지팡이와 삽_장지한

In Kim Woogyung’s work Silent Dance, there is a handle installed for the viewer. When someone visiting the exhibition turns the handle, various connected objects begin to move. A bean bag positioned at the viewer’s eye level transfers the motion to an elastic band hanging midway, and when the viewer’s strength reaches the propeller and steel ball on the floor, the objects seem to move as if trying to erase the origin of the force. While it is clear that this movement is enabled by the viewer turning the handle, from the elastic band’s point of view, it is the bean bag’s rotation that sets things in motion; likewise, the propeller could be seen as driven by the band’s elasticity. Just as the origin of the force matters, so does the interplay between the objects; and just as the viewer’s participation is essential, so too is the autonomous movement of the mechanism.

Even before the mechanical motion of Silent Dance, Kim Woogyung sought to reveal a certain tension through the dynamics between forces. For example, in her 2020 work Please step on the footplate using the stairs, the viewer physically exerts force by stepping on the footplate. However, this action does not trigger an autonomous interplay among objects but rather initiates a specific performative event. The viewer’s force moves the footplate, which transfers that energy through pulleys and strings arranged around a scaffold to a hammer that strikes the ground, breaking a long, slender piece of terracotta. The artist writes:

“When the viewer climbs the stairs and steps on the footplate, the hammer rises.
As the foot is lifted from the footplate, the hammer falls, and the long stretch of terracotta is pulled, segment by segment, and shattered.
The clay path, made over a long period of time, is instantly turned to dust through this playful act of labor with the feet.”

The artist writes that she created a path of earth using terracotta. Most importantly, the path—made “over a long period of time”—is dismantled by the viewer. During the exhibition, whenever the prepared terracotta was depleted, the artist continued replenishing it, constantly redrawing the vanishing path. What mattered to her was not creating a single terracotta form, but provoking a continuous chain of events. These events are predicated on the labor of shaping and laying the terracotta over time, and the artist wants that labor to disappear through the viewer’s “playful labor.” She does not wish for her studio labor to become a solid, lasting form; rather, she wants it to return to dust through the agency of the other. That is why, in the title itself, she makes a request: “Please step on the footplate using the stairs.” Of course, Kim Woogyung does not wish for the event of her labor being nullified by another’s to become a new sculptural image in itself. She does not ask the viewer to carry out some aesthetic of dismantling sculpture or enacting the death of the subject—she simply wants them to enjoy the play. The reason the mechanical device she designed resembles a pure game, moving through a complex network of relations, is to negate the artist’s labor without burdening the other.

In Kim Woogyung’s 2023 work A stream of water for the beloved, viewers are confronted with objects such as a hose, a water container, and a whistle—but without any guidance, it is not easy to decipher their symbolic meanings. Though I refer to these objects as symbols, the artist herself did not wish to clarify their meanings and instead placed a short piece of writing not within the installation, but elsewhere. Some may have simply observed the movement of the objects, while others might have interpreted them in light of the text. Here is the text transcribed:

“Terrified people raised their hands.
They begged to be saved.
An employee at one store poured a basin full of cold water over their pale face,
while the owner of the shop across the street kept blowing the whistle again and again.
In the narrow alleyway that had entered a vacuum, many voices cried out, louder than the whistles.
‘Get a hold of yourself!’
The night was blindingly white, and the day pitch black.”

The text describes the Itaewon tragedy that occurred in October 2022. The whistle mentioned in the writing appears in the installation as a physical object, and the basin is represented as an embroidered image on fabric. Once again, mechanical movement runs through both object and image. However, unlike her previous works, this movement is powered not by the viewer’s participation, but by a motor. A rocking chair placed against one wall begins to move, and a hose extending from the chair, meant to carry water, winds its way toward the image of the basin. The square piece of fabric embroidered with the basin stands as if to declare this is the destination, allowing light to pass through it, standing firmly like a signpost. While the movement clearly defines a point of departure and arrival, what actually travels the path is not water, but something else. Inside the long rubber hose is a blue lace, shaped to resemble water, and the slow motion of the rocking chair gives it a subtle rhythm.

The whistle, rotating beside the basin, moves unevenly—relying on the motion of a string connected to the motor. In the text, the artist imbues the whistle’s sound with someone’s desperate plea for help, but as part of the mechanical cycle, the whistle merely reveals the constant gap between the motor’s force and the object’s weight. In this light, Kim Woogyung’s objects point to a specific time and place, but do not attempt to portray that day directly. What is actually moving—or rather, gently trembling—are the string connected to the motor, the scaffold that supports the motor, and the light fixtures attached to that scaffold. That it is not water but blue lace that vibrates in place within the hose shows that the rhythm of the work has nothing to do with the pace of that day. And yet, the artist places a water container next to the image of the basin even though it is the blue lace that actually moves, in order to let the mechanical movement briefly carry our imagination back to that day. If there is the creaking motion of reality on one hand, and the imagined image of water filling the basin on the other, then perhaps what Kim Woogyung’s work ultimately traverses is that narrow gap between the real and the imagined.

She writes:
“I began creating purposeless forms in order to live.
I began preparing objects with the hope that they might save someone.
This is a diary mourning what happened in that narrow alley, and at the same time, a message for those who still choose to love.”

The artist refers to the objects she has prepared as “purposeless forms.” Yet these forms, though declared without purpose, were created with the hope of saving someone. Above all, they were made so that the artist herself could go on living. Faced with an event she could not ignore, she had to do something—anything—and so she prepared these objects. To call them purposeless is, above all, to say that these objects are directed toward the other. In order to erase any fixed purpose of the object, in order not to speak of that day too directly, the artist turns to a creaking motor and an image of a basin. She allows her “purpose” to dissolve into mechanical movement—so that what remains is only a “Silent Dance.” Just as the terracotta was shattered by another’s hand, she lets her own labor be undone, and mechanical motion drives that day’s memory away from fixed meanings and into the transient realm of imagination.

Kim Woogyung’s work Cane Shovel is, quite literally, an object that combines a cane and a shovel into one. Seeing this piece reminded me of Ahn Kyuchul’s 1993 work Oar / Shovel, in which a shovel and an oar are fused together. Regarding this work, Ahn once wrote the following:

“One side is related to earth, and the other to water.
One is used to settle, the other to depart.
By digging into the ground, building houses, driving stakes, and planting trees, one ties oneself to a place;
by rowing an oar, one is released from it.
What happens when these two objects, these two opposing pursuits, are bound together?”

Here, “earth” implies settlement, but for a sculptor, it may also signify the tactile world of material that meets the hand. Put simply, Ahn Kyuchul seems to use the oar to suggest a desire to flee from the sculptor’s life of shaping matter into form within space—a sentiment expressed through the union of two contrasting tools. Borrowing this line of thought, one might say that Kim Woogyung also uses the shovel as a symbol to express her own time spent shaping terracotta, the very moment of confronting material. But more significantly, she does not pair it with an oar, but with a cane—something that might become another’s leg. Her aim appears not to be escape from the site of sculpture, but a gesture toward the other. What happens when opposing pursuits are brought together? Or perhaps, it is precisely because one cannot turn away from the other, and because one must continue to make purposeless forms, that the shovel and cane must be joined together.