[평론 2016.05] The Boundary between Silence and Words - Kang Jinju's Tensioned Surplus Image -

The Boundary between Silence and Words

- Kang Jinju's Tensioned Surplus Image -

 

                                                                              Sanghee Jung (Art Critic)

 

“Image is uttering silence. The image is a station between silence and words. It exists in the boundary between them. In the front line, tension in the image, like in the silence, is what we experience, but it is mitigated by the beauty.”

Max Picard 『The Silent World (Die Welt Des Schweigens)』

      

There is the image of objects in the closed space filled with absolute darkness all around. The objects become in the center absorbing the whole vagueness. The image is expending possible meanings in the space. Kang Jinju’s tensioned images create another time and space in the boundary between silence and words.

 

Kang considers that the photography surpass the limit of its possibility through the function of the camera, computers, lens, softwares and various equipment under the advancement of science and technology today. She chose the pinhole camera for getting at the root of the camera being like in unlimited possiblities. The key function of the pinhole is to catch and show the energy of space with even something invisible. The fundamental meaning, the subject for photograpy has, comes to the front as productive images under the chance factors.

Generally, the energy of images is created with movements, great and small, of the camera in the optimum conditions for situations at time. The image is the results of data by camera’s working under the conditions, the main agent, a photographer. want to set. In her works, however, the agent is just the camera, not herself. The reversal of the agent and the results draws more unexpected stories between silence and words. In the boundary, the familiar places and subjects are changed to something awkward and then tension slowly comes up. For the tension, image itself and spectators come to conflict between them. Subsequently the tension is to be something diverse, concrete, and familiar through the image per se.

Cicero, ancient Rome theorist, said that the power of memory inherently related to places is great. From what he write, the interpretation of image is related to the emotional imprint of specific knowledge. Places is experienced with arrangement of imprinted memory and rediscovered memory. The place has meaning more than its role to make memory firmly distinct. The state of silence delivered with Kang’s works, supports that spectators can arrange and rediscover their own memories. If we try to consider Kang’s work with aura, the conceptof Walter Benjamin, the aura of memoried places is under the weaving with specific time and space. It could be something both accustomed and stranged or close and distant. Kang’s recalled places based on specific time and space are special web composed with existence and absence and sensible present and historical, experiental past.

 

The main role of commersial image is to create surplus value. It means the value transfer from common objects to special ones. Although Kang is a professional commercial photographer she takes her technique down at this time. She trys to minimize of her intervention ans put the intervention of new process and value instead. For making another surplus value in the image, she creates commercially ambiguous gap between positive and negative images and reduces the possibility od words that images can draw.

Photographs can be considerd as a kind of union of images and objects based on W.J.T Michell’s theory about the correlation of pictures and images. If there are no objects, the images might look like a floating, fantastic, hypothetical, and ghostlike phenomenon without visible means. Immaterial images become solid through the material media as the objects. Kang creates the image of silence with very the objects located or arranged in specific spaces. We can get to know the images, making stories about architectures, stuffs, history, nature and even spitirual thing, have more meanings besides appearance exposed in and out of the objects.

 

Photographer usually makes more private relationship with its own tools than any other artists. However, Kang shows that artists can make more fruitful artistic results in another relationships from another angle. It is just another surplus image that cannot be created in commercial images. The place becomes to placelessness and direct, detailed story becomes to silence in her works. Then, the silence creates the tensioned relationship connoting the numerous words inside. Kang Jinju’s tensioned surplus images finally exist in the boundary between silence and words.■