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Stories and the Imagination

from National Museum of Korea: Quarterly Magazine, vol.53

by National Museum of Korea

from National Museum of Korea: Quarterly Magazine, vol.53, page 36

Article from: National Museum of Korea: Quarterly Magazine, vol.53

Silla Kingdom: In Search of th...

ESSAY

By Choe U-Ram Artist

If someone asks me about my religion I feel that I should say “animism.” My works are inspired by stories and the imagination. I sympathize with objects. I feel pity for a screw that has fallen and lies discarded in a corner of my studio and weep over smashed car parts that are thrown out after testing. I lovingly wash my car which is so old that I have to send it to the scrapyard tomorrow and stay up all night writing a farewell letter to it.

Everything Has a Soul — Anima Machine

When I presented my Urbanus series in 2006 I created a virtual organization called United Research of Anima Machine (U.R.A.M). Its purpose was to research living machines, or “anima machine.” From my debut in the first half of the 1990s to the present, I have been working on themes related to machines and life, and considering that I say machines have a soul and have established an imaginary research institute, it would seem that I wanted to study them a little bit more seriously.

As a person who makes machines with a soul it is probably natural that I believe all things and all phenomena have a soul. When I see something new I see it as an object with a different form of soul and my efforts to live with it start with imagining stories. In animism, which is understood to be a primitive form of religion, people project divinity onto the trees, rivers, and rocks, and in the same way people accept the new environment made by giant god-like entities like machines, science, and technology and regard them as yet more animated beings that coexist with humans.

Objects made by human beings are infused with human passions and emotions. Hence the machines and civilization made by humans are filled with passion and emotions, too. Though they have the appearance of machines they are actually humans.

The Urbanus (2006) series explores my emotions as a person living in the machine civilization. Naturally, my interest extended to the giant city. The city seen below from a skyscraper seemed to be a giant living and breathing creature. In the city, light and darkness coexist, like the coexistence of yin and yang, which can again be expressed as male and female. There has to be light to feel the darkness and there has to be darkness to recognize the light. I was driven to ponder the importance of coexistence and harmony and that sensibility was expressed in the Urbanus series.

In the East, women are considered to be yin. But I express women as beings in control of all birth and mothers who emit light, while men are beings who prowl around women and absorb their light. Another Anima-Machine Jet Hiatus (2004) is based on the imagination, the idea that it lives by rapidly transforming psychological flow into physical energy. It is an inorganic creature that mutated from a gas turbine engine and flies against the extremely powerful jet stream. Utilizing the space between layers of air to gain propulsion, it flies faster than the speed of sound and is sometimes spotted in the vicinity of airplane dumps or engine assembly plants. That is why it is sometimes likened to a salmon in the sky.

The Endless Circulation of Souls

In Metamorphoses by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, Pythagoras says, “Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases, passing from a wild beast into a human being, from our body into a beast, but is never destroyed.” I can become an animal or an animal can become me. I break down the barriers between humans and non-humans and, furthermore, question the boundaries between living things and inanimate things. Here, the concept of difference does not exist; there is only circulation and change. I understand change as the process of communication, identification, and circulation. Change is the way to unite humans and all things in the world as one, and to change means to move.

If the hearts of objects do not exchange emotions with others in relation to the consciousness, their emotions become stagnant and harden until they are stiff and dry. The innate energy in emotion comes alive only when it is expressed, and ultimately emotion is manifested as physical force.

My work titled Ouroboros (2012) is an expression of the eternal cycle. The motif of a serpent biting its own tail, called Ouroboros, is a symbol of eternity that appeared in ancient East and West alike. My Ouroboros has a shiny gold head and ceaselessly devours its own body. No matter how much it eats its stomach is never full, and hence symbolizes human greed which is never satisfied.

Custos Cavum (2011) tells the story of suffering that arises from severed communication and hope for its restoration. I was thinking deeply about communication around the time I was devising this work. Then one day, on a television nature documentary, I saw the story of the seal who lives alone on the vast snow plains of the South Pole. Being a mammal, the seal must spend most of its time on the ice fields. To go into the sea to hunt for food it needs to pass through a hole in the ice. But the bitter cold of the South Pole means the hole in the ice is apt to freeze over and disappear. For its survival the seal uses its front teeth to constantly gnaw away at the edge of the hole to keep it open, because it cannot make a new hole when the existing hole freezes over and is shut. The seal’s situation brought to mind human communication, which led me to create a story about a mythical being known as Custos Cavum, or the guardian of the hole, who facilitates communication between two different worlds.

All Things Are One

My works are about human beings, with machines used as an extension of humans. As such, movement plays a very important role, for movement is the process of change. Life and death, myself and others, human beings and nature are all connected and through the process of circulation show that they are one.

One (Reply to Dr. Lee) (2020) expresses the cycle of life and death and their homogeneous nature using the motif of flowers that bloom and wither. The petals which look like traditional paper hanji are made of the same material as the protective suits currently used in the fight against the spread of COVID-19. It is inevitable that I agonize over the situation, as one human being who feels infinitely small and helpless as the world faces death in the age of the pandemic, and as an artist. On each petal there are overlapping ink stains, like a book where the ink has become wet and blurred so that the writing is indecipherable. They symbolize the traces of consciousness left by the endlessly repeated cycle of birth and death within the eternity of time. The central part of the work is shining with the light of imagination and anticipation of a new order of life. But deeper, at the very center, is a black sphere representing emptiness and the indifferent order of the universe.

Though my works are continuously circulating and changing, will they be complete when even movement and stillness reach a state of equilibrium? Is this what is meant by the Way in the Tao Te Ching 道德經 or nirvana in Buddhism?

About the author

Choe U-Ram was born in Seoul in 1970. He graduated from the department of sculpture at Chung-Ang University in 1991 and received his master’s degree from the same school in 1999.From childhood he was interested in machines and robots and his career as an artist took off with his solo exhibition “Civilization ㅌ Host” in 1998. Since then he has held many solo exhibitions in Korea and overseas at such venues as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Asia Society Museum in New York, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, and Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Inspired by stories and creative imagining his works are living creatures that move while the artist himself shows dynamic, diverse energies in his ceaseless efforts to communicate with audiences.

This article is from:

National Museum of Korea: Quarterly Magazine, vol.53

by National Museum of Korea