First Street Gallery, located in the heart of the Chelsea art district in New York City, is showing video installations titled “Where Do I Come From? Where Am I Going?,” a solo exhibition by Korean video artist Yongshin Cho from August 12 – August 27, 2021. Cho is a renowned video artist who acquired a reputation in France while he was working as a young man. Cho has worked in Paris, Seoul, and New York after studying plastic arts at Université Paris-VIII. His works have been shown around the world in countries including Korea, China, Japan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together with the works of Nam June Paik and Bill Viola, his work “Beautiful Is a Man Who Resists” was shown at the 15th International Video and Multimedia Art Festival Videoformes at Clermont-Ferrand.
Cho’s work takes a critical view of social, political, and cultural systems and structures that produce injustice, inequality, conflicts, and brutality. He says his experience of brutality in the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 in Korea drew him to these aspects of society for his artwork. In his work, he deconstructs historical, political, or social events and reconstructs them as symbolic images to produce unfamiliar visual images for an alienation effect. Oftentimes, he combines these themes into installations that feature overlapping video, laser, sound performance, or choreography to produce multilayered themes. The human body plays a central role in his installations. At times he juxtaposes a naked body with nature, such as the ocean’s breaking waves or an open sky, to deliver multilayered meanings.
The main theme of his works has usually been individual humans’ existences as being thrown. He has been interested in a state of thrown-ness of human beings in the present with all its attendant frustrations, sufferings, and demands that one does not choose, that is, in Heidegger’s terms, Dasein. The exhibition “Where Do I Come From? Where Am I Going?” is also exploration of such humans’ individual existences.
The title of the exhibition reminds us French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin’s work “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”. In the painting, Gaugin poses existential questions such as birth, life and death. He left France for Tahiti, seeking solace in the earthly paradise which is far away from the corrupting Western civilization and planned to take his own life after completion of the work “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”. Therefore, Gaugin’s work is reflective and retrospective.
In contrast, Cho’s work focuses on existential uncertainty of human beings. It explores the undertermined but finite nature of human beings thrown into the world. The show includes a collection of video installations that reflect the artist’s autobiographical memories of wandering around the world, pursuing his artistic career for 35 years. The installations are divided into three parts from the entrance to the inner wall of the exhibition hall.
The first space is the entrance of the exhibition hall. A video projects on the wall that symbolizes the sight seen when a life first encounters the world. In the scene, a naked body is caught in storms and darkness. The second space shows open immigration trunks of various sizes and video images of people inside the trunks smiling and speaking. The pieces of books, letters, and newspapers are scattered around the trunks, which tells how tough the journeys have been. On the wall above the trunks is a video image of a naked woman being patted and stroked by hands. In the third space, numerous clocks are scattered on the floor of the space, with one large clock standing in the center. The clocks are ticking and emitting LED lights in the darkness. Behind the big clock, a video image of the city and a floating body is projected on the wall. The artist’s portrait appears in the scene, asking repeatedly, “Where do I come from? Where am I going?”
The video installation in the first space seems to show the conditions in which human beings are thrown. However, the human beings the artist describes are not just thrown into the world, just as in Heideggerian Dasein. Dasein is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as mortality, sufferings, and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself. According to Heidegger, Dasein is not just thrown into the world. It is capable of understanding, and understanding is the possession of an ability. Therefore, a human being is not only a being defined by being thrown into the world. It is also a being who can throw off that thrown condition in a movement where it acts in a concrete situation.
The journeys in the second space of the exhibition hall symbolically show the movement of a human being trying to throw off that thrown condition. At the end of the video in the third space, the artist asks, “Where do I come from? Where am I going?” The artist seems to tell the audience that a human being can throw off the thrown condition by repeatedly asking these questions.
Amy Hunam Yun is a writer, translator, and scholar of translation studies. She lives in New York. She worked as an adjunct professor at Hongik University. She has written and translated many articles and books, including a book chapter ‘Cities and Desires’.
