ENGRAM
Park Hyun Soo
The Side of Time
Things and words are absorbed deep in time. Memories are dissolved while traces remain in space.
Park Chanoo mentioned the depth of time laden in stone in his statement for his 2015 work Stone.
Does time have depth? The objects he adopts in this work are space, bookshelves, racks, and an encyclopedia. His scenes are filled with blurred images of things and letters in a vivid frame. The texts and images in the encyclopedia
overlap while things filled in or empty spaces are documented in a location between existence and non-existence. The
page chosen by the artist is rearranged in a space at this point in time, irrespective of the order of time. Time is
reconstructed between overlapped images including books and bookshelves, racks for things, and encyclopedias in
which everything in the world is couched in blurred terms. The artist looks at everything as he fills and empties while
facing meaning and vanished memories and their relationship.
The overlapped images he brings together in a scene do not fit the meaning of a record. They are more akin to
"traces" left behind than "records" that one leaves with a positive connotation. He intended the subject of his action to
be left rather than to leave. Did he intend to deconstruct the remembered time between events? Did he want to
confirm what can be left behind after deconstruction? Was it not a reckless attempt to preserve things that will
eventually disappear as a space for eternal time or as time to exist anywhere? In this exhibition, encyclopedias and
bookshelves act as clues to temporal relations as a symbol of his age-old memories. Concerns move to bookshelves,
racks, and spaces in which another's time has amassed. The other's time overlaps with his time here.
His memories kept in encyclopedias and bookshelves reflect his consciousness of death that he faced at the age of 39.
He erased his traces and emptied the bookshelves at that time. The artist stated that books contain his ideas, mind,
and lingering attachments.
"The work Bookshelf began from my bookshelf. I created a picture by overlapping images such as my bookshelf
packed with books before I got sick, my bookshelf after I had emptied it before I underwent an operation, and my
bookshelf when it was again filled with new books. It is said that books reflect one's thoughts and values. This work was intended to represent the previous version of me, me who emptied everything, and the present me in a painting.
(Excerpts from the artist statement for Bookshelf)
His previous work Stone comes to mind here. The round stones submerged under water and the water's surface
passing above them. Water appears as a shadow of transparent light that enwraps the stones while time is
documented as silence between them. Descending memories settle down in the air like bodiless specters, gradually
emitting light. Another place where traces settle and a space where multilayered memories, floating meanings,
uncaptured words, and unspoken words are held are required. When captured traces engender some fracture due to a memory's resistance, a sensitive, clandestine space crammed with ambiguity is created. Spaces for such split memories
become halted time. That which disappears is dimly projected by the side of that time.
Deferred Memories, Separate Traces
As such, "engrams" are the results of his deconstructing and scattering of time in his own frame.
When time submerged under memories rises to a surface that is no longer unspoken, this becomes a means to open an empty future. Maurice Merleau-Ponty added in his article on temporality that "Looking out is actually looking back - the future is a projection of the past. Similarly, all looking back is a reversed looking out." What he meant is that
time is, after all, thought and what develops and constructs time is consciousness.
Park Chanoo makes a foray into relating his art to time which is open and moving beyond his position, pushing him
into a future that has already arrived. Such processes are condensed in his scenes. The point at which his attempt to
compress traces that have been left in time that has already arrived can be found in his account for his work of
encyclopedias: an overlapped image becomes blurred and empty if more accounts are given to headwords. The more records of light that pile up, the more they become blurred. Some tenuous weight whose existence is unlikely to be
sustained is left behind as a trace. Time is evidenced by unsubstantial, transparent images. Each thing overlapping one another creates an optical illusion in which they are distanced from the front, slowly moving to the back of the scene. Time is captured in a scene that is at a standstill.
He documents the moment of being incorporated with lost time in a place where he goes beyond himself and repeats
connecting and disconnecting such events and assembling changing parts. Did he define the space of circulation that
extends by itself through this process as the depth of time? Can we continue to make guesses about the things left
behind that he has continued to represent through Merleau-Ponty's essay?
"There can be time only if it is not completely deployed, provided that past, present, and future do not all three have
their being in the same sense. It is of the essence of time to be in a process of self-production, and not to be; never,
that is, to be completely constituted. Constituted time, the series of possible relations in terms of before and after, is
not time itself, but the ultimate recording of time, the result of its passage, which objective thinking always
presupposes yet never manages to fasten onto. It is spatial.“
In the end, his work leaves behind records of blanks between filling and emptying, Encyclopedias, bookshelves, and
spaces we encounter are signs and evidence that display the rhythms of such blank spaces. We can remember the
meaning of silence if we can view the bookshelves of time that are remembered as meanings. His stone and water
works, his encyclopedia, bookshelf, and space works, and his memories reveal the time of blanks and a position for
silent language in a piecemeal way.