Jaehun Park: Real-time Limbo

For Jaehun Park, an artist based in Amsterdam, the present world is a real-time limbo, or perhaps purgatory. Purgatory, that middle space between heaven and hell according to certain religious world views, seethes with souls seeking tempering and purification by fire as a necessary step toward heaven. In one part of the world, a building collapses in a bombing, while half-way across the globe, 30 million subscribers to a YouTube consumer-review channel are abuzz at the launch of some new product. Capitalism, rapture, and despair come and go, all tangled up in this real-time purgatory.

Jaehun Park sees in capitalism elements that are analogous to religion. He connects scenes of bottomless human desire and catastrophes to hellscapes and post-apocalyptic landscapes. A digital sculptor, animator, and simulator, Park is the Creator here of a virtual world constructed using CGI. This world is devoid of humans. Only objects on which human desire is projected exist in it, objects imbued with the ideologies of humankind. These document the human world in their entanglement. The function of the objects in Park’s video work are inverted to reveal, in strange and bald fashion, human life in the absence of humans.

The video installation Event Horizon digitally recreates images from various places on earth that have been devastated by war and catastrophe. The most primal form of nature, rocks; the ruins of buildings in war-torn Syria and Palestine; the nuclear reactor at Fukushima; the particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; Confetti to celebrate a joyous occasion – through these five sequences, the work presents sites of actual tragedies as virtual locations. Through the use of innovative methods like photogrammetry and point clouds, these sites become territories of the imaginary that are as unpredictable as event horizons. The immense scale and showy images created by the latest technologies depict tragedies unfolding on the other side of the world.

Fancy capitalist objects merge with supernatural phenomena to present us with a hellish, desolate space. In the video Overheated Windmill, a windmill keeps turning, soundlessly, despite having caught fire. Windmills are a representative symbol of the Netherlands, a beautiful cultural heritage that hides their original function and history as one of the foundations upon which the construction of colonies in other parts of the world by the Dutch rested in the country’s Age of Discovery. Park makes an analogy between windmills with their obscured historical contexts and overheated capitalism. In Ritual for the Night, we see a suspended censer, possibly a Catholic thurible, carpets from the Middle East, medical hoses, broadcast cables, and metal chains. A BBC report of an Israeli attack on Palestine is projected onto the surface of the shiny censer. A Syrian friend of the artist meets his brother, who he had not seen for ten years due to the war, while playing the war game Battlegrounds. The two brothers, unable to communicate over phone or the internet without fear of being censored and thus having this sole means of connection, are victims of war and beneficiaries of a war game.

Human greed and imagination have turned reality into something that surpasses purgatory. Viruses, excessive speculations in real estate, the consumption of luxury goods, accidents, disasters, fatalities arrive day after day, in an unceasing tidal wave. News conveying these stories are to some hellish, and to others heavenly. The planet, overrun by capitalism, is polluted, quantified, wasted, and discarded. Nature is wiped out, leaving only numerical real estate. Ugly desire and overheated capitalism package tragedy as comedy, screams of despair as shouts of elation. This is the capitalist purgatory in which the technologies of heaven and hell come and go in real-time.

Text by Sun Mi Lee, Curator, Alternative Space LOOP
Translated by Emily Yaewon Lee

Organized / presented by Alternative Space LOOP
Supported by Arts Council Korea
Sound design and composition: Ivo Bol
Sound mastering: Jeff Carey