Recreating Space and Time
Evelyne Jouanno
"The universe endures. The deeper we go into the nature of time,
the better we understand that duration signifies invention,
the creation of forms, the continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.”
Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire
If modern life has come to determine our everyday relation to the world, it has also modified our relation to time by imposing on us its rhythms and structures. In the age of the new information and communication technologies, it would seem that the tempo of machines has entered into competition with that of humankind, pushing us into a so-called “activism” but also dispossessing us of ourselves. Fortunately , in this situation where speed is becoming a goal in itself, there are some who are trying to withstand the acceleration and uniformisation of our existences by rethinking and re-imagining the relations between humans and the world, between the body and the mind, between the public and the private — between anxiety and joy, too.
In the field of the visual arts, the strategic challenges often reside in the need to develop critical discourses and representations that enable us to politically or culturally transgress the dominant order. At the same time, others are working more “discreetly" at inventing new ways of looking at the world, of refreshing the link between the body and space, in order to remind ourselves that the potential for change, and thus for freedorn, is still there; that the ideal is something that we can still desire.
Myung-Ok Han is one of these artists who, on the one hand, aspire to an ideal state of being and, on the other, are capable of revealing the unfathomable and extraordinary aspect of our everyday reality, subject as it is to the tyranny of contemporary time. Seeking to recapture the essential and recreate the terms of an experimental dialogue between art and life, she draws the substance of her work from what is basic, from the ordinary contents of everyday life, finding there the elements of the universalism at which she aims. In her Parisian studio, which has been her “country" since she left Korea for France at the end of the 1980s, artistic activities and everyday life shade into one another. There you will see packets of rice, sliced bread, oyster, mussel and walnut shells and, on the mezzanine, piles of containers for food: bowls, plates, aluminium platters, terracotta pots, etc. But, above all, what one sees all over the place is thread, balls of cotton thread, sewing thread, string. She uses it for everything: to fill (containers), to tie together (stones, nuts), to hang things from (bags of water), to protect things (bones, pebbles), to bandage (a branch), to tie things (chicken bones to an eiderdown), to cap (spoons), to hide (mussel shells), to embroider (slices of bread), or even to draw — as when the thread seems to have escaped from the tip of the pen onto sheets of paper pinned to the walls. In bigger spaces, the thread can also spread out on the ground and form organic configurations that are complex and fragile. With this thread, the artist explores and reinvents the ordinary reality of her everyday life in order, she says; "to make it extraordinary."
Nevertheless, this does not mean her work should be considered as a simple happy marriage between the thought of Duchamp, who showed that any ordinary object can be art and that of Beuys, who insisted that this was atso the case for an ordinary, everyday action. For it is time, first and foremost, that governs and determines the work of Myung-Ok Han —that constitutes its primary, fundamental essence. Not vectorial or linear time in the historical sense. but biological and universal time, the time that can operate only in a dialectic between the body(ies), space and the present place. Thread appears here as the materialised and remanent trace of this union. It is as if the artist wanted to tansmit along this thread the duration that is immanent in the wholeness of the universe. "When I start working, I am most acutely aware of movement. noises and even silences," she explains. ”Observing everything, I let myself be carried along, little by little." Thus the big terracotta pot filled with thread (Untitled 1995-96) took her months of sensorial attention and wakefulness. These were the conditions for the thread to be able to fill the recipient as completely as possible, in regular circles, without neglecting any space that is not part of the logical structure. The only emptiness left here is that of the centre, which can thus bear witness to the passage of time. The same goes for all her works. Whether these are made in the radical intimacy ot the studio or in the more ephemeral space of the exhibition hall, they become the receptacle that has recorded time in a space and a period that are tightly interwoven, consequently inspiring an idea at eternity, of globality, as it in each bit of the captured moment, infinity and the absolute were both fully present.
At a time when our last-minute societies have set themselves the objective of constantly making more time from time, transforming waiting and duration into anomalies, Myung-Ok Han seeks, in contrast, to add time to time, to reintroduce “slowness” or “human speed” into her work, in order to present the intensity of the singular, physical and spiritual experience that is the only way of making action and, more widely, of course, existence Itself, meaningful. “Filling these empty spaces is not my primary concern. The idea is more to occupy time, to survey it over a given period. The filling is thus only the result, a trace of time's passage, or more precisely, the trace of the work done with my hands. By doing it, I am no longer in the present, but elsewhere, in my thoughts. If I had no thoughts, the thread probably wouldn’t move.” It is also in order to manifest this consciousness that she gave the title Temps perdu (Lost Time) to three of her exhibitions (Espaee Montjoie, La Plaine Saint Denis, 1995; Galerie Municipale Edouard Manet.Gennevilliers,1996; Galeiie Claude Samuel, Paris,1996). In relation to the work done, "lost time" proves in fast to he powerfully nourishing and creative time. Time that is needed in order to mine the vein of imagination and thought that remain suspended in the frantic spiral of the everyday.
