwined on the net.
Nets, or grids, used to be seen as the symbol of pure indifference and absolute aimlessness because there is no hierarchy, center, or curves, as Rosalind Krauss masterfully pointed out in relation to modernism. (This is why the grid is associated with modernist orientation like artistic freedom.) Therefore, grids may not appear to represent anything, but they actually do because grids are the reproduction of the surface partitioned on the same surface they intend to reproduce. Min Sung-Hong covered the surface of the image with a net to grant it visibility and then folded up the surface physically. Another essential point here is that Min worked with oriental landscape paintings. Oriental landscape paintings (although they may not be true for jingyeong [meaning "true view"] landscape paintings) are reproductions of conceptual objects that are deemed ideal. This means that they are images that belong to a visual system completely different from Western landscape paintings tied to the notion of modern subjects that discover the landscape from the air. Building on this formative methodology, Min pierces through things belonging to different visual systems to create intricately sewn surfaces.
As such, tangling different things is not the only problem among distinctive visual systems overlapped on the surface. There are overlapping seals at the corner of the paintings, indicating the painters. Min stamped a seal inscribed with his name on the paintings he found in the streets, a typical practice in Asian art. Many seals are sewn together this way to create small holes in the barrier between ownership. The original Exercise for Variability series did not even have a wooden frame. In Min's recent shows, he put the frames around the paintings, but if you look at his early installation format, the paintings were hung on walls without the frame. The landscapes of various scenery would again connect with one another to create another landscape at an entirely different scale.
The Exercise for Variability series is not the only work that blends things that are part of varying systems. He has been making the Playing With Everyone series by constantly stringing discarded objects he finds around his studio like beads. The Skin_Layer series that spins off from such sculptural composition uses three-dimensional artworks covered with fabric or plastic nets. These nets resembling military camouflage nets have a structure where you can see the outside from the inside and grasp the objects inside from the outside through holes made on the flat surface. This format is again woven to issues raised in piercings, folds, and grids mentioned above. Thus, camouflage nets in Skin_Layer reintroduce a form similar to the parachute-like shape presented in landscape works before. Such methodology Min embraces also strings his other works concept-wise and material-wise.
Window, one of his works that monopolizes his collection of varying decorative landscape paintings, sits at an interestingly intertwined point with this discussion. In Window, Min tears landscape paintings into pieces and then stitches them back together with threads or fastens them in one place with staplers. You can also see the white surface between torn pieces of the landscape painting that prop up the surface. The cracks reveal the system's exterior that triggers the image, the construction of the physical support that holds up the system. You can also think of the threads and stapler pins as things that suture wounds. When your skin is cut open, things wrapped in the skin can die. The cracks in the two-dimensional work that disclose the support system are reminiscent of deadly wounds intestines spill out of. The skin is well-statured, so the crack will be filled with new flesh and become a scar. As such, here is the surface that accepts cracks, wounds, and the exterior into the interior.
Min Sung-Hong continues to sew things from contrasting worlds, from the surface that reveals both the inside and the outside, the skin, layers, and nets, to sewing that stitches all of this together. In his works that sew one another, the boundary that divides the subject and the object and the inside and the outside disappears. Furthermore, these works are not only sewn with a piece of work but also with totally different substances, audiences, and even worlds outside his works. Once again, you must pierce things to sew. They will also pierce through things and make tiny holes in the world.
Public Art, July 2022, pages 124–125
Korean-English Translation of this book(or text etc) is supported by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Service'
Press release courtesy Gallery Chosun.
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