Systems of Practice: Design Media Arts @UCLA
Lauren McCarthy, an artist and professor at Design Media Arts in University of California Los Angeles, invited me to speak in her class Systems of Practice. Here are notes for my presentation for 11/7/2024.
My name is Taeyoon(He/Him). I’m an artist, educator and organizer currently based in Detroit, Michigan. I don’t call myself as a curator, but I produce, direct and organize projects: exhibition, conference, convening with other artists, researchers and curators. For about 8 years, I worked on cofounding and running the School for Poetic Computation in New York. I left New York and the organization in 2020. Between then and now, I was based in Seoul, South Korea with residencies and projects in neighboring places like Japan and Hong Kong, and online collaborations with South Asian and Central Asian organizations and artists. The last five years in South Korea was a chance to focus on my work, re-contextualizing creative practice, teaching, and community. I started teaching at Wayne State University and relocated to Detroit this fall. I think Lauren McCarthy is one of the few person I speak most frequently and honestly about life and our practices, and I’m delighted to be able to share my recent research and work with her and the class.
In today’s lecture, I begin with stories about two other artists whose systems of practice continue to inspire me, followed by the works that I did in the last five years through various experiments and collaborations. I know this class is in the phase of ‘proposal writing’ and I will also share the logistics of my practice, including the grants and finances (This part will not be shared on the note).
Activist/Artist
We just experienced another unsurprising, but unbelievable election of the United States. The four years ahead of us seem to be gloomy. To make sense of the present, let’s rewind about twenty years to the eary 2000s. One of the artist whose systems of practice influenced me a great deal early in my career is Paul Chan. His early work, Baghdad in No Particular Order was influential for me in the early 2000s. From the project description “Notes, gifts, promises, paintings, trash, and other ephemera from the city which is now hardly a city. What if Walter Benjamin didn’t kill himself, learned html, bought a camera, and thought himself useful enough to work in an impending war zone?”
This project was created by Paul Chan in 2002. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a few years ahead of me. We never overlapped and I’ve only had brief personal encounters with him at art openings many years later. Yet, he was a notable Asian American man in the film and new media department, who was making what was works that was unapologetically provocative. A bit more about the Baghdad project.
“the artist Paul Chan was working as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, formed by the activist group Voices in the Wilderness, which was on the ground in Bagdad to protest the imminent Iraqi war. Chan captures the calm before the storm in this ambient video essay, with his focus on the routine work and leisure of the Iraqi people. Among the details that are exotic to western eyes, he reveals a shared humanity, one that is under threat of destruction.” (This part of description is from an event description here)
This project challenged me, initially from the concept — bringing the Iraqi people into human perspective, by capturing the everyday life on individuals. If you remember the early 2000s, Iraqi people were portrayed in the West as the demonic Other, heightened by the trauma of 9/11 and War on Terror. It was challenging because of the ethical dillemma of ‘watching’ the daily lives of Iraqi people online, when their entire cities and communities were raided by the military operations, led by the U.S. and the West. It felt wrong to witness and appreciate simple beauties in their lives, that the country that I reside on deliberately destroyed. It was also challenging from the formal perspective of non-linear videos on the web. The project indexes an archive of a person(the artist)walking around the streets of Baghdad, nonchalantly recording videos, which he made available online, like Walter Benjamin’s derive in the digital space. Note Youtube, the platform was created in 2005, and sharing video and other content online was not as comment in 2002. What I saw of this project were actually fragmented slices of clips, various notes by the artists, memorabilia, events announcements on the artist’s website.
The website is long gone, but there are captures of the website on the Internet Archive.
