송아리 Ahree Song

Body That Makes Haste Slowly                                                                                                                                            

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Thump! Thump! Thump! I descend the stairs to the bunker. I hear the horn sound dying away. Automobiles jamming the road are left in dim after-image. The sunrays of August melting the asphalt is caught by the land. Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! I breathe in damp air that pushes into my nostrils. I keep going further and further down. I get swallowed up by the darkness around me, and some bluish waves tickle my eyes. I see underwater creatures radiating like transparent crystals. The deep sea is like midwinter even in midsummer. Light can hardly reach it where natural laws above water are effective no more. Time extends until no one knows how long a second is.

The sensory organs that open and close as if according to the law of inertia, undergo inevitable transformation under water. Embracing the shock as it is, I look around me to find weirdly twisted bodies emerging from time to time. Something wriggles inside a thin film that seems to wear darkness. It imitates the movement of the lungs, inflating and deflating irregularly. It still seems to have the same form one, five or ten seconds later, but closer inspection reveals that it does not, even for an instant. The living organisms that keep themselves alive through seemingly endless wriggling create unfamiliar rhythm. They have a biological clock of their own. I come to be synchronized with the movement despite myself.

Ahree Song’s solo exhibition, "Cold Green Base", unfolds the world of the deep sea at the center of Yeouido. As an artist who has been interested in the quest for the modification brought on by humans and other living beings, Ahree transforms the SeMA Bunker into a deep ocean setting to introduce unfamiliar creatures living there actively adapting themselves to the environment. Looking at them briefly, these living beings look like plants on land. But in reality, they are just virtual creations of the artist’s imagination.

Cold Green Animal installations scattered around the exhibition space are structures piled up like bricks by rolling rectangular ice blocks with tapes. Sometimes they are tinged with light green and sometimes distract light like a hologram. Some may think of them as seaweeds or corals, but no one can tell exactly what they are. While we know little about the deep-sea creatures, the survival strategies of these Cold Green Animal piles remain a mystery because, in the real deep sea setting, they would need to maintain their own form by bearing the massive water pressure. The ice blocks covered with tapes will eventually melt down, but the tapes will remain as they are, preserving the forms of the ice blocks fairly solidly. In the same way, these mysterious creatures slowly change their form according to the temperature around them while yet maintaining the same form in a certain sense. These artworks guide viewers to experience in a sensuous manner a unity within changes, that is, a particular element gives a certain creature its identity. The bodies of the creatures in this stage are not unchangeable; rather, they constantly change minute by minute according to the movement of their surroundings. Therefore, the form of a living organism is the order and balance captured at a certain point of time, and a state that implies a movement to the next at all times. It is a structure temporarily formed through interactions occurring in and outside the body, and a frame that continues to be disassembled and rebuilt. In this way, Ahree looks at the body as something dynamic, and tries to explain her works with the idea that “the body is a piece of performance-oriented sculpture.” What she stresses with the word “performance-oriented” are temporality and connectedness. It refers to the process in which a certain being that is open to the outside world embraces the context of the world in its own self and pushes itself into the world in a certain specific direction. By including the progress in two opposing directions, the artist's piece of art (or the body) becomes “a performance-oriented sculpture” which incarnates not a static object but time that continues to flow.

If the Cold Green Animal installations depict the creatures living in the ocean's depths, the Cold Green Plant unfolds the movement of these beings on a real-time basis. In this work of performance presented on weekends during the exhibition period, the performer transforms herself by adopting the gestures of the underwater plants and their survival strategies. The performer makes her movements visible and amplifies them, so subtle that they appear almost motionless. The concept of transformation presented in the work is significantly expanded from the one Ahree explored in her earlier work, I Am Your Host. In I Am Your Host, where the concept of the host was dealt with in a full-fledged manner, the artist focused on the eerie relationship created when the body is infected by an external source or attached by another being. She shows in the Cold Green Plant how a body can change itself positively by mimicking the movements of other living things rather than being unilaterally altered by another being that has infiltrated into it. The performance, which lasts for about 30 minutes, consists of gentle vibrations that touch the viewers’ eardrums, sounds of high frequencies coming out intermittently, and the sounds of cleaving through the water with wriggly movements. The carefully orchestrated sounds turn the entire exhibition space into the ecosystem of the deep ocean. The performer’s body mimicking an underwater plant hastes itself to adapt to its surroundings although the process may be slow. Its senses for survival then develop into very small units, being activated in different ways at every moment. There are no dramatic scenes that ordinary viewers may expect in this process. Yet, it requires a higher level of attention from the viewers than they normally do. They must allow their body to go along with slowly flowing time and get immersed in the movements unveiled before their eyes to acknowledge how the finely split movements, breaths and rhythms appear as a series of currents in another dimension and how even seemingly the most static moment has in it an element of dynamism.

While we all live as a being that continues to evolve, it is hard to realize this fact. We tend to regard ourselves as a group of fixed forms or static images. Well, it might make us feel more comfortable about what we are. Such a perception is, however, partial and incomplete. Above all else, it can lead us further astray from the true nature of life. The gap in such perception is what leads to the vague fear of changes and the feeling of estrangement from the world. And Ahree, as an artist, strives to narrow the gap. While we can have the experience of transformation anywhere, we need, as if for shock treatment, to be in a certain place aside from where we are right now, and an environment we are not familiar with so that we can awake our body which is defensive against and closed to the outside world. That is why the artist uses the underground bunker as her base, waiting for us with the soldiers of senses ambushed here and there. Beneath the road where modern rhythms flow lies another world of a set of different rhythms. Anyone entering this world has his or her body situated in the same place as the inhabitants of the deep ocean—the very moment when transformation begins. Their bodies are shaken, stretched, and bent together, sharing the movements of endless creation. "Cold Green Base" functions as a habitat for all living and moving bodies. How can we integrate the changes caused by this new environment into our lives? This should be the task we need to fulfill in the days ahead.