The Profile of an Archaeologist Who Does Not Exhaust Contradiction (2024)

Hyunju Kim (Independent Curator)

Translated from the original Korean

Once the sun, in its sanctioned pose, fully occupies the sky,
it snatches up this excavation site and builds its own colony.¹

A dense, close-grained maneuvering—like an archaeologist’s. He does not live by congealing into a single mass; rather, he “divides the earth as if he had wrapped measuring tape around it on all sides and cut it with a knife,”² and in this way carries out his duty in Vertical, Horizontal, and Height (2024). At a glance one might even wonder if he is a painter; yet whether or not that matters may be beside the point—he did, after all, begin from sculpture. A visible trace of that origin can be found, for instance, in Buried Dog (2024).

To be honest, by temperament I do not particularly like a word such as Oxymoron (형용모순). It feels like a big tent, somehow. When I first saw the exhibition, I looked around with the sense that it was no more than a rhetorical flourish; but after time had passed and I revisited the works in memory, I came to agree with the statement that one “experiences the collision of opposing concepts and ultimately finds oneself placed at the point of conflict and boundary.”³ Eunu Lee’s notes—composed of sentences so abstract that one wonders whether they truly help one understand the exhibition on the spot—throw forth a negation of painting, sculpture, and photography as genre categories; a negation of color, the very basis of plastic form; skepticism toward completion and meaning; and questions concerning life and death. If one asks whether this exhibition is the answer to those negations, doubts, and questions, I cannot easily say that everything is neatly or economically brought to a point. But what if we posit him as an archaeologist who builds his colony upon an excavation site? I take this hypothesis as a clue for understanding him.

In addition, his emphasis on time—seen in an interview video—was marked in my mind like a single point. From there I recalled a poet who has since passed away: Huh Soo-kyung, who was not only a poet but also an archaeologist, having studied Ancient Near Eastern archaeology in Münster, Germany. I will continue the passage that follows the line “divides the earth as if he had wrapped measuring tape around it on all sides and cut it with a knife”:

(This technique, devised for the sake of recording, is adorable. It assigns, with uncanny precision, numerical coordinates of latitude and longitude to the last place where you were on this earth; and take a look at the small excavation-site map inside the grid I am recording at this moment. If I mark a point within it, that point becomes your final place upon the earth.)⁴

Through the concrete act of excavation—calling up the old—time bends; and through questions that cast curiosity toward the future, point connects to point, hurling unfinished tasks forward into what is to come. He, I, we: merely the present point, and the past point being excavated, and the point that the future will excavate. Not grand, yet not simple either, we live today.

Now let us look at the points he marks, and the lines he draws.

Eunu Lee’s Request from the Future (2024) is an interview video featuring twelve third- and fourth-grade students from Yongam Elementary School in Cheongju. The video is projected across an entire wall of a large exhibition hall; and if one senses not only the projection surface but also the floor plane onto which the image reflects at the same scale, the weight this work carries within Oxymoron (형용모순) is considerable. The questions Eunu Lee posed are as follows: What should adults do for the future society? How would you like adults to view children? And lastly, how will you live for your own future? To these three questions the students respond in their own ways. Their answers sometimes align with what one might reasonably expect, and sometimes diverge from expectation in subtle ways; yet more striking than the content of what is said are the frequent moments of silence, and the moments when a gaze slips away from the interviewer. Thinking of those children who, over the course of two weeks, voluntarily came to the art studio one by one and sat before the camera at the artist’s request for collaboration—it is hard not to find them simply endearing. What did they think along the way, walking to this place? What kind of anticipation did they hold, knowing that I—my answer—would become an artwork? And did they then come to see the exhibition? While such small questions arise, I begin to excavate the sound of a clock that, for a moment, is obscured by the video’s form and content. The ticking sound was inserted at a playback speed slower than a normal second hand. As the video and clock sound correspond, one can hazard his intention: must the present tense of asking and answering (future) tasks necessarily synchronize past–present–future according to the logic of linear time? No. Recovery—no, higher-order recovery—cannot be subdued by formal logic. Thus Request from the Future does not stop at a mere listing of children’s purity; it demands, instead, recognition that logical contradiction exists within reality, and it requires an effort, “nevertheless,” not to exhaust real antagonisms. Light, Not Light (2024)—an installation of four lighting fixtures dropped down near the floor—also takes its place in the space as if it holds its own share, yet it does so as function-not-function.

Although we have stepped briskly into Request from the Future, looking back I arrive at a retrospective judgment: Fraktal No. 2 (2024), positioned at the entrance to the exhibition, functioned as a signpost for Oxymoron. At the bifurcated entry point, between the future and the two directions—past and present—within grammatical tense, it makes one measure the ground Eunu Lee has cut. Fraktal No. 2 and Vertical, Horizontal, and Height adopt the same method in terms of production technique. The two works, which appear labor-intensive, were produced through mutually opposing impulses: building up layers using acrylic and modeling paste, and then carving them away. To ask him how much time he painstakingly invested in the process would be empty. Material forms strata; yet as with strata, the resulting accumulation necessarily entails continuous weathering and erosion. A kindly index of this lies in the carved pigment scattered beneath Vertical, Horizontal, and Height. Outwardly it is planar; yet if one follows the logic of subtraction to its end, what one reaches is something that is neither painting nor sculpture. At this point one thought arises: he seems to be extremely averse to abstraction as singularity. The logic he takes appears closer to a logic of modality than to formal logic. Accordingly, rather than seeking the necessity of the true and the truth, one finds in him a persistent attempt to receive and hold contradiction and antagonism. Sound (2024), placed between the two works and inspired by Pipilotti Rist, loosens the exhibition like a breathing hole. Sound collected from the city is embedded in PVC piping and, in his words, realized as something close to a “prank”—a bonus track that becomes effective only for those who discover it, like a stinger in film.

