Sophia Powers
Figure 1 (right), Figure 2 (left)
2002: Seoul, South Korea. Inside a gallery the multi-media artist Oh Inhwan constructed a makeshift laundromat with posted entry restrictions for “adult Korean males” only.
[1] (Figures 1 and 2). The further condition for access was that when someone entered the space, he would remove any item(s) of clothing he wished to, and allow the artist to wash, dry, iron, and photograph them before they were returned to their owner. Gallery viewers could not see into the small room that served as the laundromat, and the only evidence of what took place within were the photographs of the freshly washed clothes.
Figure 3
These photographs (Figure 3), which were later printed and re-exhibited as a “performance document,” of the work My Beautiful Laundromat Sarubia allude to the spectrum of relations that viewers can only imagine occurring between the artist and the participant. Some men took off very little clothing. One image, for instance, shows a simple pair of black socks. Other men took off nearly all of their clothing in the artist’s presence, including their underwear. These participants would then remain in their elected state of undress for the duration of the wash/dry cycle before their cloths were photographed and then returned to them. What happened inside the closed box of the “Laundromat?” What did the artist and subject talk about? Did they talk? What else might have happened? For those on the outside it is nearly impossible not to wonder. Although there was no explicit acknowledgement of the artist’s unusual status as an openly gay male in early 21st century Korean society, the homosexual undertones of the project are undeniable.
Many aspects of Korean society may appear to Western observers as sexually conservative in the extreme. At the time of Oh’s early projects in Korea, homosexuality was often understood as both a disease and a sin, and as scholars have noted, homosexual behavior was often viewed with fear and disgust.[2] Such attitudes have been linked with the culture’s strong foundations in Confucian philosophy, which foregrounds normative family relations above all else.[3] Rather than specifically prohibit homosexual behavior, however, Korean society has historically chosen to turn a blind eye, and impose a more subtle form of moral censorship through silence.
Although Oh’s work is undoubtedly concerned with expressing his queer identity, his approach is more subtle than many of his Western counterparts in keeping with Korea’s traditional treatment of homosexuality. Indeed, much of Oh’s practice seeks to illustrate how the subjectivity of gay individuals is inextricable from the fabric of everyday life. There is nothing radically at odds about their participation in broader society. Yet this relatively non-confrontational stance offers a stark contrast to many of the art practices aligned with the identity politics movement that began in the early 1990’s when Oh started to work as an artist in New York. Rather than advocate for queer rights through outspoken public address, his practice engages viewers on a fundamentally private level, leveraging the affect of intimacy to forge a connection between artist, participants, and viewers.
This essay elucidates this approach through a close formal, contextual, and historical reading of a selection of Oh Inhwan’s early works. I argue that the artist’s practice advocates a space of expression and acceptance of gay identity through the unique formal strategy of creating undeniably personal “portraits” of people and their relationships through everyday objects that are in themselves infinitely replicable. This approach demonstrates that there is a common denominator among even the most unique and intimate of bonds, and allows the artist to explore and express his contentious queer identity according to a delicate cultural precedent of non-confrontation.
Figure 4
The first work of Oh Inhwan to explicitly address his sexuality was made not in Korea, but in New York where he came to study art in the early1990s. Personal Ads (Figure 4) were indeed real messages that Oh paid to be printed in the personals section of The Village Voice, each addressed to imminent artists that he did not personally know. In the October 22, 1996 edition, for instance, Oh’s message reads:
GKM ARTIST Seeking the real
RONI HORN
This is for you, Please check out
My latest inspiration at work.
POB 32550, Jamaica, NY 11432
The other four artists addressed were Nam June Paik, Haim Steinback, Robert Grover, and Cindy Sherman. As the artist explained, he was not interested in responses from only the famous artists known by each name, he would have welcomed anyone who responded to the ad and felt themselves to be “the real” individual Oh sought. No one did, in fact, respond, but this was hardly the point.
These ads show the bourgeoning of Oh’s unique approach to queer identity as something that can be expressed quietly—slipped into existing social frameworks rather than requiring a wholly new forum or vocabulary. This identity, which Oh claimed publically for the first time, was signaled only by the single letter “G,” which according to the convention of the personal adds, is short for “Gay.” Hence, GKM– “Gay Korean Male” is how his messages began.
