AUO translator

I find a sentence in the artist note “the mechanisms of these machines change the way people behave” as an appealing opinion on this day and age of people’s value and judgement ruled by media. Perhaps this well timed opinion is more persuasive in paper work (critique) than visual work.

This circling wooden machine on a stage not, perhaps because of its large appearance which is bigger than average human, only symbolically visualizes mechanism of machine in the industrial society but also shows the artist’s intensive labor. If I properly understood the about 4-minutes-long video recording the performance, the video seems to take actions of this enormous circling machine automatically producing paintings by dripping paints on numerous canvases and a couple of man and woman hanging the complete works on a drying rack. My first impression of this video was that it seems to satirizes and devaluate the American abstract expressionist paintings in the 1940s and 50s by showing a machinery easily copying countless abstract paintings that have abstract patterns.

However, the sentence in the artist note ““the mechanisms of these machines change the way people behave” seems to be the theme of this work. It wasn’t easy to visually understand the impact an operation of a machine can make on human life from this short 4-minute video. It is because the statement of the artist “the mechanism of these machines change the way people behave” is more appealing when a machine dominates philosophy and value of human, when the artist wanted to deliver the same statement by crosscutting the scenes of machine-run and man-run.

P.S. I think the scenes where abstract expressionist painting are produced by the circling machine – different paints are mechanically dripping on canvases – are arranged too shortly in the total running time of 4 minutes.

2018-03-13 17:17:08

AUO translator

I find Min Jihun’s work on the existing painting method fresh because he tries a whole different perspective on it.
I think it is the first to paint a non-mechanical painting using a probably self-invented painting machine, except printing methods for mass production like wall papers. However, I couldn’t help to ask if it should be seen as a performance or happening to question ‘painting’ that has been done for hundreds of years so far or to question a painting done by a machine can exist with the existing paintings done by traditional way of painting. Depending on circumstances, this can be a very important and heavy question because it faces a fundamental question of can painting exist away from its physicality?

2018-03-06 12:09:10