Earlier I posited him, in terms of attitude, as an archaeologist; and Rüdesheim and Sky—works made in 2019 and restored in 2024—reveal, in their realization, the aspect of an actual restorer as well. He says that during the pandemic, when his avenues of livelihood were blocked, he would often go out to take photographs.⁵ These two works may look close to the reprocessing of photography, yet the emphasis lies less on the reprocessing of “photographs” than on the “reprocessing” of photography. Photographs were chosen out of necessity, but what preceded that choice was his desire to divide the visible world and look into the world behind the image. The works are divided into one hundred pieces—yet they could be fifty, or two hundred. The one hundred images are connected left–right and up–down, conveying, as representational images, a landscape from the small German town of Rüdesheim, as well as scenes of trees and sky; but this surface-level conveyance of an image thus assembled is not the aim of the work. Here two (or more) approaches are at work: first, the structure by which, in photography, “as RGB colors pile up, all colors are juxtaposed and an image is formed”; and second, the premise that “when we look closely at the image we see on the surface, we find them tangled together, clinging to one another.”⁶ When viewed up close, the image is dissolved by chemical agents and the forms become abstracted; yet the abstraction/figuration binary is not important. His way of not readily totalizing the back-and-forth between figuration and abstraction is precisely why I speak of him by likening him to the excavatory attitude of an archaeologist.

In August, AD 2002, at six in the morning, with a shovel, I cut the ground into a square. Around 2000 BC: pottery fragments emerge, pig bones, goat bones; a dog made of clay appears; a wheel appears; and finally a compacted floor remains, with only one corner left. The excavation is halted and cleaning begins. How much floor remains—two meters by one meter? Height is measured, orientation is measured; the floor is drawn onto graph paper. The two-by-one-meter floor of around 2000 BC: after taking a photograph, the floor is dug again with a shovel.⁷

Cutting the square of ground, measuring height, measuring orientation, drawing it onto graph paper, marking a point—he silently carries out the task of making present, as if, “your final place upon the earth.”⁸

Eunu Lee spoke of the exhibition works in seemingly simple terms—this one prints and erases photographs, that one stacks and carves; yet a work that allows one to glimpse the meticulousness of the process by which he planfully realizes concepts would be The Painter (2024). The Painter edits fourteen video sources and loops them infinitely across nine monitors; within each screen, the divisions inside the frame, chronological and reverse-chronological orders, and even the temporal points of the action are all different. The methodology of differentiating and integrating an act of painting that was likely performed in one go is shared across the works of the exhibition as a whole—and it is precisely this approach that provides my grounds for saying that he does not live by forming himself into a single lump. His dense, close-grained maneuvering may be a resolve never to arrive at one great whole. The political philosophers’ remark on real antagonism—“no real object exhausts its identity through opposition with another object, because it possesses its own reality independent of that opposition”⁹—calls to mind Eunu Lee, who, within Oxymoron, acknowledges (real) antagonism as antagonism itself.

Addendum: Even as I place him in the position of an archaeologist constructing a colony upon an excavation site, I am cautious: does the word colony—or the real pain beyond the word—risk being imposed upon him? Yet because this subjection is grounded in the (art’s) potential virtuality of excavating and composing meaning from myself, I hope that such a positing will not be a grave discourtesy to him.

Footnotes

¹ Huh Soo-kyung, “Dawn Excavation,” in The Hour of Bronze, The Hour of Potatoes (청동의 시간 감자의 시간), Munhakgwa Jisungsa, 2005, p. 44.
² Ibid.
³ Quoted from the leaflet for Eunu Lee’s solo exhibition Oxymoron (형용모순) (Cheongju Art Studio, 2024).
⁴ Huh Soo-kyung, pp. 44–45.
⁵ Eunu Lee identifies 2014 as the point from which he began applying photography in earnest to his work. Rather than approaching photography as a technique, he states that, from the standpoint of a sculptor, he sought to approach the things that make up the world through the difference between “sculpture” and “plastic.” Quoted from a conversation with Eunu Lee on September 26, 2024.
⁶ The two operative approaches are quoted from a conversation with Eunu Lee on September 26, 2024.
⁷ Huh Soo-kyung, “Time Hill,” in The Hour of Bronze, The Hour of Potatoes, Munhakgwa Jisungsa, 2005, p. 70.
⁸ Huh Soo-kyung, p. 45.
⁹ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, trans. Seung-won Lee (Korean ed.), Humanitas, 2013, pp. 223–224.