Defying Gravity

This exhibition marks the first one-person presentation of the work of Moo Kwon Han, who has been living and working in New York for the past five years, and whose work has increasingly been produced in the medium of video. Although a skilled and exacting craftsman, Han’s videos are deceptively direct and informal, with a humorous dimension throughout. There is also, however, a serious thematic thread running throughout, in which the artist’s vocation is consistently held up for comparison with other possibilities for living one’s life.

In the video Gravity, the artist struggles physically to find his way in the world, a kind of seeker constantly testing the limits of his own body. The opening image is of an enveloping barrage of rain, against which the artist is first encountered as a small, hapless cartoon, covering his head with his hands and trying to dodge gravity’s effects. Han then conjectures that the endless downward thrust of those countless raindrops, driven by the law of gravity, causes a kind of injury to the soul against which the body always struggles. In response, the artist is literally pushed out into a kind of perpetual freefall: carried aloft on a geyser, speeding through rapids, and diving off a lonely rock face. The artist’s ultimate dream is to float in the clouds, but if in the end he sails forward propelled by the force of his own exhalations, at least he can feel himself moving, and thus achieve a kind of utopia. This video, created while the artist was at an art residency in Art Omi, New York, has the feeling of incorporating nature at every turn

Similarly with Silk Road, which emerged from a Skowhegan residence, and in which the object of Han’s affections is the animal kingdom. Beginning with a retreat into nature on a search for the Silk Road, only to find himself fleeing avalanches and brush fires, he discovers that each anima has a characteristic that he can identify with. Gazelles run faster, pandas are cuter, geese can fly, and penguins excel at group solidarity. His efforts at imitating them do not necessarily give him an advantage in his quest, but, undeterred, he continues to snuffle with bears, scratch with monkeys, and dance with birds. Love leads him to a rainbow, and his dream of defying gravity returns, only this time as a bird that can swim through the ocean. As he realizes that the elements can transform into one another -- “time is water, time is light” – his acceptance of his own limitations leads him to set out on the Silk Road once and for all.

In Virus, which is one of the videos completed for Han’s 2006 MFA research at School of Visual Arts, the artist uses the form of his own body, viewed from above and augmented with painting software, to simulate the snaking, writhing movements of a single-cell organism. What emerges from these movements, however, is not an abstract form, but words like Epistemology, Integrate and Cosmology, which the artist’s seemingly random body movements are spelling out letter by letter. While slightly older than the other two videos, what Virus shares with them is the idea of a hidden meaning in nature, one that cannot be seen from the outside but only approached through immersion.

Han also includes a single drawing with these videos, in which the artist, seen photographed from behind, confronts a traditional temple structure, which is seen as a sketch.  These are the only two images in the drawing, and the fact that one is a photo and the other a drawing suggests that traditional means of representation are fading over time, and with them, traditional means of apprehending and giving respect to nature. The artist’s vocation is, to him, a sacred commitment, in which questions are asked and hypotheses floated that all seem to be substitutes for what ordinary people may be thinking about as they go about their lives in the Age of Information. Han’s alternative, while not rejecting the role of either nature or spirituality, is to transform himself into an Everyman, one whose reflections are mired in ambiguity, as if to prove once and for all that the artist is fundamentally the same as everybody else.

Dan Cameron

October 2009