Main : Sungseok AHN

2020 News
2020 [Video Art Program: A Window to the World, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art]

Hiroshima city museum of Contemporary Art
https://www.hiroshima-moca.jp/en/exhibition/video69/
Wisdom of the Crowd, 2018　color, sound, 8min. 46sec.

Who Is the Player? -Kana Uo-

In an abstract, virtual space, soldiers fall atop one another, folded in a heap along with their national flag. The image is somehow reminiscent of tableaux such as Liberty Leading the People, Eugene Delacroix’s depiction of the July Revolution in France. However, one cannot immediately identify the nationality or era of the soldiers’ uniforms, and the scene evokes different historical tragedies depending on the viewer.
This work is a simulation of a first-person video game. Ahn describes a game as “a virtual space where all eras of history blend together,” and says that “playing a game is a process of creating a new or fictional history.” The game Garry’s Mod, which Ahn utilized to produce this work, does not have a fixed mission, and the player can freely alter characters, objects, and even the game’s content. Thus Ahn could modify the character settings and physics engine so as to render the characters completely helpless, and raise them aloft, drop them, or duplicate them, exercising a degree of control that verges on the violent. Who is operating the system? The answer is, of course, the artist ?Ahn? but we can also say the protagonist of this work is the unseen person playing the game. The “REC” that keeps flashing in the upper right corner of the screen, and the images that shudder as if shot with a hand-held camera, strongly convey the presence of the player as if we were seeing through their eyes. But this is a video piece and not actually a video game, and there is no player in front of the screen. In front of the screen there is only the viewer. Completely without their knowledge, the viewer becomes the game’s player and is incorporated into the work. However, despite adopting the perspective of the player, the viewer is not authorized to manipulate the catastrophic scenes unfolding before them. The viewer sees the exact same scene as the player, but lacks all control and can only watch the player mercilessly toying with the virtual world’s inhabitants, who make no attempt to resist. By generating an inferred player who wields tyrannical power within the chaotic and non-temporal space of the game, Ahn expresses the absurdity of history, throughout which an unidentifiable “someone” has always pulled the strings behind the scenes, and the inexorable powers that continue to propel the real world today.

Ahn Sungseok:
Born and lives in Suwon, Korea in 1985. He graduated from the Sangmyung Univeristy with a degree in Photography and Visual Media in 2010. Major solo exhibitions include Stinging at OneandJ+1 (Seoul, South Korea, 2018), and group exhibitions include Young Portfolio Acquisitions 2014 at Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Yamanashi, Japan, 2014), Exhibition of Exhibition of Exhibition at Cecil Theater (Seoul, South Korea, 2018), and Liquid Glass Sea: Young Korean Artists 2019 at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Gwangcheon, South Korea, 2019)

2020 News
2020, March [SB1 open] / is delaied by COVID-19
2020, May [Video Art Program: A Window to the World, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art]

우리는 특별하지 않다. 우리는 한심하다.
We are not special. We are pathetic.

<젊은 모색 2019: 액체 유리바다〉에서 ‘우리는 울면서 태어났고, 많은 사람들은 기뻐했다.’를 출품했다. 제목에서 짐작할 수 있듯이 이 작업은 미래에 관한 이야기가 아니라 내가 지나온
과거를 회고하는 발자국으로 채워져 있다. 미래가 희망이라면 과거는 아쉬움이다. 과거를 아쉬워하기엔 아직 젊지만, 그렇기 때문에 그 후회는 오히려 더 명징하고, 현재진행형이며, 변화의 의지가 있는 성찰이다. 작업을 하며 살아가는 지난함속에서 싹텄을 예술에 대한 짙은 의심과 회의를 국립 미술관의 공간 정중앙에서 펼쳐보았다. 만족스러운 확답이 나 소통, 믿음이 부재했음을 자각한 예술가로서 토로했다.

나의 작업은 단지 개인적인 고민에서 그치지 않고 역사적 사건들에 대한 기억을 담보하고 있다. 지난 2013년 워크온워크에서 열린 개인전〈 Open Path- 관할 아닌 관할〉 에서도 송전탑, 전투경찰, 미대사관 등 역사적 사건에 관한 의식을 가상공간의 문법으로 보여준 바 있다. 〈나는 울면서 태어났지만, 많은 사람들은 기뻐했다〉(2019) 역시 개인적인 경험이 사회적 사건에 대한 상징으로 치환되는 지점을 보여주는데, 영상 말미에서 죽어가는 군인들을 무심하게 촬영하던 여고생은 다음 장면에서 휴대전화와 함께 바닷물에 잠긴다. 일견 폭력적으로 보이는 이미지는 기술 매체의 확장과 함께 무자비하게 몸집을 불려가는 무관심과 증오를 뜻한다. 그러나 마지막에 이르면, 차갑게 출렁이던 바다는 다시 떠오르는 새벽의 해를 맞이하며 붉은빛을
띤다. 마치 과거만큼 불안하지는 않을, 조금은 더 나을 미래를 조심스럽게 조망한다.

기념촬영 1997년
정윤철 감독