Jennie E. Park on Jisoo Chung’s “Flower Blooms Only After Surviving A Harsh Winter.”
The central gesture of Jisoo Chung’s sound and sculpture installation, Flower Blooms Only After Surviving A Harsh Winter, is ambivalent and simultaneous fragmentation and assembly. Perpendicular steel bars, joined together with garden ties or anchored in potted soil on the floor, at once separate and connect small floral foam blocks. The foam blocks, designed to temporarily hold water and real cut flower stems, instead permanently display vellum-printed or carved relief flower images, or are hollowed out to hold mini speakers. The speakers emanate human voices repeating the syllables “su su” in cryptic relation to the visible structure. Overall, immediate decipherability is obscured or lost, and it’s unclear whether this loss entails a problem, solution or other possibility.
This work continues the South Korean-born and Los Angeles-based artist’s contemplations of a lilac that has been transported by humans over several decades between East Asia and the US (and other parts of the world). In her prior film, Miss Kim Lilac, Chung cobbled together a candidate description and history of the flower—its multiple traits, cultivated varieties and Korean and English names (including Su Su Kkot Dari, Miss Kim Lilac and Miss Gim Lilac)—but wondered ultimately whether she could definitively locate or identify the original or “real” Miss Kim Lilac.
In this new installation, no narration or text exists outside of the repeated “su su,” which, in Korean, is part of a gendered expression referring to a modestly dressed female; here, without additional context, and especially to those who do not know Korean, the sounds are largely meaningless. Viewers are thus offered traces of images and sounds in a grid of lines that suggest an underlying algorithm or logic of a whole, space/place, map, or meaning. In its invitation to viewers to connect the dots or clues, as Chung had ventured to do in her film, the installation is like the film’s prequel; given the minimal “dots”—small foam blocks and a short repeated sound—information that may have been omitted from or “lost” in the installation becomes salient.
In their book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han applied a theory of racial melancholia to a relatively recent generation of Asians in Americans who on the whole experienced the pressure to assimilate into dominant (white) American culture. Citing Freud, Eng and Han distinguished melancholia from mourning as an ongoing pathology marked by an inability to resolve an internal sensation of loss; while a mourner is eventually able to declare a specific entity (for example, a deceased individual) “dead” and reinvest their mental and emotional energy into new things and experiences, a melancholic person is saddled with ongoing conflict and ambivalence around their feeling of loss. The loss feels irresolvable for at least one of two reasons: One, they are incapable of fully or authentically attaining that which they are always (subconsciously) seeking (in the case of racial melancholia, this is a foreign ideal imposed upon or “contaminating” them), and/or two, they are unable to precisely describe the identity or significance of what feels lost to them.
With respect to racial melancholia tied to a chronic sense of failure to attain or embody a foreign ideal, Eng and Han observed that whiteness as a standard imposed on or “contaminating” the psyches of people of color in America has had a particularly ambivalent and insidious effect on Asians. The historical (including legal) construction of “Asian” in the US as both “not white” (“yellow peril”) and “not black” (“model minority”) has resulted, Eng and Han argued, in a cleaving of the psyche of the Asian in America between feeling like a perpetual foreigner on one hand, and, on the other, more capable than black people of imitating whiteness. Asians in America have thus been saddled with an irresolvable (and often unconscious) sense of grasping for that (whiteness) which has contaminated and wants to be replicated in them but that they cannot ultimately be or possess.
The lilac in Chung’s work, presumably never having asked to be named, was nonetheless given personifying names, including Miss Kim Lilac by a white American male botanist who observed (according to Chung’s film) that “Miss Kim” could apply to thousands of beautiful women in South Korea; Miss Gim Lilac was subsequently adopted as the lilac’s name by South Koreans (as “Kim” is correctly pronounced with the “g” sound in Korean). Like “su su,” “Miss Gim” in Korean evokes a gendered stereotype of a nondescript woman, where “Miss Gim” further connotes a kind of subservient secretarial role. The lilac has thus been personified, gendered, raced, exoticized, humbled, or anonymized while also (as the installation’s soil-potted grid of “pathways” suggests) selectively cultivated or bred and transported by humans from and to different sites. As Chung’s installation alludes to the lilac being encoded or traded in or on human terms, it induces the kind of melancholia arising from the inescapable imposition (on the lilac) of unattainable and conflicting foreign (human) ideas or ideals.
The installation further renders the lilac in human terms by including no live flower nor any access to the flower’s consciousness in the flower’s “language.” Instead, humans voice part of the lilac’s human-given Korean name (“su su”), steel grids reflecting human architecture suspend the lilac’s digitally generated images, and the steel bars are set in displaced soil constrained in human-designed pots; the lilac is thus fragmented and (re)assembled in the vernacular of human materials and technologies. As the lilac’s consciousness remains fundamentally and profoundly inaccessible to viewers, the question of what the lilac “means” or “symbolizes” to (a) human(s) is, by default, asked by the art instead. In seeking this “meaning” while not being able (or even thinking) to consider how the lilac experiences life, viewers (perhaps unconsciously) sense that this elusive meaning is ultimately unfathomable; this reflects the second kind of melancholia.
The melancholic search, in human terms, for the lilac’s meaning gives rise to an associated search for a definitive origin or referent (again, in human terms) to which this meaning can be traced or attached. The linking of referent to meaning is the basis of human racial logic, on which Wendy Hui Kyong Chun provides insight applicable to Chung’s work. Chun proposed considering race in terms of, or as (a), technology; citing Heidegger, she noted that technology in its essence reveals or “enframes” nature to be an enduring energy reserve and, as such, strips natural objects of their genus, type, or objecthood altogether and converts them into mere quantities. “Endurance,” hence, is central to technology. Chun further noted that racial logic has, in historically variable ways, linked visible traces of the human body to invisible and innate human traits; with the advent of Mendelian genetics’ conceptual separation of genes from somatic cells, chromosomes could be linked to “eternal features”—some corresponding to notions of race—across bodies and generations. Race as a kind of replicable essence, Chun argued, makes it akin to a technology that primarily apprehends what “endures.”
