策展人解读丨两极椭圆：情动的粒子及玄秘的流溢

Yunchul Kim thinks cosmologically and acts microphysically. He allows himself to indulge in cosmic reveries, meandering through the geophysical expanse and astrophysical immensity and permitting caprice in planetary temporality alongside the circadian cycle of earth-bound creatures.  He is at once pre-scientifically abstruse, recalling when alchemistic enunciation proclaimed the divinity of a totality of the living and the undead, of solids and spirits, and in which the suprarational reigned in the domain of knowledge, and post-humanistically amorphous, by which homo sapiens is understood microbially in rapport with plants, and quantum mechanically in tandem with rocks and stones (we are all particles!).

Argos (2022), our first encounter with Kim’s preternatural reality, is reminiscent of the monolith in Space Odyssey that channels the celestial stupendous to the everyday profane by the violent act of cosmic rays striking the earth’s atmosphere. In this ultimate contact of the human abode with the cosmos, the thousand-eyed monumental structure originating in Greek antiquity, equipped with a modern apparatus of a Geiger Muller tube, scans muons, the subatomic particle that is the result of the interstellar collision, transforming into sounds and lights and setting in motion cluster of actions and interactions of things and substances in their vicinity – it crisscrosses, traversing  matters of different natures, magnitude and properties, materializing not only matters of fact but also “matters of concern,” as Bruno Latour would have it, enabling a reciprocity that is both physi-chemically necessary and ethical-aesthetically indispensable.  

The French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard once stated that “realization takes precedence over reality,” that is, in Yunchul Kim’s parlance, a techno-matteReality which foregoes the real perceived by human sensory faculties.  Chroma IX (2024), the colossal, knotted assemblage of a vastly elongated ouroboros form, engenders a reality coming into being through the very process of putting into action the phenomenon of fluctuation of the variegated liquid that is the marvelous work of a modern alchemist, of an entanglement of energies both positive and negative, converging into an elliptic dipole in sedimentation and ascension. Yunchul Kim hence presents to us a reality through the actualization of a techno-phenomenological phenomenon: phenomenon that is instrumentally produced and has “no genetic tie to human consciousness and perception.” (Mark Hansen, The Critique of Data) In doing so, the artist has intuitively undone the damage of anthropocentric hubris and made equal footing of varied and multitudinous subjectivities.

We get a glimpse into Yunchul Kim’s underworld of alchemy.

Amorph II (2024) reveals, shedding light on the intricate contrivance and technicality Yunchul Kim creates in his visual enchantment. Rather than an optical illusion, the wondrous spectrum and brilliant intensity are a manifestation of a materiality of forces, both artificial and organic, solidified in the form of hydrogel derived from layers of seaweeds. Ancient tapestry techniques and the progressive mono-tonality of Morton Feldman weave into the transcendental splendor of the artist’s imaginative mattereality. Two installations of Amorph II, resonating with each other across the expansive gallery space, in Yunchul Kim’s pataphysical explication, make salient a "matterphor" in the physicality of an ellipse enacted by dipoles. It is eternity reconciled with evanescence, like in the quantum mechanical revelation of waves and particles, commingling, erupting, penetrating the Double Slit to land both infinitely far and near all at once. In that vertigo of electromagnetic charges, opposite forces achieve an equilibrium and arrive at the negentropic tranquility.

As if two elegant harps were to orchestrate a vortex of harmony and dissonance with the mechanical precision and articulation of clockwork, Triaxial II (2017) is a liquid furnace that incinerates metal particles and sand residuals, turning them into a fluid gyre, coagulating dissolution into suppleness, winding up, twisting down, cochleated, rushing geometry into entropy and vice-versa, disintegrating and regenerating. Yunchul Kim’s piece is cyclicity, open-ended closure, a system of reciprocity and a resolution of the polemic. It is this polyphony of multi-nodal intensity and Variantology, as German Media theorist Siegfried Zielinski might concur, that forms the leitmotif of the artist’s inner chamber.

If Zielinski’s polyphonic articulation on Variantology stems from his erudite study of Deep Time through the lens of media archeology, Yunchul Kim, once a student of the prolific professor, inherits not only his mentor’s pluralist worldview of humans ancient and modern, but also takes the word very literally in the mineralogical sense of stratification of rocks in light of geological immensity and with the cellulose composition of trees that enliven, and of that which subsists at the bottom of the deep ocean. In Strata (2024), the artist explores material verity that is beyond immediate human perception and cultural conception, excavating and unveiling the depth of pigmentation unseen by a naked eye.

