May 17-31, 2023, Hongti Art Center

Da-eun Lee, selected as a short-term resident artist at the Hongti Art Center this year, presented a comprehensive showcase of her projects over the past three years in her solo exhibition relay. The exhibition was divided into three main parts: Movers (2023), Variations in Metaphor (2022), and her signature work, Index, Constellations (2021), featuring video and installation works.

The Montage of Abstraction Drawn by ‘Ambiguity’

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by the single-channel video Movers. The artist captures scenes of ‘movers’ living their daily lives in pre-pandemic Berlin. Their stories do not follow a single timeline but are fragmented and disjointed memories. The confusing sequence of seemingly artificial images, with changing narrators, interview videos, dinner scenes, and nighttime fireworks, resembles an abstract montage sequence.

Importantly, the artist does not portray the movers as stereotypical ‘others’ settling in a foreign land. Their lives, as shown on camera, are filled with laughter and even appear pastoral or lyrical. This depiction is intensified in a first-person shot where the artist appears to be swimming in a river, a rare moment in the fifty-minute screening where the artist’s body is directly visible. By positioning herself as part of the world, both a mover and a recorder, she blurs the boundaries between these two identities.

If there is anything depicted as foreign and uncanny in the video, it is the appearance of the Eurasia Expedition team, who traveled over ten thousand kilometers to Berlin to promote Busan. The stiff, nervous participants on stage, the awkward host reading from a script, and the hollow, meaningless words like “exchange,” “reunification preparation,” and “4th industrial revolution,” followed by a predictable ‘traditional Korean music’ performance, all seem void of individual subjects, merely representing a collective dictated by a specific ideology. Throughout these scenes, the artist maintains an objective gaze through distant shots.

Moving to the next work, the method Da-eun Lee uses to handle images becomes clearer. The single-channel video Index, Constellations is noteworthy. The artist skillfully touches on both reality and fiction, topics that are increasingly important today. The video alternates between archival images of the Vietnamese refugee camp in Busan from the 1970s and current images of the Hwaseong Immigration Detention Center. Instead of a dialectical attempt to juxtapose the past and present, the artist creates a kind of phantasm(幻視) using LiDAR technology, which scans spaces through light reflection, producing images of spaces that do not exist in reality. These images, revealed to be porous structures towards the end of the video, are referred to by the artist as constellations.

Here, the context of the artist introducing fictitious images into historical archives becomes clear. We do not perceive the world inside a mirror as real because we recognize the world through both physical senses and cognitive judgment. Thus, ‘seeing’ an image is not just about photons reflecting off objects and hitting our retinas; it is about logically understanding the structure of the world mediated by that information. There is no objective or substantial truth where photons are reflected (images). Truth is a transient illusion, changing according to the observer’s judgment. Constellations are the same. Star constellations are merely arbitrary lines drawn by observers standing at their coordinates on Earth, looking up at the night sky. While constellations have served as guides for countless explorers in human history, they hold no meaning for hitchhikers traveling through the Milky Way, leaving Earth behind.

The Image of Refugees, the Refugeeization of Images

Da-eun Lee’s method of linking keywords such as migration, refugees, movement, and women to images and arranging them in sequences evokes the works of Choi Chan-sook. While Choi Chan-sook skillfully visualizes narratives and thoughts through a documentary-like approach to historical events and personal stories, Da-eun Lee takes the opposite trajectory. Instead of hastily mediating objective truths through images, she uses ambiguous montages that are neither dialectical nor symbolic, blocking and colliding with any attempts by the audience to read a narrative. For her, narratives are infinitely drifting data——infinitely re-mediated visual information units, memes as replicators, or as Hito Steyerl puts it, poor images. In her world, individual or historical ‘stories’ can never precede superficial images, possessing a relativistic speed.¹ In other words, a key theme in Da-eun Lee’s work is the reaffirmation that ‘images can never capture reality.’

Da-eun Lee is obsessed with capturing images as ‘imagined things’ themselves. For her, the act of archiving narratives and contextualizing them is no different from relating imagined images within norms and institutions. The world behind the mirror in Index, Constellations does not exist in real coordinates (EXIF) and does not hold the status of an index relating to the world. Thus, what appears on the screen are fragments of images without referents. The distance relationship between the artist and the subject in Movers, whether close or far, becomes a device revealing the imaginary relationships within ideology. Let’s juxtapose the image of the Eurasia Expedition team with refugees (or minorities). The image of refugees seen from ‘afar’ through today’s media is also merely something called upon by ideology; their real lives are not there.²

Images can no longer be evidence of someone’s existence or the naive belief that the world will remain ‘as seen.’ Today, images have become refugees themselves. Digital images in the contemporary world are entities that drift through networks independently, without the function of representing the world, constantly referencing and mediating other images. Let’s recall Susan Sontag’s warning about photographs that “Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a short cut. Any collection of photographs is an exercise in Surrealist montage and the Surrealist abbreviation of history.”³ If we add Steyerl’s insight that digital photos taken with smartphones are not records of reality but “social projections” determined by algorithms that separate information from noise, it seems that freely editable digital images, which can quickly reach anywhere in the world through networks, accelerate the “abbreviation of history.” However, all this does not necessarily lead to some aesthetic nihilism. As Benjamin spoke of redemption, we can draw new constellations of recognition suited to a new world. In the gap between visible images and the unrepresented reality, we paradoxically perceive the lack in reality. Most importantly, it is crucial for artists to continually seek ways to approach images that provoke thoughtful contemplation in the viewer. As we continue to ponder how images and the physical world relate today, we hope that Da-eun Lee’s montages can lead to new constellations and a “new map of lives.”

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