Bae Yoon Hwan: Record of Destruction
Chapter II is pleased to announce Bae Yoon Hwan’s solo exhibition, Record of Destruction, from 20th September to 2nd November in Yeonnam-dong, Seoul.
‘Record of Destruction’, the title of the exhibition, has a dual meaning. It generally refers to a machine which applies an external force to destroy certain objects; this reminds of us a shredder often used in offices and public organizations in order to cut off documents for reasons of security. Another understanding of the expression that the artist adopted for the exhibition is ‘recording a process and details of destruction’. Although it is not frequently used in ordinary circumstances, ‘Record of Destruction’ is a significant step to secure procedural legitimacy of removing sensitive information or archives in military agencies and government departments.
Here is an establishment called 「Fumble Company」. (The name of the company briefly appears in Bae’s video, Record of Destruction (2019, single channel video, 9’28)). A monitor installation situated in the center of the exhibition space shows a puppet play which is not only the most crucial piece of the exhibition but a device revealing the artist’s fundamental aim in a descriptive way. Being made with the Assemblage technique, the characters of the video, also displayed in the exhibition, play a role of employees and an employer. The overall framework of the story is based on happenings of a day at the company specialized in destruction.
It is not difficult to discover social phenomena and related messages in Bae’s practice, as he has actively borrowed numerous references from mass media such as the Internet, news, TV series, mobile spam messages, political incidents, uncanny stories or several anecdotes widely talked about, in terms of selecting subject matter. Nevertheless, Bae’s practice often represents fragments of diverse discourses dominating a social and political environment of a particular era instead of delivering a uniformed message, due to his unique working methods and techniques which enable him to produce large-scale canvas pieces overlapping multiple affairs and dense images and videos conveying rapid developments of plots.
In this recent work, Bae subtly unveils how a hierarchy repeatedly operates in human relationships and societies and moreover, he sarcastically depicts the situation. The president character works in a separate room with individual equipment in the video. Thus, the interior setting faithfully obeys the conventional model of office environments designed under an explicit hierarchy. The employee characters are preoccupied with their personal matter rather than being concentrated on their given tasks. Some scenes show that they produce private documents including a vacation request form, a letter of resignation, and even divorce papers and later some manage to hand in the document to their superior or some hesitatively shred them in the end. Especially, these sequences clearly demonstrate a considerable influence of ‘money’ which can be one of main substructures of a capitalistic hierarchy upon every member of the society.
‘Destruction’, the main theme of the exhibition, is closely connected to a hierarchy in informational accessibility, usually specified as access authority. The access authority to particular information is allowed to only the upper echelon of the group. This unequal distribution certainly occurs in cases of status and income. In this sense, ‘destruction’ is an essential function to maintain constancy of the system and support discipline of the hierarchy by obstructing anti-systematic approaches towards the information.
At the end of the video, the shredded debris of the documents heavily shakes, crumples, eventually becomes lumpy. It is similar to a typical introduction of SF films which describes an emergence of a monster. Through this scene, Bae implies that the shredded information is able to create other narratives since they possibly contain their original confidential details, hidden schemes and underlying plans. He also suggests that this pattern has similarities in the current tendencies of overflowing manipulated or corrupted information in the Internet and corresponding daily efforts against the phenomenon.
Bae Yoon Hwan, one of the first selected artists at Chapter II Residency, has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Baton; Doosan Gallery Seoul; Insa Art Space; Spacemon Museum of Art; Space O’New Wall. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at numerous establishments including Art Basel Hong Kong; Daegu Art Museum; Art Center White Block; Gyeongnam Art Museum; Seoul Olympic Museum of Art.
