Durational Way of Traversing Time
(curator / director of Primary Practice)
2023
According to the idea of Henri Bergson, time exists in the flow of inner experience. The past, the present and the future are indistinguishable. Time is not just a transition from one moment to another, but a process of internal change and development.
The modern conception of time has given rise to both advances in science and invention of precise time measuring devices. At the same time, industrialization allowed for an organized production and labor, and the accurate measurement and adjustment of time contributed to an increased productivity and efficiency with more regularity, leading to the standardization of time. In the meantime, the evolution in transportation and communication brought about a revolutionary change in the modern understanding of time. For example, faster means of transportation has greatly reduced the time required to move from place to place, and accurate timetables and schedules are emphasized to improve time coordination. Such a close relationship between distance and time expands to a concept of time that, under the development of reason and rationality, is no longer dependent on physical space.
On the other hand, Henri Bergson explains that time is not simply a series of moments but one that must be understood in close connection to the flow of life. In other words, time is not a mere quantitative concept. It is to be linked to the qualitative aspects of inner experience. According to him, the desire to measure and control time comes from the desire to fix heterogeneous time in a homogeneous space. This underlying impulse signifies that even though time and space have fundamentally different characteristics¹, there is the desire to anchor disparate times in the same space and to exclude the possibility of different events or states existing simultaneously. In the end, the desire to measure and control time calls to further standardize and quantify time; the impenetrability that two things cannot exist in one space fixes a 'moment' in different places. In this formulation, time is recognized as a more constant and predictable conceptual anchor.
Before discussing this exhibition and the displayed pieces, let's take a look at Jiyoung Yoo’s previous works. In Spilled Water (2018, RAINBOWCUBE), the artist constructs a web of relations using an empty space created after an image has left – a frame whose center is left empty by intaglio – and an image that has finally been liberated – a subject whose significance has come to life only through the detailed portrayal. And as the title Spilled Water implies, through the relationship between “content” (water) and “form” (cup), the audience is invited to examine the premise of painting as a conventional form and its existence today as a medium. Following this work, the artist traces the tacit consensus set by socio-cultural customs that form what is believed (or mistakenly believed) to be an optimized system through the units and structure of everyday life (One After Another, 2019, alltimespace). The artist appropriates the forms of an egg carton, a calendar, and a manuscript paper to expand into the relationship of significance and structure-form that contains it and challenges the existing formulation of the system built under the promise of utility and the dominant perception of the cultural norms itself.
As aforementioned, Yoo takes the structure or shape derived from social systems and norms and uses the close relationship between meaning and form to disrupt our existing cognitive scheme. For the artist, the set rules are only limits that condition the semantic network in the first place, and the image that conveys meaning only slides toward the endless horizon, even if it tries to break away from it or anchor down. The container that exists as a condition for systematizing the object in this way remains in the form of a tear or hole, rendering it insufficient to hold any more significance. In this context, Yoo attempts to break away from the modern conception and system of time in this exhibition, Traverse In Between (2023, KICHE). She begins by choosing a circular canvas in the Day-Hour-Minute series, expanding on the fact that the unit of time is closely linked to the angle of space. Dividing a day into hours or minutes on a 360-degree circle is a fairly familiar scheduling method. Therefore, this form of canvas, while uncommon, refers to temporality in the hexadecimal system that divides 12 hours into one cycle, and has quite straightforward persuasiveness. On this circular timeline, the artist divides the space she moved to on a specific date during the exhibition preparation period into time units and transfers it onto her painting. In addition, the complete circular canvas is titled A Day, and the circular work with missing teeth is named by replacing the remaining angle with time. Through this method, she breaks away from the temporal structure that is divided into and consists of the numerical units of “moments” – “day”- “hour”- “minute” – and pays attention to the “duration” that traverses between them. Again, to borrow Bergson's language for a moment, "pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, … without any affiliation with number.” In this sense, as suggested by the artist’s free-roaming pictorial touch on the circular panel, Day-Hour-Minute, is not confined in spatialized time as a scientifically measured and systematized number, but is a “flow” that is “durational” in between. It evokes time in its “traverse.”
Unlike Day-Hours-Minute that leans against the wall, the Long-Distance Relationship series that is located on the floor is a sculpture of layered days. The advances in communication technology have enabled instant communication despite physical distance, but the time zone in which each person is located remains constant. We exchange text messages with temporal gaps in between, and conversations with others in different time zones remind us of our disparate times and locations with the unfamiliarity of mixed time zones. As the artist explains, these pieces that began as a way to “fold [her] time and carve out that of the other to overlay in each other’s time zones,” are the embodiment of “the moment when the familiar linearity of time collapses.” Even in connections that are unbound by space, we frequently encounter temporal gaps that often fall between the linear cracks that overlap and overwrite.
Yoo's Time Zone Panel series borrows the format of uniform standard time zones used in various regions globally. The artist pays attention to the artificial boundaries and its compartmentalized temporal division of the “Standard Time Zone” designed to prevent confusion due to time difference and uphold consistency by setting the time zones based on longitude. Each panel takes the motif of a specific zone for each time zone of Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). Panels made of various materials such as wood, iron powder, and jesmonite have a dark hue based on UTC+0. Here, the depth of color is expressed by the degree of corrosion of iron powder or the surface shade of wood, which imprints the concept of temporality on the panel through their material properties. Interestingly, the areas extracted from each time zone are arbitrarily mixed and arranged as if to expose the contradiction of the rational notion of time created for the systematic management of the world. Hinges and clamps, locks and chains that connect the panels cross and connect between different time zones as if mocking the futile apparatus to build a global time system – standard time zones. This formulation leads the audience to critically evaluate the fictitiousness of the boundary between artificially standardized time and physical space-time by pointing them to not only the gap between the panels and the structure but also the crevice between the panels themselves rather than within the individual panels.
Lastly, Yoo hypothesizes a kind of time on the exhibition that penetrates or non-linearly traverses space by adding several installations to her oeuvre. The artist breaks down functionality and efficiency of the space by adding a specifically designed structures, Rail, to the joints where the walls and floor meet. Closer to a gesture to reinterpret the temporality of the exhibition space rather than an individual piece of art, it puts in place a repetitive rhythm on the boundary of the planes that meet in a rigid and partitioned space, challenging the linear flow of the exhibition and attempting to extend it into a multidimensional space-time. On the 1.5th floor, a perforated screen, Leftover, is installed to divert the gazes from being fully directed to the circular works that have fallen off in intaglio, Day-Hours-Minutes series and Long-Distance Relationship. While the eye is disturbing and losing its track, the process converging into a result and the time that has been tightly bound in an object reveals in a gap between the object and the leftovers. Perhaps the space-time found in the exhibition is fitting to reveal the contradictions of reality dominated by the “time” system. Roughly speaking, the exhibition (space) is based on a non-linear narrative that is teeming with the web of fragmented images. It sometimes points towards eternity where time has faded, and sometimes becomes the past that allows us to face the present anew. And even it drives into a future imagined through newly intertangled relationship of the present and the past. Even the images that are listed and arranged are freely mixed in the consciousness of the audience irrespective of their order and invite a free imaginary space-time unconstrained from the conditions of reality. The time Jiyoung Yoo builds up on the nature of these exhibitions is not a system that regulates our life by scientifically measuring it, but as a “form of existence” that traverses and continues between standardized ways of being.
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¹ Time, in Bergson’s view, consists of continuity and flux of internal experiences which a moment is continually being replaced by the next. On the other hand, space is a homogeneous place where objects coexist and interact.
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