Completed in 1996, Oh’s work was conceived in an art world caught in the thrall of a cresting infatuation with identity politics, and the fraught inclusion of artists from minority groups into the mainstream. Partly in response to the infamous 1984 Primitivism exhibition at MoMA, three New York City museums collaborated on The Decade Show, in 1990, featuring the work of 94 artists who each addressed the phenomenon of exclusion in relation to their own exhibition opportunities and the art world at large. Among the most powerful of the show’s works was James Luna’s Artifact Piece, a performance installation in which the artist laid in a vitrine placed in the museum covered only by a loincloth with museum labels explaining the origin of different scars and marks on his body. Through this uncanny enactment the native American artist asserted the subjectivity of the anthropological “other” through his own artistic authorship. The piece also unsettled the assumption that such subjects were always already relegated to an a-historical register. Luna confronted the audience with the bodily evidence of his contemporary and quotidian survival.
The true watershed moment for identity politics in mainstream American art was the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Critics heralded the show as a major transition from the market-oriented spectacularism of the ‘80s to the contentious socio-political context-driven practices that were asserting themselves in the early years of the ‘90s. The first artwork viewers encountered beyond the museum entrance, for instance, was Pat Ward William’s photomural of five young black men with set steely gazes covered in graffiti which read “What you lookn at.” As New York Time’s art critic Roberta Smith commented: “confrontation fills the air.”[4]
Oh’s work, by contrast, evades confrontation, though its focus on queer subjectivity would have been well suited to the biennale in other respects. (Queer) sexuality is always half hidden in his oeuvre—evident only to the especially curious or the initiated. Perhaps Oh’s most well-known work: “Where He Meets Him” (Figure 5) illustrates this best. This piece features the names of gay bars and clubs written with incense powder which is slowly burnt over the course of the exhibition. First shown in 2001, the piece has since been redone in a number of international venues where the artist has replaced the original nightspot names with their local equivalents. To uninitiated viewers, however, the names are hardly legible, and their significance is utterly obscured. Hence the piece appears essentially abstract to straight viewers or out-of-towners.
Figure 5
Yet even to the uninitiated, the medium of burning incense works on multiple registers. It is a classic accessory to Buddhist worship, and hence evokes traditional religious practice to viewers familiar with East Asian religious traditions. Indeed, the work enacts a potentially fraught elision between religious tradition and queer cruising culture. Even those who pick up on neither the Buddhist nor queer implications of the piece cannot escape an encounter unaffected, as the particles of the incense enter the viewers’ bodies in the form of scent without their consent.
Oh’s work was not alone within the landscape of the 90s art world in turning away from a confrontational approach to issues of identity politics. Others such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an artist Oh always admired, had shifted away from an explicitly politicized voice in favor of a more open and personal mode of expression.[5] Yet in Oh’s case the approach was not simply the exploration of an art-world trend, but rather a strategy of complex socio-historical significance for the artist as a gay man of Korean origin. Homosexuality in Korea has typically been treated with delicate aversion, and rather than explicitly outlaw homosexual behavior, Korean culture most often more or less ignored it. As the long-time Seoul-based journalist Daniel Tudor writes:
“The attitude of intolerance in the modern era did not generally take the form of active hostility, for homosexual acts were not banned by law, and there was no serious problem of anti-gay violence as in many Western countries. It was more the case that twentieth-century Korean society chose to pretend that homosexuality did not exist and only reacted against it—primarily through ostracism—when faced with people who wished to express their same-sex preference openly.”[6]
This attitude of denial is indexed in the fact that historical records indicating same-sex relations are nearly non-existent, though a few notable exceptions stand out. Poetry from the Silla Dynasty (57 BCE – 935 ACE) describes a mysterious group of elite military men called hwarang, or flower boys, who dressed in makeup and female clothing and were celebrated for their feminine charms. While there is no direct evidence for their connection with homosexual behavior, numerous scholars have suggested that various verses such as Song of Yearning for the Flower Boy Taemara, “have been traditionally seen as illustrating a hwarang penchant for sexual intercourse with same-sex partners.”[7] There is evidence that King Kongmin of the Koryo Dynasty kept a coterie of jajewi (chajewi), or attractive male lovers following the death of his wife.[8] For the duration of the Choson dynasty there is only one official reference to homosexuality, and that is to the daughter of King Sejong who was thought to have had homosexual relations with her maidservants. For this indiscretion the king was advised to disown her. There is some evidence that homosexual relations occurred among members of the lower classes, but by and large the issue was simply ignored.[9] This relative silence is all the more surprising considering the way homosexuality was dealt with in China and Japan, both of which had developed historical literary traditions that address romantic love between men.[10] Such references persist despite the fact that both cultures were also guided by Confucian orthodoxy. The historian and cultural scholar Michael Pettid has characterized this approach as one that strictly delineates the public from private sphere, relegating sexuality—including deviant sexuality—to the latter category.[11] As he reflected historically:
“Perhaps contributing to the propensity to ‘look the other way’ in the case of same-sex sexual relations in Choson was the Confucian view of sexual matters as being a part of the private sphere. Episodes concerning sex were not part of the public discourse, and Confucian ethics highly discouraged bringing matters concerning sexual practices into the open.”[12]
Oh Inhwan’s practice, however, insists on bringing sexual identity into the public sphere, albeit without directly confronting the status quo. He may be understood as activating a space of what Lauren Berlant has coined as the “intimate public sphere” in her work on sentimentality and “woman’s culture” in the American context.[13] She describes the way “[s]entimentalists strive to save the political from politics,”[14] illuminating the strategies by which the female subjects of her study work to address political questions through personal rather than explicitly political realms of action and expression.
Oh’s unique strategy of forging an “intimate public sphere” relies on a formal approach to art-making which demonstrates difference and individuality within paradigms of reproduction and mass-producibility. Let us consider how My Beautiful Laundromat Sarubia, introduced at the beginning of this essay, can illustrate this point. The series of performance document photographs illustrate one of the most consistent and unique aspects of Oh’s work: its ability to highlight the paradox of personal individuality through the presentation of standard and ordinary things. The clothing in the photographs is nearly homogenous. Jeans are common, as are conservative dress shirts, usually plain, occasionally checkered. The color pallet is overwhelmingly dominated by black, white, blue and grey with the exception of a few red items (socks and a baseball cap), a pair of green army fatigues (shirt and pants), two colorful shirts (one mustard colored and the other sporting red and pink flowers), and a pair of tight violet underwear. This chromatic monotony is highlighted by the light blue background the artist selected upon which to photograph the freshly laundered clothes.
While many of the individual clothing items appear nearly indistinguishable, each photographic ensemble offers a unique “portrait” of its owner. Even the photographs that contain only a single item, the pair of jeans, for instance, rather uncannily evoke the individual body of their wearer as it is impossible not to interpret their selection as a conscious choice, however quotidian.
Figure 6
Interpolating the individual through markers of ubiquity was also the aim of two projects by Oh that each focused on locating strangers who bore statistically common Korean names. The first, Name Project: Looking for You in Busan (Figure 6) took place within the context of the 2006 Busan Biennale. For this project, Oh repeatedly paged individuals with the twenty most popular names in Korea over a public speaker, asking them to gather at a specific meeting point within the exhibition hall where he had printed each name neatly on the wall. Once there, he explained that the announcement was part of an art project. Those who agreed to participate would be photographed and asked to add their signature on top of the characters of their name printed on the wall (Figure 7). By the end of the exhibition, ten of the twenty names had been “claimed,” leaving viewers to be confronted by a palimpsest of individuality-imprinted statistical anonymity.
Figure 7
The Name Project was continued in another iteration on the streets of Seoul in 2009. (Figure 8) For this version, the search was conducted by way of a moving truck, the body of which was illuminated with an advertisement requesting people bearing the ten most common names in Korea to “please visit the ticket office at Artsonje Center,” and listed the phone number of the art space. The truck made its rounds through the city after nightfall, and during the day remained parked outside the gallery.
Figure 8
Although neither iteration of Oh’s Name Project suggests queer subject matter of any kind, the artist relates the mode of anonymity expressed in the works to the anonymity experienced by closeted individuals in a conservative social environment like Korea. As he explained in an interview:
“There are two kinds of anonymity, i.e., one deriving from the cultural and social exclusion or oppression, and the other resulting from the occurrence of over-circulation or over-generalization. That is, the anonymity of the Other derives from its oppression, and that of people in general results from generalization. As is often the case, we are familiar with the anonymity of the Other but are lacking in the awareness of the anonymity of people in general.”[15]
Hence, even projects devoid of expressly queer content consciously reflect a worldview molded by the unique experience of struggling for recognition as a gay man in a conservative society.
