Recently, while attending the opening of The Weird and the Eerie at The Page Gallery in Seoul, I couldn’t help but think of Rosalind Krauss’s provocative ideas expressed in her seminal work, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, against the backdrop of a talented group of artists.
The artists featured in the exhibition—Eunsil Lee, Jinn Bronwen Lee, Hyunwoo Lee, and Jin Han—employ various strategies to subvert conventional notions of representation and meaning. Eunsil Lee’s use of traditional Korean painting materials and techniques to explore taboo instincts and desires resonates with Krauss’s critique of the “grid” as a modernist trope. By metaphorically representing the fragmentation of individuals and the disintegration of communities through twisted spaces, body parts, and distorted animal forms, Lee challenges the grid’s supposed neutrality and universality.
Jinn Bronwen Lee’s irregularly shaped canvases filled with dark colors and textures further disrupt the modernist grid, echoing Krauss’s notion of the “expanded field.” By embracing deviation and decomposition as a means to find balance, Lee’s paintings become vessels for accommodating and fermenting existential processes, much like Krauss’s understanding of sculpture as a medium that occupies the space between landscape and architecture.
Hyunwoo Lee’s deconstruction and recombination of isolated parts of natural objects resonate with Krauss’s critique of the modernist fetishization of the medium. By eliminating conventional values and standards and horizontally positioning these elements as forms of matter, Lee challenges the notion of medium specificity and explores the essence of existence through a visual experience that redefines the perception of objects.
Finally, Jin Han’s attempt to visualize invisible states through meticulous drawings and multi-layered oil paintings evokes Krauss’s notion of the “optical unconscious.” By using unique sound waves to scan the unseen cracks and surfaces of the world, Han’s canvases, filled with roughness and smoothness, regularity and irregularity, challenge the modernist privileging of vision and invite viewers to engage with the strange and abstract as a means to access deeper truths.
Overall, The Weird and the Eerie presents an effective artistic afterword to Rosalind Krauss’s influential collection of essays. Through their unique and compelling pieces, the artists in the exhibition invite viewers to question their assumptions about art, representation, and the human condition.
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