Vision and Perspective 2023 — My Young & Sad Day
The regular exhibition VISION AND PERSPECTIVE, held at the Busan Museum of Art from March 10 to August 6, features three artists born in the 1980s—Doki Kim, Minwook Oh, and Junghwan Cho—in a show titled My Young & Sad Day. Spanning installation media, video, and painting, each artist’s work is introduced through one of three curatorial themes: “Acceleration,” “Energy Flow,” and “Impression.”
Junghwan Cho — Journey Through Uncertainty
As viewers enter the third-floor exhibition hall, they first encounter the theme of “Acceleration,” which centers around Junghwan Cho’s paintings. Installed on wooden structures reminiscent of scaffolding at construction sites or layered memorial walls, Cho’s canvases fluctuate between figuration and abstraction. Each piece presents a unique scene, yet beneath their surfaces lies an unease directed at the neoliberal obsession with “growth.” This anxiety materializes through intense abstraction in works such as Red Alert (2021), adopts surreal forms in Floating-Units (2019) and IKEA Wave (2020), or evokes desolate, uncharted terrains—like remnants of ruins—on canvas. As such, Cho’s paintings read like visual records of a quest to trace the origins of this anxiety, sketches of a “strange land.”
The driving force behind Cho’s painterly journey appears to be the uncertainty of the future. In a society that demands complete individualization and internalization of suffering from its youth, a sense of absurdity arises—especially when one remains unacknowledged and excluded by the ideological system itself. This duality evokes a persistent uncertainty, appearing like a cosmic terror throughout Cho’s work.
Doki Kim — How to Control Sorrow
The second space, themed “Energy Flow,” offers a first impression of solemnity, reminiscent of a church or cathedral. Perhaps by design, the space mimics a basilica layout: Cho’s paintings hang along the side aisles like stained glass, while Doki Kim’s installation White Shadows (2023) occupies the central nave with plaster casts of hands emitting faint warmth, stretched across the floor like offerings or wreckage from a tragic incident. These white sculptures, devoid of embellishment, rest on the ground like ash or bones—residues of trauma. The idea of installing heaters to warm them evokes a disturbing paradox, like “warm corpses.”
Kim’s compulsive generation of warmth seems to stem from a despair toward a world that lacks it. Perhaps she chose to focus solely on human connection and body heat because she could no longer endure the coldness of society. Her works quietly descend into this frigid underside of the human world, and in doing so, they engage deeply with death. This makes them profoundly precarious.
This sense of precarity intensifies in her earlier work Quantum Dream (2018), shown in the third space. LED diodes, disassembled and scattered from TV monitors, flicker as if gasping for breath—like a machine at the moment of death. While these visuals may suggest the death of representation or media itself, the image never truly dies. Instead, Kim shows that the spectacle lives on—like a ghost that refuses to vanish.
The suffering and death of others, arguably the most intense of all spectacles, are often found in contemporary media. Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁), in his video Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002), showed the slow, brutal execution of a prisoner surrounded by onlookers. The condemned man’s strangely calm expression evokes a complex emotional response. For Chen, this gaze is essential—an uncompromising attempt to face the world as it is. Similarly, today’s traumatized realism—found in images of physical suffering or disaster—may be less about entertainment and more about a psychological defense mechanism. We repeatedly watch fractured realities through media and exhibitions, gradually numbing ourselves to survive in a brutal world.
Kim’s engagement with death and trauma provides a crucial lens for understanding the works of both Junghwan Cho and Minwook Oh. In Cho’s case, trauma is triggered by the collapse of social safety nets. For Oh, trauma emerges from a liminal space between memory and forgetting—an ungraspable middle zone that eludes image-based representation and instead aligns itself with history.
Minwook Oh — Archiving the Future
In the third and final space, which explores the theme of “Impression,” Minwook Oh’s work is presented in dark, segmented rooms. Time and memory are central both formally and thematically. The most striking pieces are the single-channel video works Post (2023) and Imageless Arrival (2020). Oh draws attention to the forgotten corners of everyday image storage—photos captured on smartphones or personal devices that have long been abandoned or overlooked. These neglected visuals, like formalin-preserved specimens, hold the past within the present.
The myth of image-making and archiving—now part of our daily lives via smartphones, DSLRs, webcams, CCTVs, and dashcams—can be seen as a reaction to the fallibility of human memory. In Post, flowing lyrical imagery is deliberately fragmented through interrupted frames, evoking black-and-white visuals that appear worn down by time. The narration resurrects past conversations, summoning them into the present. Whether these dialogues are authentic or fictionalized is irrelevant—it is their ambiguity that most resembles how memory functions in real life.
Where Post embodies stillness and delay, Imageless Arrival infiltrates the perception of time through continuous, unconscious gestures—like swiping a smartphone screen. Although the photos on Oh’s phone reflect his private memories, the emotions and experiences not captured within those images remain tethered to them, generating narrative meaning. For viewers unfamiliar with the scent or feel of these moments, the photos become, in effect, “imageless.”
German artist Harun Farocki’s film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) recalls this dilemma. In the film, a 1944 aerial photograph of Auschwitz existed in archives for decades without anyone noticing its significance. Unconnected imagery, no matter how authentic, amounts to nothing when stripped of context or recognition. Archival mechanisms, when disassociated from meaning, can unintentionally silence atrocities. Thus, to remember a past event is not merely to recall an image, but to connect its fragments—to construct a montage of awareness, an act that activates history. Oh’s works leave us with one critical question: Why do we archive images of the world at all?
A World That Is Not Flat
If art reflects its time, then the underlying pathos shared by Kim, Oh, and Cho might well represent a portrait of our contemporary youth. Mainstream narratives in Korea often trumpet how large the art market has grown, or how high art fair prices have soared, but these have little to do with art itself. Commercial art remains commercial art. Diagnoses claiming that the art world was “damaged” by the COVID-19 pandemic are, regrettably, half-truths. From a practitioner’s perspective, the scene had never expanded enough to shrink in the first place.
Remember the year 2011, when artist Choi Go-eun died alone in her room, leaving behind a handwritten note asking for leftover rice and kimchi. That same year, four students from the Korea National University of Arts died by suicide within five months. Not long after, countless university art programs were downsized or eliminated due to their “low employment rates.” Students protested, “As long as we don’t put down the brush, we are not unemployed.” What has changed since then? Not much. The suffering continues. COVID-19 may have become a convenient excuse for a “noble death,” but the true hardship of art lies in the paradox of being judged by capitalistic standards while aspiring to remain anti-capitalist at heart.
To truly read My Young & Sad Day, we must begin with a simple premise: The world is not flat. Despite Thomas L. Friedman’s idealism, we cannot understand art through utopian concepts like healing or reconciliation. We must think through art as a way of understanding the very real world that exists—right here, right now.