Myung-Joo KIM

The Difference between Beauty and Visual Pleasantness

Sim, Sang-yong 
Director of Seoul National University Art Museum, Ph.D in Art History

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“The course that must be taken to reach serenity… the path leading to fullness…” 
-Frédéric Bodet- 1)

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The Suspicious Return of the Real
In 1996, a book titled “The Return of the Real” was published through MIT Press. The keyword 
“real” or its concept was once the trend of an era. To understand “The Return of the Real”, the preceding question should be, “What is realness?” The author Hal Foster 2) explains it in the context of a new avant-garde grounded in Lacanian meaning, the primacy of semiotic theory, a new subversion, body, and social place. Let us be reminded that the legacy of the two fathers in semiotics stands strong to this day.

Father 1 - Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): According to his semiotic theory, 
the relationship between a symbol that conveys meaning (or the world) and meaning itself (or the world) is arbitrary. There is no need to be dwelling on the wrongfully connected semantic system.

Father 2 - Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914): His semiotic theory is a bit broader and more complex, but the context is identical in that the relationship between a symbol and its representing object is dynamic.

Hal Foster’s strategy for the return of the real has become clear: to separate meaning from its deliverer the symbol; in other words, to not rely on such arbitrary or undependable things we take to be meaning. And to stay suspicious of all that has been and even will be considered to be meaning – its past, present, and future! 
Now with almost a generation passed, let’s ask this one thing: Has the real returned “well” through the separation from symbol? Has our distorted acknowledgment of realness been shattered, and have we drawn closer to its proper notion? How about the legitimate relationship established between meaning and symbol?
Despite our anticipation, the real hasn’t returned yet. It has been unheard of, let alone returning. Rather, the emerged era is prevalent with indifference to the real and its disintegration. 
The meaningless has triumphed. Something has definitely gone wrong. There is a generation vociferating that they will rekindle the flame of the ancients while offering mere comments(Pascal Bruckner). That must be the current generation. Karl Marx once said, “The great events and figures of world history happen twice. … Once as a massive tragedy, and then as a ridiculous comedy.”3)
Simone Weil responds to this question of real and realness. According to Weil, the focus should  be shifted from the disjunction of meaning and symbol to the human(ity) that initiates such false combinations. This is due to the real(ity) being constantly eradicated through the intention of human(ity) to impose false values on things: the desire and obsession that bring down our perception to the imagination. Regarding the real, we are trapped in a cave, a cave named Obsession. It is we who plunge ourselves into lies.

“When we assign a false value to an object, the realness disappears from its perception.”4)

In other words, without the question of “Who or what creates the false conjunction of meaning and symbol?”, it is just as much an outcome of imagination to call back the combination as sending it away. The imagination of detaching meaning from symbol, and how that may utterly return the real - the imagination that equally distorts our perception.
We are still living a life of un-realness, expunged by the false values that we appoint to our world. This is life in the cave of the unreal, or the surveillance of the unreal that we take as real from perceptual chaos. “We are enslaved to the non-existent.” Therefore, the only way to see the real beyond the blurred value is by becoming completely released from obsession, a state of mind that endows untrue value to things.

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Another Return of the Real, Melting Down
“The survivors of attempted suicide remain chained as ever.” 5)

So vicious is the obsession. It is intertwined with a person’s character and impossible to be removed. To become free from it, you need abscesses as Job 6) had, a pain. Without suffering, you cannot let go of obsession. The notion that you may have overcome it from time to time, is only a figment of imagination and soon returns to hatred and fabrication.
The figures of Kim Myung-joo undergo the painful, symbolic process of melting out the matted obsession from identity. Their enlightened arrogance is deliquesced in a thousanddegrees-Celsius kiln, and this affliction leads to the process of detaching from the sense of existence, becoming unaffected by one’s desires and the opinions of others, and the birthing 
pain to achieve realness. With the glaze oozing down, revealed is the yet unnamed inner world and the conclusion is open-ended. Forbidden is the prediction of beauty that will eventually emerge, for it will be what no one has ever envisioned. All beauty is anonymous, and the response of existence to this anonymity is ignorance, which is the prerequisite to properly encountering a thing and the moment to taste pure exhilaration.
The hours for Kim’s figures to be baked in the kiln is the time of confessing this ignorance, and the time of anonymity to be separated from the dreadful obsession. A time of perseverance, of humility. And, being humble is admitting that one has not yet fully disrobed oneself from untruth. According to Bodet, “The course that must be taken to reach serenity… the path leading to fullness.” 7) This is the symbolic virtue of ceramic work, but rather, the virtue of Kim Myung-joo who invited this in through her own notion of beauty.