Figure 9
Oh’s artwork often attests to one of his primary modes of engaging with this challenging environment: friendship. Friendship is a central theme in his practice. As he once said in reflecting upon the impact of Felix Gonzales-Torres’ work: “He always talks about ‘love,’ and I usually take up ‘friendship.’ In that respect, I envy him.”[16] Among Oh’s strongest projects is one that takes friendship as its explicit theme and once again succeeds in highlighting individuality through the presentation of standardized items. Titled Things of Friendship, (Figure 9) this work documents all of the objects that Oh Inhwan has in common with particular friends. With their permission, the artist entered their home, combed through their possessions, and collected the objects which he also possessed. He then assembled two still lifes in mirror image composed of all the objects common to both homes, photographed them on site, and then installed the actual items in the same composition within the gallery beneath the picture that shows them in their two respective original locations (Figure 10).
Figure 10
By necessity, all the featured items are mass-produced. Books, containers of food, and cleaning products are among the most prevalent items. And yet, just as the non-descript items of clothing featured in My Beautiful Laundromat Sarubia, they are transformed into intimate portraits—not this time of their owner, but of a quotidian yet intimate connection shared between two friends. Hence, Oh adopts a parallel strategy to the one he deploys in presenting queer subjectivity with a sensitive cultural consciousness: “extraordinary” relationships of intimacy can be conveyed through the most “ordinary” of things.
Oh Inhwan is hardly the first artist to deploy seriality as a strategy for communicating affect. Indeed, art historian Eve Meltzer’s 2013 book Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn specifically undertakes an investigation of the necessarily affective underbelly of art forms often classified under the heading of “structural” and “conceptual.” Her analysis focuses on Robert Morris, Mary Kelly, and the artists featured in the pivotal 1970 MoMA exhibition Information, as well as the writing of Rosalind Kraus. Each artist in Meltzer’s account embodies the tension between an impersonal and fundamentally structural world order and the individual artist’s necessary resistance to it. Although Robert Morris called himself an “anti-humanist,” he famously wrote: “Everywhere the signified assaults and overwhelms the signifier”[17] Indeed, for Meltzer, the impetus for producing art that exemplifies “failed systems” is specifically “to generate affect, that non-sign that does not ‘signify,’ properly speaking, but rather render[s] visible different registers of a problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) [and] conjoin[s] these problems in a distinctive manner.”[18]
However, Meltzer’s prose tends to situate artists’ formal concerns and limitations as ultimately more fundamental than the affective significance they belie.[19] She writes: “Many and varied were the critical strategies that artists developed in order to find their way through, around, or beside the systemic prison structure in which they found themselves.”[20] The forms are thus understood as a “prison” rather than as a “vehicle,” or an indispensable means by which the affective content can be expressed. Oh’s work, in contrast, suggests the latter strategy. The formalism inherent to works like My Beautiful Laundromat Sarubia is a conscious strategy adopted by the artist to communicate an affective intimacy in a way that is inviting to the viewer, rather than confrontational. The relationships that Oh’s work privileges—both bonds of friendship as well as bonds of queer love, are thus delineated through the objects of everyday life.
[1] My Beautiful Laundromat Sarubia, Project Space Sarubia, Seoul, Korea.
[2] Young-Gwan Kim and Sook-Ja Hahn, “Homosexuality in Ancient and Modern Korea,” Culture, Health, & Sexuality, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan – Feb, 2006), 62.
[3] Historically, Korean society has been guided by the Sam-Kang-Oh-Ryun, or Three Fundamental and Five Moral Laws are as follows:
The king is the mainstay of the state (Kun-Yi-Shin-Kang)
The father is mainstay of the son (Bu-Yi-Ja-Kang)
The husband is the mainstay of the wife (Bu-Yi-Bu-Kang)
Between the father and son it requires chin (friendship)
Between the king and the courtier, eui (righteousness)
Between the husband and wife, pyul (deference)
Between old and young, saw (degree)
Between friends, shin (faith)
See: Ibid, 59.
