A LINE
Olivier KAEPPELIN
"I have always had the impression or feeling of the frailty of living creatures
as if it took a tremendous amount of energy to keep them upright."
Alberto Giacometti
The first thing that surprises one with Myung-ok Han is the space. Whatever the room her works are in, they contrive to remove themselves from architectural contingencies. They carry us off in the experience of their own axiom, which turns out to be more powerful than their surrounding environment, however large or small the volume. The space of her sculptures draws us to the place where they appear, where they come and where they exist, where they hold their form. The works of Myung-ok Han do not dialogue with the functional data that determine or alienate them. They remove themselves from their context, dig a "hole" in the middle of a system of codes the better to assert themselves as an individual place of concentration and energy. It is significant to note that in an insrallation entitled Aquarium, it is made un of the hundreds of transparent bags filled with water, each hanging from a thread which both isolates and identifies them amidst the sum of the units. Each receptacle has its own form, each its own force. Each volume supposing "its fish", each volume aesthetically and ironically asserting the subject's space overriding the overall space of the whole, rendred absurd by the generality it induces. Myung-Ok Han brings out the importance of the singular experience which, once accomplished both spiritually and physically by the individual, alone enables one to state some communicable meaning through the work. Whilst it may refer to a Korean cultural heritage (the thread as a long life material) or to some European artistic attitude (Arte Povera), we soon understand that this is only an apparent convergence, one which hardly informs us as to the meaning of this creative work. Myung-Ok Han means to be alone facing this form, this lonely "other person" that her gesture brings to life, that she ever so slowly casts before herself. Paradoxically for this space to exist - and here l am thinking of the Laid thread, the Wheel or the Nine Spoons - it has to be built up through an act requiring a great length of time, or to be more precise, an exceptional awareness of time. Here, time literally builds space. Once constructed, it makes us understand like a fragment from Heraclitus that the beginning and end are undecidable and imperceptible, that in gyrating the one constantly occupies the other's space in the happy, dangerous test of mobility. Let us accept the gift as our own, the offering of this form made through trays, plates, spoons, let us follow and then loose this undiscoverable line and we shall attain this strange sensation whose meaning is the experience of a permanent becoming, a genesis with no other purpose than itself, the figure of its own principle which, taking over the space, peoples it with lives, with continuous creations. Thus, with this thread, this tool, the sculpture takes hold of substance which it sets in motion, it returns the abandoned objet, the dead stone, to the flux of the worlds. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, the universe starts to move ; "the fragments then are stones on the circumference of the circle ; l spread out in the round ; my whole little world in crumbs ; what is there in the centre?", wrote Roland Barthes. In the centre, the void, the unthinkable of sculpture, which, with Myung-Ok Han, designates both the frailty of any mobile "construction" and the contrary of a movement which it endlessly restarts through its very negation. The void that obliges the beginnings and the ends, the mixed "ayes and noes", the void which, when maintained in the centre of the flux, creates the enigma, that is the extreme presence of form.