If language is a proxy for our thoughts, it is surely a metaphor. And if language can be a platform for ideas to flourish, arts is a manifestation of those ideas. But I guess it is difficult to assume that it is one directional – thoughts languages arts. Maybe these relationships are like a spiral effect or kind of like a pinball effect, where nothing is quite linear. What seems clear is that, in the 1920s, literary figures such as Apollinaire and Andre Breton founded surrealism in Paris, a movement that inspired many other writers and artists to follow, which, to this day, has stoked the fire of avant-garde spirit. The crux of surrealism is that it is anti-reason. It defies stagnation or tradition. It attempts to tap into the emotions or visceral aspects of human beings. What is nebulous – like those seen or felt in dreams – can come alive in stark formations in our reality.
These thoughts emerged once again when I now think about the exhibition that I attended a few years ago during the pandemic. I took a bunch of photographs at the time, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Going through these photos now, I can now relive the moment and conceptualize how these artworks stimulated my senses.
At the Hangaram Art Center in Seoul, I wasn’t so sure about seeing the collection on tour, a masterpiece collection on loan by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen for a couple of months. I figured that there would be only a handful of “great” artworks and most quality pieces would be left in Europe. But I realized that I was wrong….and more on this point later. Trying to beat the crowd, I got there in crisp November, but unfortunately a throng of college students or 20-something women were eager to get in through the door. At the time, Covid-19 cases were surging, but that didn’t deter the crowd from enjoying a visual feast for their eyes.
To my untrained eye, aside from Dali, I wasn’t familiar with other names, which gave me incentive to fish around for their works later. Among the three artists, however, I was surprised to see that Dali’s paintings – some on wooden panels and others on canvases – ranged in such great variety. Also, his work spanned from the early 1920s to 1970s. What got me was his detailed brushwork. Many of his subjects/objects on the panel or canvas weren’t decipherable, but they were completed with such care and detail that they can come across like realism. But the whole point of surrealism is that those dream-like images should be as realistic as possible so it would be pointless to paint such images in staccatos of blur.
But returning to the point about how language is a sort of metaphor, it is possible for an artwork to be entirely incomprehensive to logic. If language is incomprehensible to people who cannot speak that language, why is it impossible for an artwork to be incomprehensible? After all, we will pass on at some point in our lives, not ever knowing some several hundred languages in the world. Many of them have already disappeared from the planet because of decimation of rain forests and marginalization of tribal people somewhere in the deep jungles of Africa and South America continents. Even in China, many dialects are slowly disappearing due to political campaign to “unify” the country. If uniformity should triumph, there is no need for arts. The fact that we can feel or see something different, and how we can process these emotions differently upon each encounter is what probably makes us more human than anything else. We keep revisiting songs, theaters, stories, and galleries.
