Cyborg warriors from the past and the future
Kho, Chung-Hwan(art critic)
Venus by Willendorf, David by Michelangelo, the Bronze age by Rodin, Sam and odalisque by Ingres, a monkey hugging a cub that Picasso made by combining the objets such as a toy vehicle of his son Claude and a pot handle and a pot, the dancing Siva of Indian Hinduism. Stone Hareubang of Jeju island, Robot Android in the movie ‘Star wars’. What is the ground that brought these in one place or made them in one place? Is it inevitable or coincidence? Can these be called classifications or items? In that case, which classifications and items are they? Michelle Foucault said that the classification and item that pass for a common sense is in fact arbitrary and the result of ideology. It’s called the loot that one mold suppressed another and survived. According to Pierre Burdieu’s logic it the outcome symbolic struggle, and according to Andre’s way of saying it is the art gallery of imagination. They are the standards and regulations of art in Hakje Kim’s brain. Then, what is happening now in the brain of the author? How are standards and regulations of art called and set? In this item and classification, there are Western art history and Eastern art history, prehistoric times and classicism, and the fault of time that embraces the current and the future is included. And the art history, religion and folklore are loaded. Although at a glance the probability that connect these and continue them is obscure, you can see its probability if you look into it. It’s mixed and crossbreed, hybrid and fusion, and crossover. To use these days’ words, it’s the logic of consil￢ience and funnel. It’s the place where various different formal semantic branches meet, it’s the place where the common sense loses its context and gets another context, and it’s the place where the world is reorganized and restructured. Artist’s brain is an imaginary factory where the world is repaired and organized. A language was called a closed system that has self-sufficient structure and physiology of its own. That a language is a closed system means that it cannot have any meanings in itself. Therefore the dictionary is nothing more than a home of dead languages. It is in the use of speech and writings that its meanings are created and fixed. It’s in the environment and suppositions, in the context and its contextual relation. It’s in the author’s brain which is the network of those environment and suppositions, context and its relations, and the ones that have the physiology similar to the brain are hybrid space, world wide web and the internet. The internet looks as if it’s an analogic expression of the brain. The internet gathers the world in front of the author’s sense of eyes. The sea of information is similar to the world of senses. It’s infinitely open as the sea. There are numerous routes, but those routes can be erased any time and recreated. Although there are numerous relations, those relations can be fixed at any time. There is nothing definite. It is in one’s sense that its meanings are defined. Along with the senses, the fixed meaning can also be erased, recreated and fixed. Just as the sea does.
Hakje Kim gathers different points in one place where his senses go. And he make it depart from the context where it
originally belonged and reorganize them into a new category. This organization, which at a glace seems arbitrary and willful, has been called to testify the existing method of contemporary image that appear as consilience and funnel, and the method that the senses are structured. Although it receives some elastic￢ity after the internet environment, the physiology of contempo￢rary creation subject is more immersed in consumption rather than production. A special method of existing image rather than creating nonexisting image is applied to the creation. The sym￢pathy runs through Hakje Kim’s works about the contemporary image application method that appear in the action of recogni￢tion map of its own using as a substance the caught image while swimming in the information sea for surfing and mapping, and in the image sea. And the essence of that flow is borrowing. There is no more originality. There are only Simulacra, that pretends to exist while not having real existence, something that are accepted as ex￢isting by chance or publicly, those whose meaning constantly slides while looking noticeable or making slight differences or its existence unable to be caught, those that betray reappear￢ance while pretending to be reappeared, those against the logic of stagnation for the play of difference and against anchor logic for nomadic play. The physiology of the play is parasitic. That is to say, the reason that the borrowing is parasitic on the original is that it takes the original as a host only, but in the end it is to obtain the self sufficient existence, and this itself is to accede to a new originality. Let’s get back to the beginning. Hakje Kim borrows Western art history, religious icon, folklore objet, and the image of public cul￢ture. Such borrowed image is treated as a clay and formed into minute shape. Next the mold is made from the shape, and lastly the new shape is made of