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The Difference between Beauty and Visual Pleasantness
“The hell of the real must be chosen over the heaven imagined.” 8)

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Contrary to our habitual mix-up, beauty differs from visual pleasantness. The two are rather unrelated. The real is not soft or sweet, but rather strong with a rough surface. But inwardly, there is a joy - pure exhilaration entirely absent in visual pleasantness. About this ecstatic experience approaching her, Kim journaled in January of 2019: “…still with anxiety and fear, but a feeling of heading toward a more progressed knowledge, and in the course of learning about where the sense of loss comes from that I had not known in my youth, I feel “the joy of life” deeper than ever.” 9)
By overlooking the qualitative difference between beauty and visual pleasantness, Kim’s world has often been misunderstood as “Unheimlich” 10) of Freud, that it serves unfamiliarity or uneasiness, the Uncanny. This is from likening her world to Théâtre Cruel or “Butoh” of Japan. (Frédéric Bodet) But, Kim’s is clearly distinguishable from the dance of desolation that forms the aesthetics of Butoh, requiem, or resistance against civilization. Her figures are not about 
the movement of agony covered in ashes from the nuclear bombing of the U.S. In her world, something else resonates than the incantation in the ashes of ruins. This unfamiliarity reveals with the melting away of the acquainted visual pleasure and the false arrangement of meaning. 
The unfamiliarity not from the absence of the real nor the unreal, but from “the return of the real”. Therefore, Kim’s world ultimately has a disparate aim from the Uncanny, which is said to provide an artistic experience encompassing what children, cavemen, and neurotic patients encounter.

Kim Myung-joo creates a thousand faces, each astonishingly unique with different facial expressions showing feelings from various layers of existence. They are the faces created from the passing of time revealing the new real equipped with pure joy – even if not yet completely - as the false value assigned to the world according to the law of gravity and their misplacements strip down. The eyes are especially important. Wide and sparkling yet sad, or sunken and staring, but constantly hinting at aspiration and hope. It is a technique showing the new existence finally broken free from gravity, a way of depicting the slightly revealed bequest of grace, numerous lines drawn as if with hesitation, and the formation of a gaze rather than the eye. According to J. P. Sartre, “He who brings the eye brings with him the object of its reflection.” The eyes are variously expressed upon their object of gaze.
This world of gently wavering expressions spreading anticipation and anxiety from the eyes is therefore remarkably rich and beautiful. Fluidity creates gaps, in which the inevitable trembling toward the origin of a new existence is allowed. For now, less weight is on the clearer definition of what that might be. Just as the outward similarities no longer hold significance, the contour that defines the boundary stays fluid. It does not matter who they are. Some of those receive the 
title of self-portrait, but distinguishing between self and other is also trivial. They are all human siblings linked in an invisible chain, which is us.

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1) Frédéric Bodet, ‘La douleur et la grâce’ in Miroir de joie(exh.cat.), Beauvais: École d’art du Beauvaisis, 2022, p. 11.
2) A critic affiliated with Princeton University and co-editor of October.
3) Pascal Bruckner, Une Breve Eternite(A Brief Eternity: The Philosophy of Longevity), Se-Jin Lee(trans.), Seoul: Influential, 2021, p. 99.
4) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Yoon-Jin(trans.), Moonji Publishing, 2021, p. 75.
5) Ibid, p. 73.
6) The protagonist of the Old Testament’s Book of Job. Also, in Arabic, Job is called (Ayyub), which is the name of the father of Salah ad-Din, the founder of the Ayyub dynasty.
7) Frédéric Bodet, Ibid.
8) Simone Weil, Ibid, p. 76.
9) Kim Myung-joo, Playing Blind (exh.cat.), Daejeon: Artist Residency TEMI, 2019, p. 11.
10) Unheimlich: The root word “heim” means home, comfort, or ease, with the prefix of “un-” to mean unfamiliarity or discomfort.

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