The squiggly lines sway precariously in the air. At first glance, they seem to fall vertically like water streams, but if you look closely, you can see that they are floating freely, drawing their own trajectories with their own power. That freedom is by agreement. They are too light for gravity to rule everything. The stress of the threads that are twisted together is greater than my weight. Just by turning the lens barrel a little, the world changes like this. The shorter the focal length, the more light is scattered. This umbilical cord trembles even in the air that is slower than the exhalation that is imperceptible to the skin. Only the most sensitive among us can detect the change by holding our breath for a moment. The photograph freezes their world in milliseconds, but in that small world, several generations may have passed in the past few days.
If we can perceive the subtle changes in time and properly, I think we can enrich our thoughts and emotions. In the end, emotions seem to come from a generous and active attitude that is willing to look into another world. There is no such thing as a feeling that just pours down like sunlight. It does not mean that the pleasure that immediately leads to an action is not valuable, but I pursue a slightly different kind of richness. The hem of a thick, fluffy coat, the white quilt that supported the structure inside, its stretch and inherent strength, the cool gloss of the sharp metal podium, the overlapping of shadows created on a clean wall by the various light rays flying in from outside the picture. To some, they may be nothing more than a fragment of a reproduced reality. What more meaning can be contained in a hem of a coat that can be taken out of the closet right now? This is a common complaint for viewers accustomed to exhibitions that simply list fixed symbols and expanded meanings. For example, there is no longer any doubt that the clothes of Lerici hanging here were completed using classical techniques that were historically formed, and that their craft preservation value is valuable. But is the feeling of artistry or beauty solely in the realm of personal characteristics?
Capturing universal and precise beauty is clearly an important task in Kim Dae-cheol's work. Therefore, the implicit authenticity is carefully considered in the selection and processing of materials, and the details are determined, and the desire and confidence for the so-called 'perfect balance point' is fully revealed in the finishing and arrangement. This is not something that was calculated in advance or elaborately directed, and the meaning is not determined in itself or reproduced repeatedly, but rather moves toward something new at every moment. If we recall that he has focused on bespoke service through Lerici and has consistently raised issues by referring to the words of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, it is not difficult to guess where his philosophical coordinates are roughly located. However, it is meaningless to discuss whether his actions are the result of craft or a fragment from the path of another artistic pursuit. Perhaps such an attempt may also be the result of thinking that is bound by form. A beautiful life imitates art, and material craft is a means to make it possible in the present. Everything is nothing more than a device to tell an old story.
『Enhancement』2022JUL27-31, Sowol-ro138, Lerici
I am not interested in listing all the allegories used in the exhibition, so it would be better to set up a clue to examine a more fundamental way of thinking. First, it is necessary to point out that his starting point has nothing to do with the actions of commercial brands or other artists. Fashion and art have had a close relationship for quite a long time, so many modern people may not feel much resistance to this behavior, but Kim Dae-chul's awareness of the problem of the masochistic relationship between the two is one of the very important parts in distinguishing Lerici's behavior from that of existing brands. The general discourse that has criticized the relationship between fashion and art so far 'Fashion itself is a type of visual art' , 'Fashion cannot be the ultimate art because of its commerciality' or There was a degree of 'both sides with the same interests for each other's development' . This structure presupposes a somewhat obvious scheme of the vulgarity of fashion and the inherent purity of art, and the marketing intentions of financial capital to differentiate and promote the brand by improving the image through art and the desire of the artist to access capital collude. This kind of sophisticated and political collaboration is not the way that Kim Dae-chul, an independent designer and successful producer who runs his own workshop, has evolved.
Throughout the past 18 years in Lerici, or even since Seven-O a few years earlier, what he has consistently displayed in his actions is a devotion to perfection, a worship that borders on obsession. He seems to no longer care about cliched dichotomies. His approach is not limited to that of luxury brands or the fashion business, nor does it pursue a self-righteous sophistication that is divorced from the present. However, the reason he has adopted a self-abusive and ascetic anti-business approach is simply an obsession bordering on faith toward consistent authenticity. This description immediately brings to mind the nature of craft. In the world of craft, results are given only as much as one does, and there is no such thing as luck. It is governed by powerful cause and effect, so principles and morality are of utmost importance in action. Such an environment must have naturally led his thinking to the phenomenological essence. He is an artist who feels the world and existence in a purely sensual way, and he believes that others can also clearly understand the phenomena that he has already acquired and takes for granted. Because they can never come up with something false, and they can never be satisfied with something plausible. Therefore, the time of craft they are going through may not be productive at all. The sheer belief in authenticity and the old-fashioned practice that I lightly call the “craft mindset” may seem old-fashioned in today’s business world. It is an era when accepting that you are a “human who knows the moral law but cannot practice it” and passionately caring about financial statements may be the attitude of a good manager. However, if you are intoxicated by the arrogance of reductive error and hierarchical ranking, you will remain in the hell of endless conceptual segmentation, and you will not be able to find heaven anywhere you escape to.
