Wonjung Shin
Yoo Hana, who lives and works mainly in Berlin, deals conceptually with images presenting socially reflective and critical content. Her solo show in Seoul presents different approaches to life and the ecosystem, subjects that have always interested her.1 The name of the exhibition, “Chambers”, refers to rooms or spaces that are politically, architecturally, biologically, and technologically independent. The exhibition combines the potential semantic expansion of the word (i.e., the meaning of spaces and boundaries) with the artist’s aesthetic experiments exploring what lies both inside and outside those boundaries. The characteristics and significance of Yoo’s work are investigated in the following sections, particularly regarding the media and important motifs in art history.
I. Media: The Coexistence of Traditions and Cutting Edge
Yoo’s work, which focuses on video and images, fits naturally into the category of contemporary art which is characterized by media, particularly new media and digital technologies. Yoo masters footage and montage techniques, and her video work follows the current trend of focusing on media properties and the potential of the image. Her work Fall: recording of machine learning unity, based on machine learning algorithms, is prominent in its use of the latest medium. Artificial intelligence, a term for various systems and technologies that simulate human intellectual abilities in computers and machines, has become increasingly important in the 21st-century art world. Machine learning, a subcategory of artificial intelligence, is a method of implementing artificial intelligence through an algorithm that allows machines to learn and make decisions independently.
Fall offers a bird’s-eye view of mice, taught by machine learning algorithms, performing specific tasks. A total of 132 mice (agents) are placed in 66 rooms (chambers), two in each room which at first glance appears just like a circular plate floating in the air, one from the experimental group and one from the control group. Each experimental mouse has to find cookies and give them to other mice. Not all mice perform the tasks successfully. Some of them accidentally leave the room while searching for cookies. Deviation from the specified area signifies more than simply an error. What awaits the mouse upon leaving the small room is not only elimination from the experiment but also a great fall; thus, completing the task accurately was imperative to the mice’s survival.
This experiment, in which virtual laboratory animals constantly face a crossroads between life and death, is projected onto a wall in the exhibition hall as a digital spectacle. Elongated dots move confusedly across the screen, gradually falling toward the bottom of the screen until they eventually disappear. Notwithstanding the novelty of the medium called artificial intelligence, the visual impression that was made reveals traces of the tradition and history of painting. The element that dominates the screen in Fall is the “line”, with its various curves. The movement of the mice wandering around the room in search of cookies creates a bundle of soft or dense curves, and the trajectory created by the failed mice falling out of the room leave behind juxtaposed lines of different thicknesses that merge together. Like an everevolving drawing, the black lines on the pure white background create rich dialogues with a range of mid tones and delicate nuances.
While the virtual camera persistently follows the trajectory of the mice, changes between a bird’s-eye and a frog’s-eye view evoke various visual associations. At first glance, one could perceive a complicated maze or pouring rain. It evokes lush vegetation in a dense forest. The video projected onto the large screen creates a stunning visual impact. Composed of a virtual event called Fall of Experimental Mice, the digital image embodies the beauty of the sublime through the relatively simple elements and principles of black and white and the juxtaposition of line and plane.
Barnett Newman, who advocated a new so-called American sublime of the 20th century with a large canvas filled with intense primary colors, explains the concept of the sublime as the basis for creation in his 1948 article, “The Sublime Is Now.” Jean-François Lyotard describes Newman’s large-scale color-field painting as a “negative presentation” of the sublime as it eschews the presentation of something unpresentable. Thus, Yoo’s Fall, which visually describes the narrative of animal experiments using dynamic lines, stands not only in the tradition of European painting due to its painterly quality, but also ironically in the tradition of modern Western painting due to its obscure and abstract depiction. The images of the disorderly, tangled lines created by the trajectories of mice roaming around the room connect with the historical genealogy of action painting.
Although the visual effect of Fall is far removed from that of the monochrome of the primary color, Newman’s notion of the sublime can still be applied to this work. Owing to the constant shifting of perspective between the gaze of God looking down at everything and the eye level of the frog looking up at almost everything, the viewer perceives his/her existence as the subject of a temporally and spatially transcendent experience. The presence of the viewer promotes the formative expansion of the work (e.g., one’s shadow on the screen enrichs the visual impact). Fall thus suggests the potential for embodying the sublime in the digital age.