glistening metal texture whose mate￢rial is stainless steel. Through this series of procedure, an origi￢nal is regenerated as a different copy. The body is substituted by the combination of various machinery parts whose origin is unknown, including the parts that are taken from the computer. As the body has been made into one piece, it feels likely to move with machine sound although it will not really happen. This way all the characters of the original are regenerated into a kind of cyborgs. Cyborgs are warriors that came from the future. So, as the war￢riors from the future(the era that has not come, so the era that does not exist) intervenes, the historic era abruptly becomes un￢familiar, and the sensuous reality based on the material ground becomes unfamiliar. For example, the Venus of Willendort repre￢sent fertility and richness. The reason that it particularly stressed the bosom and hip is to stress the fertility and richness, and to stress the life. Compared to this, the cyborg Venus of the author seems to stress the power of the maternal society, so if we read it as the feminism plan to reconsider the art history, would it be an overstatement?(In a machine bosom, lubricating oil seems to flow instead of milk) A female cyborg, the parady of Ingres Sam, can be read as the original or as a prototype or as an example of Femme Fatal that punishes while seducing the person, and as the cases may be different, in other cases they are quite likely to be read differently, and moreover the probability is even uncon￢trollably open(this way, a kind of hypertext is being realized). As the imaginary intervenes in the reality, the reality seems up in the air. Due to the cyborg warriors that appeared in the historic era like this, the reality suddenly becomes unfamiliar, the imagi￢nary and the reality are keeled, and the imaginary have rather more sensuous reality feeling than the reality.
But after careful consideration, this story is not about nean￢thropic human beings but about the current human beings. Cyborgs are not from the future but are current human beings. There maybe slight differences, but we all are cyborgs. Marshal Mcluhan considers the media as the extension and expansion of human organs. I can send a draft at a click, listen to events and news at the end of the world with one phone call, and can see far away in a small room. Hiding behind anonymity, I can criticize some one without any concept, and call every men and women for Kwan Yin(Of course without letting the person know that he/she is called). Now, shoudn’t we say that the current human beings are already living in a totally different dimension than previous human beings? He is already living in the future, not in the present(or today). As he is living in the future beforehand he has no future. The reason that the novels and movies whose themes are about the future are depicted in gloomy color without fail is not only because of the ruthless human desire or civilization drive whose brake is out of order. The current human beings have lived too long. As he has seen the end of the world his curiosity dwindled, and as he has lived in the future beforehand his body got older. Tired and again tired. Maybe the human tragedy have been prepared from the separation of the body and consciousness. His eye of consciousness has seen the end of the world and his ears heard the end of the world. The media will probably change the world at a light speed, and the human consciousness developed by the media will see and hear the world faster than the light speed. The fast look stagnant. Maybe it really is instead of looking so. What moves around is the crest of the world only, isn’t the inside having a deeper sleep than stagnancy without knowing that the world is moving
around fast? What is sure anyway is that the future vision is usually colored dark. Here Hakje Kim makes the nature confrontation. We have forgotten the world for long. We have been forgetting the existence of nature who has lived before us, who will live long until the humans will only become a legend, and who will instantly recover those that the civilization has destroyed at least for several hundred years after modernism only. We early collected the awe that its constant vital power deserves, and belittled the fear that its infinite scale deserves. But there were times like when there was Pascal who discovered a god in nature. That infinite scale is the god and nobility. The god that hides in nature is nobility. The author goes to the end of the world looking for the traces of that nobility. This time he really went instead of letting his consciousness go. There he takes thousands of pictures. Then he make editions, the reason of which is not to make them more plausible but to reveal its nobility better. And he puts the pieces on the image. At first in a diorama way, for example he puts the pieces in front of the background, and later he makes the pieces into images and synthesize them with the background. And in those photos thus synthesized, infinite nature and the humans that evolved(?) into cyborgs are included. He clanned in glistening metal garment looks like an alien who intervened in indifferent nature and, looks