What willingly drives him to asceticism is the "memory of an old life that flows faintly in the bloodstream." For Kim Dae-cheol, humans are originally from matter like stars. Flesh and stars both originate from cosmic dust, but they are the result of willfully moving toward different forms with different information. At this time, all information tries to survive in its own way. Stones preserve information through their immutability, and trees and people replicate information from generation to generation. Of course, if we imagine the cosmic time of the emergence and dizzying cycle of the universe, their survival strategies are pitiful. This is because nothing can survive that much time. If we try to find some meaning in this humble life from a cosmic perspective, it would be Beckett's meaning of simply playing a given role during a given time. It is to endure absurdity and willingly create information - "beauty" in Kim Dae-cheol's language. Therefore, life and art, which "desire immortality but cannot achieve it," will have the same meaning and purpose in the big picture. There is no need to be greedy to understand the magnitude of the time it takes for a star to become a human and for a human to become a star in this life. Life is about conceiving a form that fits the meaning and continuing the given story. Religions that follow the laws of nature use reincarnation and cause and effect, and religions that follow the one God use salvation and original sin as metaphors. Another clue is a kind of humility that even apostate sinners can recover through constant learning and persistent thinking.
(1) Eric R. Kandel, 『The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012)』
The stories born through the telephoto lens of ideas that go back and forth between the universe and the microcosm are closer and more a priori than we think. For example, we already share different points of circulation. Existence is in a process and uses energy to stay in the most perfect state at every moment. However, all information is vulnerable to time and has the characteristic of easily disappearing. Therefore, we must experience the beginning and the end, life and stars, peaks and descents. Great works of art from the Renaissance, Michael 'Air' Jordan, crustaceans converging into crab shapes, the blue sea and tropical depression of Tahiti, the biosphere of the 'pale blue dot' located in the Goldilocks zone and the earth's crust that has been wriggling for billions of years, and even the cooling red star of 6,000K. Each existence is heading toward the peak or has already reached it by its own inherent power, and will inevitably become worn out as it experiences its own time. Kim Dae-cheol seems to see this fate as the most fundamental and poetic experience before philosophizing with language, and as something that is “perceived before thought.”
Of course, the image of the bedchamber being removed from the clothes is clearly an allegory of conception and birth, and this will always function as a device to remind us of aging and death. So it is not surprising that it looks like Francis Bacon's butcher shop. When a body is dismantled here and there and hung on an iron skewer, each organ that performs its function is revealed, and the detailed structure of the cells that relate to each other is revealed. There was a certain period when this image of reductive anatomy stimulated us most intensely. Eric Kandel1 ) provided decisive inspiration by reading the results of the meeting and convergence of Klimt and Zuckerkahn at the salon with a new perspective. However, this taxidermy of the moment of birth is not intended to praise life or remind us of death. It would have been much easier if there had been an ideal photography that exists only as an act, removing the image as a divine observer and message, but since you and I are inevitably meeting in the most inefficient way, which is to list existing language, the interpretation here cannot but be metaphysical and fragmented.
If I could, I would like to reveal here some things that cannot be said, that cannot be conscious, that cannot be thought of, and that cannot be abstracted. Since I cannot, I cannot help but guess that relationships are the fundamental driving force behind all these fables. Clothes as objects have a very unique status in the first place. Just as we are objectified in structures, experience objects as structures themselves, and are reconstructed through others, objects can be differentiated into various phases and multi-layered meanings as independent entities through their relationships with me and the world. However, clothes are nothing other than 'things worn on the body'. They are rather strange objects that imitate and wrap the body, which is an embodied consciousness. They function as an object that is immediately recognized, an extension of the conceptual body where empathy and projection occur, and a field of phenomena where sensation and perception themselves occur. Therefore, clothes as objects operate simultaneously in multiple directions and in multiple aspects while newly becoming aware of the relationship between the inside and the outside. Through this, we can see that Kim Dae-cheol performs a compositional function not only on physical objects, but also on the actions and cyclical time surrounding them, the relationship with users and the boundaries resulting from them, and even beyond their world. He strips off objects and persistently encounters the fate of aging. This powerful will gives form and extends an umbilical cord to the phenomenal world.
Written by Kim Jun-ki
Photo Hans
