The Works of Art in the Age of Pandemic

If one is to declare a place that is most vulnerable to disasters and catastrophes, it is probably a cultural space. While an unidentified nanoscale virus took over an entire building, what seemed more threatening than such spread of an infection was the subsequent raid over the cultural and arts sector. Several restrictions related to exhibition viewing created a scene that we have never seen before. From controlling the number and traffic of exhibition visitors, collecting visitors’ data through QR codes, to making reservations in advance, many experienced unfamiliar changes in viewing an exhibition. Attempts to deal with the crisis in the art world also sporadically surfaced. Art Basel unprecedentedly used a digital platform to display artworks, galleries used metaverse to recreate the experience of viewing art in a virtual space, and the artists approached the web environment as a new kind of art medium, which seemed timely.

Three years have passed since, and as catastrophe became the new normal, the reflection upon exhibition viewing remains unsolved. Was the self-proclaimed metaverse and the VR exhibition viewing alternative enough? Since the appearance of pseudo-exhibitions, has our experience of the conventional art exhibition changed? While the culture of the multiplex dragged on, OTT (over-the-top) has established itself as a mainstream culture. Consequently, despite the fact that the screen failed to replace the site in the experience of contemporary art, we cannot help but think about the taste of the manna’s recipe.

Can we consider Soohyun Koo's 《World famous showroom》 as the pandemic era art? As if she had foreseen the crisis of lockdowns, in 2018 Koo began a digital archive of world-famous exhibition spaces, which is here re-presented in the aesthetic of a flash game, posing questions around the experience of viewing an exhibition. Viewers can walk through the gallery using a first-person perspective as in the FPS game. However, unlike general web spaces which allow the user an unrestricted time and space, here, the players must abide by the rules set by the artist. Attempting to reflect the typical exhibition viewing guidelines of the real world, it places the exhibition visitors to face and wrestle specific situations in each of the games that they participate in.

Do Not Cross The Line is a game reminiscent of the queue line at the entrance of an exhibition space. In the game, if you hit the line three times before reaching the center, you will have to start again from the beginning. The normative warning that comes when violating the viewing guidelines in the real world are mirrored in a stage-clearing style game by inflicting a penalty upon the player. There seems to be no other choice but to experience several game-overs before finally reaching the goal because in the game the player does not have a sense of its whole body. Since the player’s perspective is restricted to a frontal view, it is impossible to tell whether the body being manipulated actually exists in that virtual space or whether it is even a body at all. The gist of Do Not Cross The Line is here. The goal is not necessarily to clear the game by reaching the object, but recognizing the questionable perception of the agent that floats towards the center. When clearing the mission by reaching the cube, a text that says, “Image not Found,” appears above the cube where one hopes to be rewarded with a closeup view of an artwork. This is not an error, but a reply that the ontological image of the player who has successfully reached the goal cannot be provided. Playing Time <=>≠ Duration is even a stronger coercion of this message, as once the visitor enters the black cube that has open doors, they cannot exit until the video ends. What does it intend in incarcerating the player without any barrier to their freedom? Answer: Total betrayal of one’s sense of command mistaken for one’s inherent subjecthood, in other words, the total absence of agency.

Contrary to such ontological questions of the player in the web, The Closer, The Further compares the conditions of the real world and the cyberspace built with graphics. In this work, the artist reveals that, unlike the naked eye, which sees the object more clearly as one gets closer to it, “zooming in” in cyberspace exposes its geometric pixel structure and ends up ruining the beauty of the digital image. The hanging canvases of modernist masters, when approached at a closer distance, turns into a blurry image reminiscent of the Impressionist paintings. This may be the legacy of Mondrian, who believed that the grid he used to make the compositional works can create an illusionary visual effect. If the network of pixels is a mere logic, wouldn’t the 1080x1920 pixel image that it has created be a mere illusory effect? If the space constructed with graphics is actually an illusion made of language and logic, it is important to recognize its arrangements rather than the form. Get Lighter, Get Closer looks like one version of such an arrangement. The situation in which a damaged artwork is restored through 3D scanning and reverse construction seems at first to point to the question of the original and its reproduction. However, stopping one's inquiry there is a misuse of the theory. The critical point here is not how faithful the reverse-constructed digital object is to the original . The question is the logic of this newly constructed as a work of art itself. Since it is difficult to accept its imminent presence, these two identical works actually have no relationship to each other at all. Just as Mondrian's grid always returns with a new form, and as images created in this ghostly grid of the pixel has no relationship to its previous images, the reverse-constructed artwork is not the original work from the physical world, but a newly uploaded sign within the perceptual experience of the cyberspace.

If The The Closer, The Further and Get Lighter, Get Closer tried to reveal something through the art object in the exhibition space, MAGIC WHITE MAGIC and Closing Hourss reflect upon the exhibition space itself. Firstly, MAGIC WHITE MAGIC questions the conventional exhibition mannerism in differentiating art and non-art by setting the mission of the game where the player wanders around the virtual exhibition space and selects objects that appear to be art. As a result, what is grasped is not what makes an object an art, but the fact that the exhibition space is a place of selection and exclusion. On the other hand, Closing Hours, unlike the rest of the games, can be experienced after 7pm, during the closing hours of the World famous showroom, where other works cannot be viewed and the player merely floats in an empty gallery. This space may appear to be neutral and empty, but in reality, it is the pragmatic gimmick of an exhibition. Just like in MAGIC WHITE MAGIC, we all belong to conditionals of a dense code.

Thus far, I have adopted the following logic in reading this exhibition: “It appears to be ____, but actually it is about ____.” This method gestures that the space beyond the screen is not a mere place of entertainment. Just as the conventional exhibition space that appears to be neutral is actually a dynamic site where politics, economics, and culture intersect, cyberspace is a game of reverse calculation where the artist mediates their mission from the backstage. The phenomenological approach initially seems to reveal many differences, but what it performs is a mere arithmetic. Thus, for clarity, we need geometry.

The myriad of exhibitions that proliferated in the pandemic era were often insufficient coverups to make up for the lack of conventional exhibitions. Instead of hastily recreating the paralyzed physical gallery space via the screen, Soohyun Koo's work exposes the margins of cyberspace. The World famous showroom offers a better example to gauge the sense of this period, as unlike many who were desperate to make a shelter to merely survive the attack of the virus, this project references the web space to explore the rules of the conventional exhibition space. Instead of quickly returning to reality, Koo’s persistent attempt to seek a place in the virtual space brings back the long breath that most art seems to have exhausted today.