[4] “At the Whitney, A Biennial with a Social Conscious,” New York Times, accessed August 31, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/05/arts/at-the-whitney-a-biennial-with-a-social-conscience.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
[5] “Talking about changes in the art world in the early 1990s, the Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres noticed that there had been a shift away from the ‘sloganeering’ art that appropriated the media, exemplified by the work of Barbra Kruger, toward a more personal voice.” Ernst Van Alphen, “Affective Operations of Art and Literature,” RES 53/54 Spring/Autumn (2008): 21.
[6] Daniel Tudor, Korea: the Impossible Country (North Clarendon, VA: Tuttle Publishing, 2012), 291.
[7] Kim Young-gwan and Hahn Sook-ja, “Homosexuality in Ancient and Modern Korea,” Culture, Health, & Sexuality, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan – Feb, 2006): 61.
[8] There is even a record of five of their names: Hong Yun, Han An, Kwong Chin, Hong Kwan, and No Son. Ibid, 61.
[9] As Tudor suggests “We can probably infer that the scarcity of such tales (relating to homosexuality) in official records is more a result of the aversion and taboo that had by then developed than an indication of the absence of homosexual practices.” (Tudor, Korea: The Impossible Country, 292).
[10] As Rutt describes the historical background of homosexuality in Korea: “It is strikingly different from the luxurious literary and theatrical homosexual tradition in China, and even more so from the glamorized and pseudo-chivalrous homosexual code of late mediaeval Japan, with its manuals and novelettes.” (Richard Rutt, “The Flower Boys of Silla (Hwarang),” Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38, (1961): 36.
[11] “The most common approach in the Korean gay community is that of using a public space-private space model.” (Ibid, 180.)
[12] Michael J. Pettid, “Cyberspace and a Space for Gays in South Korea,” Tangherlini, Timothy, and Yea, Sally, ed. Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography, University of Hawai’i Press: 2008: 61 – 86.
[13] Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
[15] Sunjung Kim, ed., Inhwan Oh, (Seoul: SAMUSO: Space for Contemporary Art, 2009), 141.
[17] Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66.
[19] “This is a dream of a world: a representation of what is before that and, at once, within which we find ourselves. And it is a dream that for nearly fifty years now has been normative and binding for us.” Ibid, 37.
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Cho, John (Song Pae). The Wedding Banquet Revisited: ‘Contract Marriages’ between Korean Gays and Lesbians. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, (Spring 2009), pp. 401 – 422.
Kim, Sunjung, ed. Inhwan Oh, Seoul: SAMUSO: Space for Contemporary Art, 2009.
Kim, Young-Gwan and Hahn, Sook-Ja. “Homosexuality in Ancient and Modern Korea.” Culture, Health, & Sexuality, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan – Feb, 2006): 59 – 65.
Meltzer, Eve. Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Pettid, Michael J. “Cyberspace and a Space for Gays in South Korea.” Tangherlini, Timothy, and Yea, Sally, ed. Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography. Univerity of Hawai’I Press: 2008.
Rutt, Richard. “The Flower Boys of Silla (Hwarang).” Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38, (1961): 1-66.
Tudor, Daniel. Korea: the Impossible Country. North Clarendon, VA: Tuttle Publishing, 2012.
Van Alphen, Ernst. “Affective Operations of Art and Literature,” RES 53/54 Spring/Autumn (2008): 20 – 30.
Sophia Powers completed a double major in Art History and Anthropology at Stanford University, focusing on the emerging contemporary art worlds of China and India. She went on to receive an M.A. from the Anthropology Department at Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on the impact of East Asian aesthetics in the Bengal Art School supervised by Partha Chatterjee. Sophia received her PhD from the Art History Department at UCLA under the supervision of Saloni Mathur. Her major field of study was South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, and her minor subject was East Asian Painting, which she studied under the supervision of Korean art specialist Burglind Jungmann. Her dissertation “Intimate Durations: Re-imagining Contemporary Indian Photography” considered the relational photographic practice of three contemporary Delhi-based photographers: Sheba Chhachhi, Dayanita Singh, and Gauri Gill. Sophia is currently in the process of developing this project into her first book. Before joining the faculty at University of Auckland, Sophia held a post-doctoral position in the Art History Department at Washington University in St. Louis.