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Fishing Lamps,
Discovered/Reinterpreted Objects

 

The lights dotting the charcoal-black sea are fishing lamps. Fishes such as mackerels, hair tails and squids are attracted and drawn to these lights. Boo, Ji-Hyun is also attracted to these lights and collects and recycles the fishing lamps for her installation works. The artist uses thin wires to suspend five hundred fishing lamps from the ceiling, while installing the same number of rectangular mirror boxes on the floor for their reflections. Boo installs the lighting in such a way that the lamps can cast their shadows on the wall and the effects are sensational. The transparent glass lamps combined with their reflective mirror images along with the wall shadows, create a somewhat dizzy but elegant festive emotion. For Boo's installation, the fishing lamps themselves are not the sources of light. Both mirrors and other lamps are used to create an atmosphere and illusion as if the lamps light the space. The luminosity is far less intense than that of the actual lamps. However, the artist has recreated the dim mood one would feel when viewing the fishing lamps at sea from afar. Furthermore, when you look at the lit dots blinking on the glass surface, you may feel as if the lamps themselves were flickering. The fishing lamps, that were once used and discarded, are reborn into a kind of dreaming and aesthetic objects to create the artist's poetic impression. Through this aesthetic process of the artist re-interpretating the objects discovered, we are witnessing a kind of occultistic, alchemistic or magical event metamorphosing the lost light of the fishing lamps (here, ‘light’ may be comparable to the source of life) into an aesthetic realm (fantasy objects). For the artist, it is a difficult process to find used fishing lamps but she could collect them from dumps like the auto junk yard or second-hand stores. As such used up industrial products end up here, in this sense, they may be comparable to tombs. And so to speak, they may be the tombs of civilization. Neo-realists opened a new chapter in the history of fine art by paying attention to such tombs of civilization. Neo-realists were given this name because they reinterpreted realism anew. The reality of our contemporary society as a highly developed material civilization, can be identified from a variety of industrial products dominating our daily life, and particularly, from those used up and discarded. Moreover, these industrial wastes may help us to redefine such reality and may even be metamorphosed into some artistic objects. As soon as the industrial products are dumped, they undergo a change of identity. The strata of the time people spent together and the life traces they left had been accumulated in the discarded products. Industrial wastes give us a sense of familiarity, evoking some sentiment, when they are reborn into a kind of aesthetic object. In addition, art is closely related with the production of such aesthetic objects. It is well-known that the assemblage stacking or laying out of objects and installation art subliming it to the dimension of an exhibition engineering have served to expand and remodel the methodology of the artistic expressions conspicuously. Besides, the artist’s works are a good example of recycling because the medium is from the so-called "wastes". The lamps are almost the same when first manufactured and shipped from their factories. However, the used fishing lamps differ very much from each other. Looking closely at them, some look flawless but show a lot of oil stains while others show flaws or scratches. The lamps are broken, the filaments get rusty, water has gathered inside or seems to have dried out. For the artist, the process that the fishing lamps have undergone from the factory (cradle) to the dump (tomb) resembles our human life course. They resemble each other when produced from their factory, but all look different at the end of their life span. The scars – broken, burnt and burst – testify literally to the traumas of life or being. As we see different events and scars connoted by the used fishing lamps, the everyday life is different among us, although it may be deemed the same. It may be a repetition connoting a difference. Thus, the used fishing lamps are a metaphor of our different lives and everyday events. Though the fishing lamps are produced from the factory, the "hometown" of these lamps is the fishing vessel and sea. The artist returns them to their lost hometown by printing some vessel silhouette onto each of their surfaces. Furthermore, she punches small holes in the center of the mirror boxes laid out on the floor of the exhibition and installs the LEDs to have their blue light reflected on the fishing lamps suspended from the ceiling. In such a way, the artist feels that she is returning the used lamps to their "hometown" of the blue sea and the vessels. And after all, doesn't art mimic and represent reality? Isn't the process of art to retake discarded things, and to recollect the forgotten and to give life again to the dead? In the past, the artist used the copper etching printing technique to express the image of the vessel on the print. In her recent works, however, she transplanted such images and their process onto the surface of the fishing lamps. The result is a kind of cubic or installation print to which 5 vessel images and a hundred editions per image are applied. Thus, the print that is deemed two-dimensional so far has expanded to a cube or installation like sculpture, and such immaterial elements or properties as light and shadow are added up to expand the print infinitely in the realm of a space installation. Furthermore, if the concept of print should be expanded, the industrial products (fishing lamps) themselves may well be deemed the prints originated from the same mold. Actually, the artist marks an edition on each vessel image printed on the fishing lamp in order to declare that her works are originated from the context of print or that the concept of print is expanded. The expansion of the print concept is not all about her works. Boo's work transcends the boundary of art genres (between print and sculpture) and crosses the border between forms (plane and cube). In summary, artist Boo, Ji-Hyun's work underlies a perception of the so-called inter-genre arts.

 

Kho, Chung-Hwan/ Art Critic