“Signs of Loss” at Busan’s MUSEUM 1
By Joanne Yau
Figure 1. Yongmin Kim, The Lost Souls of the City, video, 2022, courtesy of Museum 1, Busan, South Korea.
It was a scathingly hot August day in Busan, South Korea. My friend and I just discovered that the Monet exhibition we had wanted to visit was closed. Not really knowing where to go next, we somehow ended up at MUSEUM 1, a contemporary art museum running a temporary exhibition titled “Signs of Loss”. I was initially not too impressed by the poster’s visuals – it seemed like yet another contemporary art museum that relies too heavily on 360-degree “immersive” neon light and audiovisual installations. Thankfully this wasn’t the case – while the exhibition does lean into this flashy design, it does not fall into the trap of becoming simply another Instagram aesthetic but instead roots this flashiness in a deep sense of irony, which proved to be an appropriate choice for painting a portrait of our current cultural state.
Figure 2. Exhibition poster for “Signs of Loss”. Design: Yongmin Kim, Signs of Loss, mixed media, 2022, courtesy of Museum 1, Busan, South Korea.
For me, “Signs of Loss” is about the loss of the real; the replacement of what we know as art or reality with its synthetic copy, its sign, its simulated, virtual, or fragmented form – a postmodernist anxiety that reverberates heavily in our modern society. Mostly by contemporary Korean artists, the displayed works all emanated a sense of alienation and depersonalisation. The ceiling-to-floor videos by Yongmin Kim dazzle us with vibrant neon colors and images of our modern-day technology such as smartphones and AI humanoids to showcase how they have infiltrated our conscious reality. Then, the video switches to a rollercoaster running at breakneck speed through mountainous heaps of trash and deserted urban spaces – a classic, pre-traumatic dystopian image that alludes to a deep-seated anxiety towards relentless societal development. The ironic part is, although these videos meditate on these questions of human identity and the role of technology and capitalism in shaping it, its bombastic and vibrant visuals liquidate these deeper existential questions and render them as gorgeous yet depthless abstractions. They simultaneously address and detract from the problems we are facing. It’s the same feeling I get when I am scrolling through aesthetic Instagram posts about social activism. This idea is echoed time and time again in other media installations, such as Changsun Koh’s photographic projections of serene, lush landscapes. The frames of these images remind us we are looking at simulated representations of nature, with their ethereal timelessness distanced from our present mortality and transience.
Figure 3. Yongmin Kim, Signs of Loss, video, 2022, courtesy of Museum 1, Busan, South Korea.
The exhibition’s focus on the human body was also uncanny and thought-provoking – gone are the pristinely perfect curvatures and lines we see of the human flesh in classic Greek sculptures and Renaissance paintings, and we have instead fragmented, hyperreal images of corporeality: unzi Kim’s media installation explores this idea through its copies of human faces on TV screens and an acrylic painting of a faceless human body trapped in a glass cage in Trinity. The juxtaposition between these human forms represents the more real-than-real blurring into its image in Perfect Blue style, underscoring how we are simultaneously voyeuristic consumers of and victims to the depersonalizing effects of media. However, while the exhibition offered a creative blend of mediums, the underlying plasticity to these bodies reminds us they are artistic inventions, or even just pixels on a screen. Hence, while it leans into this ironic effect, to some extent it also detracts from how these hyperreal nuances can be found in our everyday lives.
Figure 4. unzi Kim, Trinity, mixed media, 2013, courtesy of Museum 1, Busan, South Korea.
After seeing these explorations of human identity and existence, I felt the exhibition poses these overarching questions: what is the function of art in today’s age or has its meaning dissolved? In the age of AI and virtual technologies, does art just offer another simulated escape from the current problems we’re facing or, we becoming increasingly aware that we can’t differentiate between reality and its artistic representation? Even when art does address current issues, would we succeed in recognizing its cultural commentary or would it forever remain in a nebulous and hazy state, neatly packaged beneath a glossy veneer? This is what I feel like a less refined, merely “Instagrammable” art exhibition would achieve, and what makes this particular exhibition a step up from the rest is that it explores the value of art today from an ironic yet ambiguous lens: Zinoo Park’s “No More Art” anthology appears to address this concern in a blatantly ironic attitude, in which graffitied slogans of “no more art” are plastered across reproductions of iconic paintings such as The Swing. On the other hand, and on a more positive note, it might signify that in our desperate attempts to pin down notions of authenticity and the real in the postmodernist age, we should embrace a re-evaluation of the definition of art, so that these anxieties would dissipate and become free-floating.
Figure 5. Yongmin Kim, No More Art Anthology, 2021, mixed media, courtesy of Museum 1, Busan, South Korea.
Overall, the exhibition was a dizzying, sometimes glaringly honest, sometimes playfully ironic descent into our current postmodern condition, albeit it was hard to pinpoint whether there is a driving force behind these explorations of the real and the hyperreal. I personally felt it oscillates between irony and sincerity enough to not be a purely hopeless depiction of a deteriorating society, and it feels liberative in that sense – although I’m not sure how long this liberation will last. Though I did feel that the exhibition was a candid response to the country’s crisis moment – my news algorithm has recently been flooded with articles about how so many people in Busan are leaving to work in Seoul that the former has become economically unsustainable, and how the entire country has been facing a declining birth rate driven by a multitude of factors all potentially attributable to its ultra-capitalist nature. All of these are incredibly fitting for this exhibition’s context, and it’s scary to think that its speculative nature is not too far from the truth. What I would be keen to explore further, is, how I can translate my viewing experience into meaningful action, so that I am not merely mourning the loss of a society on an aesthetic level.