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작성일 : 12-07-17 19:25
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Knowing and not knowing (Peter Westwood)
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글쓴이 :
관리자
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Knowing and not knowing
Today, as a form of knowledge, art may exist within a space where knowing effectively co-exists with not knowing.
Such a contemporary condition exists beyond the binaries of modernism and gives permission for the artist to acknowledge
an unspoken truth: ‘I know and yet I don’t know’.
For Shin Jaedon the awareness of knowing and not knowing may be further intensified through his life experiences of living
in South Korea where, on a daily basis, he was always aware of the dichotomy of two divergent versions of the same country.
Jaedon’s conception of the world, like most Koreans, was formed through the consciousness of two territories, one experienced
and one imagined, each facing the other off, across a heavily fortified demilitarized zone.
According to Jacques Lacan all of us are split between a conscious side, a mind that is accessible, and an unconscious side,
a series of drives and forces which remain hidden to us. Lacan states that we are what we are on the basis of something that
we know to be missing from our conscious awareness: our understanding of the other, the unconscious, or the other side
of the split out of which our unconscious must emerge. And in turn the unconscious attempts to fill in the gap caused by
the very existence of the unconscious. In other words, we know and we don’t know our psychological entirety.
Within his paintings Shin Jaedon explores what it means to both know and to not know through the general theme of
human alienation, distress, and isolation. While these works are formed around photographic references,
it seems that they could only have ever been actualised as painting, the markmaking contaminating and distorting the imagery
to imply a volatile and unpredictable reality. The figures in these paintings appear as some-things formed beyond
the limitations of photographic representation, embodying a sense of the unconscious other, and implying ruin or loss.
These works attempt to suggest the unceasing awareness that we all hold within our consciousness, of the unconscious other
within a separate or parallel terrain.
The surfaces of these paintings appear incidental or direct, suggesting a distressed, transient and volatile setting. Jaedon states
that he is “very suspicious of this world” but that his “destiny is to play with these ‘unstable’ images from the daily media
as a form of comprehending the world, and that perhaps this understanding may only be possible through metaphor”.
The imagery in Jaedon’s works appear to induce a place where one is unable to decide if the location is one of fiction
or remembrance, or a blend of the two.
Eventually these works are focused more in interpretation than representation and form a cipher or code of the sub-conscious mind,
evoking an ungraspable counter world outside of what we can know.
I learned in my childhood that a work of fiction is not necessarily enclosed within the mind of its author but extends on its far sides
into little known territory1.
Peter Westwood
(Peter Westwood is an artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne.)
Notes:
1. Murnane, Gerald, Barley Patch. Artamon NSW: Giramondo Publishing, 2009. p68
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