In Chung’s installation, multiple static representations of the lilac in tandem with a reiterated Korean syllable suggest a “stuck” or repeating racialized “thing,” referent or essence associated with or giving rise to the palpably “lost” meaning viewers seek; various technologies incorporated or referenced—industrial, agricultural, digital, vocal—further afford direct association of racial logic and “technology.” Referencing Fanon, Chun noted that certain racialized humans have been considered mere quantities and, consequently, neither subjects nor objects; as such, they’ve not been recognized as, nor allowed to become, fundamentally or fully human. Chun further observed that technology’s containment of nature as energy reserve likewise prevents poiesis, or nature’s development according to its inherent design (as in the sprouting of a seed). In Chung’s installation, a kind of stoppage of poiesis can be observed on two levels: One, in that the still or lifeless images of the lilac can become nothing more/else, and two, in the rendering of the lilac as a (racialized) quantity (i.e., as uniformly sized, digitally manipulated foam cubes or even “pixels”). The search for a stable referent or root in Chung’s installation is thus ultimately unsatisfactory, as even were a racialized or otherwise enduring essence pinpointed, the victory would be pyrrhic in that the essence or thing would be deaden(d)ed in form, vitality and agency.
The installation, hence, ultimately leads viewers to reconsider the (f)utility of searching for “lost” meanings or stable referents, as the former produces merely melancholia, and the latter merely a stunted essence or thing; in both cases, a kind of interminable thwarting of wholeness yields a feeling of stark emptiness. Dissatisfied with bleak interpretations of race as technology, Chun proposed reimagining race as a kind of technology that allows for more subversive or creative kinds of relation between what a body is, does or looks like and what it “means.” Similarly, Eng and Han proposed depathologizing and reframing melancholia according to Raymond Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling,” which comprises “emergent patterns of emotion still struggling for social form and recognition.” This more positively adaptive formulation of melancholia reflects, in their view, how racialized people creatively manage daily (internal) conflicts and integrate their (multifaceted) identities.
Jacques Rancière advocated for a similar kind of reinventive stance with respect to viewers in relation to artworks. “Emancipated spectators,” he contended, are active translators of artworks, in contrast to passive receivers of prescriptive or obvious meanings, and apparent “distance” between an artwork’s appearance and its “meaning(s)” provides fertile, rather than problematic, opportunities for active translation. Rancière believed an artwork’s aesthetic efficacy relates to its capacity to enable momentary disidentification within viewers, where viewers cease conceiving of themselves within conventional societal roles and structures. This, in turn, creates opportunities for what he called redistributions of the sensible—reconfigurations of what is legibly visible or thinkable and of bodies’ relations to each other and to their capacities and worlds—in more than one “correct” or possible landscape or way.
Rancière identified a melancholic kind of societal critique (within and beyond art) that is resigned to and feeds off it its own impotence; that is, while recognizing that any attempt to subvert the regime of the market (or commodification) inescapably reinstates or strengthens the regime, this kind of critique nonetheless persists in being “against” while acquiescing to the regime, never finding a resolution or way out. The gnawing, repetitive limbo or stuckness of this mode of critique is reminiscent of Eng and Han’s pathological (racial) melancholy and Chun’s enduring (racial) essence. Rancière, however, productively reimagined or reclaimed irresolution or “loss” within the realm of art (as Eng and Han and Chun had respectively reimagined racial melancholia and race as technology); he eliminated the (unsatisfiable) mandate that an artwork “expose” to a target audience “the one true” damning reality through a single regime of presentation and interpretation. He instead suggested that an effective artwork “loses” at its start “a” predefined audience, “reality” to expose, or definitive method of exposure; in lieu of these stale certainties, the artwork weaves percepts and affects from ordinary experience into new “sensory fabrics,” or new candidate forms of expressing and experiencing a common or shared humanity. Disidentification or “loss” can, in this way, beget, rather than preclude, revitalized human embodiment.
Chung’s installation, in its sparse and spacious organization of visual and sonic “information” pertaining to the lilac, offers many fertile distances among materials, signs and potential meanings; these distances or gaps, in turn, encourage within viewers productive disidentifications and (in Rancière’s words) new political constructions of common objects (including vellum, foam, pots, metal, soil, speakers and garden ties, in addition to the lilac). Rather than succumb to a more or less doomed quest for “the real/actual” thing or essence “lost” in the installation and the attendant expectation that the installation critique or condemn something in connection to this loss, viewers can actively translate the installation as an entirely different kind of technology, “structure of feeling” or sensory fabric. A chief question the work asks, or that viewers ask of the work, can hence shift from, “Where and what was the original lilac, and what was original to or about it,” to, “Here/in this site, what multiple sensations, things, relations or collectives can spontaneously, unexpectedly or creatively be(come)?”
Jennie E. Park, August, 2024.
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Bibliography
Chun, Wendy H. K. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura, vol. 24, no. 1 (70), May 2009, pp. 7-35, doi:10.1215/02705346-2008-013.
Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press, 2019.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, 2009.
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Images:
Installation shots and details of Flower Blooms Only After Surviving A Harsh Winter taken in the artist’s studio.
All images courtesy of the artist.