But what may seem even more radical is the fact that after the time of their exhibition, Myung-Ok Han systematically burns her installations and keeps their ashes kept in little transparent bags. She explains: “As | see it, I am not destroying the work. On the contrary. I do this to purify it and better preserve its memory. The idea of possession frightens me. Over time, things change, are transformed. That is why i prefer to keep the work in the form of a memory.” We can sense here a will to lose everything while persuading herself that nothing is lost. To lose, one might say, the better to save. Her installations do not have time to age — such, ultimately, is the “speed” of their changes. In the world of utopia made real, nothing has the time to be transformed into destiny. It is the same with the secret diary that she has kept every day for years -not, as the rules would have it, at the end of the day, but in the morning. when she gets up: there is this deep desire to project, control and always master her destiny; to re-create time, the present as a future memory.
The work of Myung-ok Han is, without a doubt, about memory. The memory of particular encounters, of precise, precious moments that must be preserved whatever the cost, kept away from historical and ecological disaster. But the memory is also an internal one, that of the heritage that the artist tries to rekindle when preparing to work. It is, consequently, the memory that is recreated in the material itself, in the thread that reacts physically to the hands that give it life and form.
That is why, if the thread represents a striking image that evokes the infinite potentiality of passing time, it also embodies the concentration of memory and life in the body, and all that is most primal and vital — and mortal,too, with its drives, its fears, its anxieties and its desires. Her work thus preserves an element of the indiscernible, something that it is impossible to grasp fully. In the accumulations of thread secrets are hidden, wounds and joys, too. The holes in the centre of the Fil posé (Placed Thread) pieces could even be an invitation to look beyond the surface, or even put one’s eye up to it, although of course, without running the risk of taking this treasure away.
As a “foreigner" who comes from another culture, drawing on personal memory is not only a natural reflex. It is also a necessity that makes it possible to exist in the strange space of the Other, knowing that one will always be considered as the Other. "I am an outsider here in Paris. In fact. I also felt like an outsider when I went back to my country. to Korea. I will always be an outsider, wherever I go‘” she states.
In effect, if a culture can be defined as a particularity because it is a oneness in distinction to other cultures, other territories and identifying signs, then someone like Myung-Ok Han cannot be integrated into a cultural particularity in that she bears the marks and wounds of several of them and yet remains outside each one.This is a singularity that can only exist if one touches on a universal substance; an absence of identity that cannot metamorphose into identity except by losing what is most common in the impersonal. For that, you need to go down into the depths that lead to the hidden dimension of life, to accede to the source of existence, to its creation and identity.To go deep within, into the self, and find there each person, each thing ; the Universe.
She wanted to be a writer. But you cannot enclose truth in words. The realty of life is ineffable. beyond description. The artistic language that she has developed is now a way of re-examining her inner world, of grasping and formulating the link that unites the multipte heterogeneities that constitute it. Thread, insofar as it is a signifying terminus of her memory, also enables her to negotiate immediate reality and to untangle the tensions and contradictions that she Inevitably finds there. From these negotiations there emerge different combinations of forces in movement, which in turn give the ensemble its life and soul. This is what is manifest in the installations made with stones (Pavés. [Cobblestones] 1993-95), spoons (Neuf Cuilléres [Nine Spoons], 1994), nuts (Féminin-masculin [Feminine-Masculine], 1996), in which each element of “tension" and the "resolution" brought to it engender an autonomous, total body. More emancipated now, they bring warmth and quietude to the spaces of the cold, ascetic architecture, modifying their nature in a living, human transcendence (La Chapelle, Villa du Parc, Annemasse, France 1998; APT Triennale, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia,1999 ; Oubliettes, Projektraum Bern Kunsthalle, Switzerland, 2001).
Thus the materials and spaces in the work of Myung-Ok Han, which she tries to make as elementary as possible, are always transformed into a living process of the direct experience of life itself. It is work that requires the total involvement of the body and mind, here and now. When she gives herself up to its movement, it is as if she is re-enacting immemorial gestures. In this choreography, the body both guides and adapts itself to the softness and suppleness of the cotton thread. The result is a kind of mysterious, contemplative dance, a dance that is somewhere between movement and immobility, the concrete and the abstract, leading to a transformation of physical elements that takes them towards a "Zen” state. In the hands of this artist, these ordinary, distant elements become powerful, strong and vital. Their potential energy is revealed and reinforced. It is out of this intense. poetical mutation that a new language can express itself, that a new identity can grow up with its demands and protests and dignity. Articulating the myth of loss and turning It into a process of reconstruction and openness to the changing world — that is where access to the Self and to the possibility of creation can take us.