In an homage to Raymond Roussel, the French poet who has inspired the artist during his formative years and alongside his prolonged pataphysical elucidation of the world through poetic, extra-scientific reveries and introspections (the artist named his studio after Roussel’s novel Locus Solus), Yunchul Kim has created a living sculpture, inventing a new substance granulated from minerals that can only be viewed by custom-designed lenses subtly integrated into hexagonal glass containers. Stony liquids gush from small jets inside the translucent vessel, arising upward as if longing for and embracing solar gravity, the source of all life. Transmuting and transforming the unstable into the potential, the boiling liquid culminates in the co-arousal and co-ascension of the organic and the artificial, incinerating all that are incommensurable and contradictory of the grime of the earth into the Dust of the Sun (La Poussiere de Soleils III, 2022).

If Studio Locus Solus is the hermitage where Yunchul Kim and his assistants exercise their arcana of metal, stone and vegetation, Remnant Vitrine (2024) opens a window unto the sorcerous inside. Nested in an alcove in the mezzanine area, the Remnant Vitrine is a miniature laboratory that hosts a medley of the alchemist’s archive of things, objects not following the convention of classification, but alongside the exactitude of materiality such as measurements beyond the apparently visible or matter’s indeterminacy contingent on temperature, pressure, and the elasticity that’s yet to be unleashed from the potentiality of the thing itself. The juxtaposition and infiltration of varied categories defy the taxonomy of species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, etc. The chandelier of magic (Impulse) hanging above appears as a crystallization of wondrous and uncanny things, its hydraulically powered pumps resemble the respiratory connectedness of a living tree, pulsating and resonating, circulating liveliness throughout in an audio-visual spectacle both sublime and subliminal.

Yunchul Kim paints, too, but in an uncanny stunt of painterly action. Call it particle painting; it embodies the artist’s somatic gestures that transpire in a process analogous to conventional painting or photo developing. Yet, it is also akin to unveiling the vicissitude of geological eternity. The bodily movement unpacks the trajectories of nature in the epiphany of microscopic rudiments. Eluvial Horizon (2024) reaffirms Yunchul Kim’s materialistic symbolism as action carved in longevity, here the ephemeral has acquired its indisputable manifestation in physicality and temporality.

As much a visual artist as an accomplished musician, Yunchul Kim constructs his own devices to make music that is electronically acoustic and classically avant-garde. His turntable-styled instrument C-Ray is a chemical reactor turned synthesizer which amplifies the seawater-generated electrical currents into audio signals. Sound is produced by a chemically infused “writing pencil,” inscribing onto an aluminum plate. It is a material imprint that materializes the inaudible.  

Yunchul Kim eschews the convenience of a metaphorical toolkit, defies the dictatorial sovereign of the Signifier. His pataphysical imperative demands a "matterphor" that is capable of agential autopoiesis, that impregnates and brings forth. His world is otherworldly in which only surrationalism can untie the never-ending knot of polarity in the mesmerizing image of Elliptical Dipole. The artist’s mystic granules thus stir up emotive flux in the concurrence of cosmology and mineralogy, of biology and geology; of monad and dialectics, of immanence and contradiction; and ultimately, of life and death in the co-rising of the ascending flare of eternal return, in the atomic vortex that swallows humans and everything else, Yunchul Kim finds his own respite and solace.

艺术家/Artist

金允哲曾获得多个国际奖项，包括2016年欧洲核子研究中心（CERN）的碰撞国际大奖、林茨电子艺术大奖（Ars Electronica）和 VIDA 15.0 三等奖等。其作品也曾在世界多地展出，包括第59届威尼斯双年展韩国馆（意大利）、巴塞罗那当代文化中心（CCCB，西班牙）、FACT利物浦（英国）、林茨电子艺术中心（奥地利）、法兰克福艺术协会（德国）和国际新媒体艺术三年展（中国）等。他曾担任韩国高等研究院（KIAS）跨学科研究项目“物质现实”（Mattereality）研究组的首席研究员。此外，他还是艺术与科学项目组“流体天空”（Fluid Skies）以及奥地利维也纳应用艺术大学艺术与科学系的“液体物质”（Liquid Things）艺术研究项目的团队成员。

Yunchul Kim is an artist and electroacoustic music composer. Asking fundamental questions about “material” and “materiality”, he has demonstrated the possibilities of imagination and the creation of a reality beyond the realm of human experience, paying attention to its potential tendencies. His work embodies the material world imagined by the artist and is a story of a dimension before humans formed cultures or were defined by language. His works, in which humans, non-humans, machines, materials, and substances are considered equal, exist as active matter (transmattering) as the subject of events.

策展人/Curator

Zhang Ga is a media art curator. He was curator of three editions of Media Art Triennial (National Art Museum of China, 2008-2014). His recent curatorial projects include Chaosmosis: A WANG Yuyang Exhibition (Shenzhen Art Museum, 2024), Motion Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters, 2023), Topologies of the Real (MoCAUP, 2023), The 6th Guangzhou Triennial (co-curator, GDMOA, 2018), and Datumsoria: The Return of the Real (ZKM, 2017). His publications include edited books and essays. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Central Academy of Fine Arts.  Since 2015, he directs Chronus Art Center in Shanghai.