II. Motif: Animals and Ecological Systems
Yoo has previously expressed her interest in animal welfare through videos such as The Brilliant Grass Splendour in the Grass (2020), and explored the relationship between humans and animals more deeply in her exhibition “Chambers.” Mice, which have lived in a symbiotic relationship with humans since the dawn of human settlement, are the main motifs that permeate almost all the pieces. In Fall, the test mouse learns to solve a task and either succeeds or fails. Arbitrary Radius Circle, which derives its title from Isang’s novel Abnormal Reversible Reaction (1931), refers to a traditional Korean story about a mouse’s human transformation after eating a discarded finger- and toenails, and then becoming the possessor of the nails. Bare Life features white and black mice which are widely used as laboratory animals.
In the West, rats have long been associated with negative connotations; rodents are even referred to in the Bible as unclean animals that should not be eaten (Leviticus 11:29, Isaiah 66:17). Competing with humans for food and being harbingers of illness and even death, rats are viewed as hostile by humans. This negative perception of unwelcome mice is also evident in art. As seen in a still life by Georg Flegel (1566-1638) of a mouse in front of a bowl of nuts,2 rats appear in paintings throughout history as symbols of destruction and death and are a compositional subject of vanitas paintings, which signify the transience of life.
A change in perception that began gradually, progressed rapidly during the 20th century. The traditional threat of mice lost its power as life became more abundant and sanitation was improved. Pop culture and the visual arts portrayed mice as cute and likable (see Mickey Mouse in Disney animations and Roy Lichtenstein’s painting). Scientific development has also focused on the positive qualities of mice such as their strong (survival) life force. The widespread use of animals in scientific experiments has fostered a new positive image for mice which in the past were viewed as harmful, but are now recognized as beneficial in terms of human health and disease eradication. Due to their high fertility and short life cycle, mice are particularly suitable for experiments – which is why rodents account for more than 80% of all experimental animals in Korea.3
Bare Life, which refers to uncomfortable facts regarding the welfare of laboratory animals, can be placed in the category of ecological art since such discussions of this piece are not only related to animals but also to natural environments and ecosystems. The artist focuses on the problems caused by the intersection of the respective environment between mouse and human instead of merely focusing on animal welfare itself, opening up the critical possibility of reading and interpreting Yoo’s work in terms of ecological art in the age of the Anthropocene. However, the subtlety in the socially critical tone of the work contributes to its obscurity and semantic ambiguity, which is further reinforced by the loose narrative structure. This can also be observed in Arbitrary Radius Circle which contains a metaphysical message. Yoo’s attempts work like an exquisite tightrope walk although there may be a point at which one wonders what the results would be if the artist’s voice were clearer.
Paradoxically, man’s existential freedom is reflected in the tragic fate of the laboratory mice in Fall, although it occurs in a virtual space. The appearance of the mice, which are preoccupied only with the things in front of them, is overlaid with portraits of modern people who, while supposedly feeling free, are caught up in the dense routines of everyday life, repeatedly fulfilling assigned tasks. Instead of being depicted realistically, the mice in Fall are sketched, with the emphasis being placed on making their movements visible. The piece evokes the motif of the “memento mori”; although the fate of the falling mice is not shown clearly, the viewer’s imagination easily fills in this unseen part of the story – everything that falls has an end.
The exhibition’s title, “Chambers”, implies the confronting concepts of “inside” and “outside”, leading to an examination of various types of (in)visible boundaries which are treated in different ways throughout the exhibition. The three works described above are investigations into the inside and outside of boundaries and the borders between them. In Fall, the rats fail in the virtual laboratory by leaving the room. Arbitrary Radius Circle asks if a straight line kills a circle. Bare Life explores definitions of inner and outer spaces, which are closely related to wild animal survival and depict North Korean defectors risking their lives crossing borders. The piece analyzes deep learning systems that measure the pain of experimental mice both inside and outside the laboratory.
Spatial boundaries lead to other types of boundaries (for example, the questions raised in Arbitrary Radiant Circle about distinguishing between the natural and the artificial) and hybridity (the experiments in species mixing attempted by cutting-edge science in Arbitrary Radiant Circle overlapping with legendary personified animals). Conceptually and in reality, the artist’s interest is not limited to the definition or properties of boundaries themselves. Yoo deals with different types of borders related to human life. Her eyes are particularly keen where cracks appear at the border. At a time when the traditional boundaries between culture, art, and science are becoming increasingly blurred and political themes such as refugee issues, wealth polarization, and class conflict are becoming more intense, Yoo’s work, which focuses on lives that deviate from adhering to strict boundaries, is even more meaningful.
1 The exhibition was held from September 30 to October 11, 2021, at the Post Territory Ujeongguk and sponsored by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
2 The production year of this picture in the Munich Alte Pinakothek is unknown.
3 According to data released by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA) in 2019, the proportion of rodents among experimental animals is 86.9%, overwhelmingly surpassing fish (6.3%) and birds (5.1%).