Hyperlinks Affirm Hierarchies

The global lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic brought about significant turning points and reflections on our reality. The sudden ‘halt’ faced by modern civilization, which seemed to be racing ceaselessly towards progress and prosperity, caused immense confusion in every aspect of life. However, the world did not entirely stop accelerating. Traditional ways of human interaction were blocked during this period of contactlessness and pause, but the non-physical network of the internet remained intact. This network, which tightly binds the world together, almost seems like a firm promise that our connections and bonds will never be broken, no matter how our reality and forms of life change.

In retrospect, the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), which predicted that “Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchies,” was clearly mistaken. The Cluetrain Manifesto envisioned a hopeful future where barriers to information and knowledge would be dismantled, and users could bypass and dismantle traditional power structures and hierarchies through the hyperlink function of the internet. However, today’s world seems to be accelerating in the opposite direction of that hope. Classes still exist in various forms, and rather than destroying hierarchies, the monopoly of data and concentration of infrastructure have accelerated the digital divide, leading to unprecedented inequality and human alienation.

Nevertheless, as the world rushes towards an era of tactile loss where contact is unnecessary, and we are forcibly thrown into a world where we cannot feel each other’s warmth, perhaps we need to cautiously prepare to embrace this new era’s connections with a sliver of hope in our hearts, much like Roy Ascott’s “Telematic Embrace.” Therefore, it seems necessary to pay more attention to the potential of art, which draws out relationships between people in ways different from online networks. Through its critical action, art brings hidden and unseen elements back to the surface. Art’s power as a real network lies in capturing and linking forgotten people, thoughts, histories, and beliefs, stripping them from social hierarchies.

The exhibition Transcending Hierarchies is an attempt to once again rely on the relational aspect of art and carefully explores whether physical networks of art— in ways that non-physical internet networks could not— could serve as a clue to saving humanity from hierarchy and alienation. This exhibition focuses on how two artists, Min Ji-hoon and Yang Na-young, view and contemplate the world. It will introduce Min Ji-hoon’s strategies of twisting perspectives, swapping and recombining humans and machines, and Yang Na-young’s strategies of observing and capturing objects while walking through urban spaces, examining how they reveal and attempt to overcome hidden hierarchical structures.

Min Ji-hoon: Flipping Perspectives / Moving

In an era where full-scale wars between nation-states have resumed, Virilio’s insight that visual image machines are control devices for monitoring society is being proven in more sophisticated and ruthless ways. However, in Min Ji-hoon’s series of projects, machines appear on the surface as symbols of humanity rather than totalitarian war machines. The artist swaps the placement of machines and humans and interchanges the perspectives of objects and people. In his imaginative world, existing power structures are overturned, and the possibility of resistance is explored.

In Min Ji-hoon’s work, perspective and movement are crucial elements. For example, in the series Memory of the Box (2021-2022), the artist uses a delivery box as the material for his work. This ordinary cube, which we commonly encounter and use, has no distinct features or functions and is thoroughly an object discarded after use. However, the narrative that emerges the moment the artist attaches sensors and cameras to such a mundane box and grants it vision reverses the positions of object (thing) and subject (human). The act of flipping perspectives, in other words, swapping the positions of the observer and the observed, blurs the boundaries between subject and object, becoming the most effective strategy for redistributing the topology of power inherent in visual perception.

The artist endows objects with movement through mechanical devices, metaphorically presenting them as living entities. Movement inherently implies the possibility of ‘being alive.’ This may be why the artist chooses moving mechanical devices and videos as his mediums instead of static images. In his work, the purpose assigned to objects within the existing order disappears, and the things that were taken for granted lose all meaning. To stop, to be silent, to be unseen, to be forgotten— all the things imposed on objects as objects appear before the audience as gestures. According to Giorgio Agamben, gestures, as a means of communication that existed before language, can express things beyond what language can capture. Perhaps this is why the movements of Min Ji-hoon’s machines resemble a poltergeist’s dance, as if invisible beings are entrusting their existence to create a dance.

Yang Na-young: Return to Space

Spaces now face greater challenges. From the emergence of net art that sought to break away from traditional concepts of space to the recent frenzy over the Metaverse, the trend towards de-spatialization and immersion in virtual spaces seems to erase the foundation of real spaces, as if it has become a new hegemonic order. Along with de-spatialization, the power of spectacle that hides important things, making them ‘invisible,’ seems to have reached its peak. The spectacle created by capital and class has degraded modern urban spaces into schizophrenic spaces devoid of critique.

Yang Na-young observes and appropriates traces she encounters while wandering through urban spaces, stripping away hierarchies. Her thoughts manifest in a way similar to the Situationists, who sought to destroy the spectacle by ‘drifting’ through the city, viewing modern cities as ‘mere collections of fragmented spaces.’ Drifting is an act of revealing life within these well-constructed, rational urban spaces through unintentional and accidental wandering. The artist’s method of capturing spaces and objects is akin to this. Her paintings and objects inevitably draw motifs from physical walking (drifting), capturing traces of life within urban communities as images. In an era of speed politics that nullifies the politics of space, the artist’s act of drifting and capturing images can be read as an attempt to bring the politics of space back to the surface to uphold human dignity.

The so-called ‘slums’ of urban spaces are a major theme in Yang Na-young’s work. Growing up in cramped, old multi-family houses, the artist naturally focused on the traces of ‘dull and sluggish beings’ left behind by a world that accelerates beyond them. She captures elements such as ‘sloppily applied cement surfaces’ and ‘old plastic pipes’ as manifestations of the invisible, marginalized humans (Homo Sacer) and incorporates them into her work. If the repeatedly applied cement surfaces contain the time and traces of physical labor, pipes that connect the inside and outside in urban spaces are evidence of breathing and circulation, life itself.

The series Boundary Staircase (2022-2023) best represents Yang Na-young’s artistic perspective. Stairs are symbolic structures that divide urban spaces into upper and lower levels. Although we often forget, thanks to elevators and escalators that allow us to move hundreds of meters in an instant, the levels created by the height of urban spaces have long been regarded as symbols of class. However, the crude cement stairs in slums captured by the artist reveal that people existed on this land even before the planned and rationalized urban structures. On those paths devoid of rationality or efficiency, there is no distinction of human rank. The varied steps of children, light and clumsy, and the slow and deliberate steps of elderly gentlemen, all leave the weight of their bodies on the cement surface. The artist, who believes that human traces are etched into objects and human lives are revealed through objects, affirms humanity by affirming the space.