I remember discovering this site, and feeling envious of the ways the artist was able to materialize the relationships between the personal and political. Chan, more so then now, was introduced as an Artist/Activist, whose border crossing practices brought critical discourses on the War on Terror, as well as the U.S. government’s (lack of) response to Hurricane Katrina. The world felt volatile in 2003, the threats of war and terrorism, and the greater weaponization of fear felt visceral. Al-Qaeda was mentioned in almost every news items. There was a culture of fear and retaliation all around the world. I was a young international art student in a large city in the midwest. My English proficiency was barely acceptable for college level courses. I didn’t really fit into the city or the school. I was depressed, homesick and scared. My general uneasiness of the situation resulted in me seeking escape, to study abroad or to take extended trips, or to return ‘home’ to South Korea. But most of my days were filled with lonely nights at the video editing suites and watching DVDs at home. I was also frustrated about my work. I had grandiose ambitions, but not a lot of skills or patience. I was interested in performance art, but I didn’t have the means to produce performance pieces I had imagined. I found digital video as a medium where I can have a full control of production with little or no production budget or help. Through the school, I had access to a camcorder. I recorded my daily life, my friends, and everything obsessively.
A year or two later, I purchased a better camera Canon GL2, and took on more ambitious projects when I travelled to Central America. I didn’t have the gut to travel to the war zones, but I had enough curiosity to go to Central America with practically no Spanish skills. I have all of the DV tapes from this period. It’s a little cringe to watch them. Over the last few years, I discovered the videos again and thought about ways of activating archives, especially personal data and oral histories. Back then, I didn’t make particularly interesting work or participated in major anti-war protests or organizing. It’s been more than twenty years, and I have a perspective about the culture and politics of that time, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how it relates to the current Israeli war in Palestine and Lebanon. I have the language and knowledge to make sense of how whiteness, masculinity, casual and explicit racism shaped my racial and gender identity. Now I can make sense of why I was depressed and scared in 2001, and feel more empathy towards myself and others. The difference between an archive and hoarding is the owner’s intention, structure and accessibility. I’m interested in activating my archives towards an open work that’s both personal and political.
I also remember the Paul Chan’s other bodies of work, especially the haunting projection pieces. Created with Macromedia Flash, the simple animations captured the sense of disorientation, neglect (in the case of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) and nostalgia.
The artist at one point uploaded the entire Flash file for these works on his website, thus anyone were able to download, remix, reinterpret the animation on their computers. I downloaded and played with the file, but didn’t create anything meaningful. Yet, the point was not necessarily on everyone making a remix. The point was the idea of an art work that was openly available to view online, and for the work to be available to remix, circulate— if anyone were driven to do it.
I’ve been following his works since then, and particularly interested in the Badlands Unlimited, an experimental publication studio and publisher that created digital-first books and editions. The company is no longer operational, but I often think of their experimental practices of circulating artistic content online, which predates the NFT boom and doom, and more recent proliferation of Digital Art. Chan’s practice spans over various disciplines and methods, some of the recent works are more aesthetic and cryptic, and I don’t fully understand them. I think that’s okay. Maybe I will understand them a few decades later.
Philosopher/Artist
Another artist, who I have discovered more recently is Ho Tzu Nyen, based in Singapore. His systems of practice centers on philosophical mediation on the sense of time, power and technology. His primary medium is video, animation and installation. His works are accompanied by philosophical narration. I find them engaging, but others sometimes find explanatory, possibly didactic. Adeline Chia writes of “Ho’s self-narrating, self-theorizing, and sometimes even self-interpreting practice…”(source) I argue that for artists, like him, deliberate writing practices do not take away to aura of the work, instead it is the essence of such work. Such relationship between critical theory, philosophy, literature and ‘Art’ has been something I’ve been exploring over the last few years. In Ho’s work, I find a systems of practice that is not shy from crossing the lines of interpretation and explanation. The writings are in various languages, Japanese, English and others, according to the topic of the work.
One set of works I experienced at Art Sonje Center in Seoul is about animations created during the Japanese colonial empire, where the faces in the film have been blurred by the artist. The narration traces the cultural artifacts of the colonialism via personal letters from the period. Another set of works, which I will spend more time discussing, is about time, presented with hauntingly beautiful composition of anime-style moving images, voice over and music. The work, T for Time, is introduced as a video art with non-linear, algorithmic video editing. The specific technical functionality of algorithmic editing was not clear to me(which is fine), and the actual experience of viewing the work is worth noting in details.
Ho’s installation at Art Sonje Center consisted of two parts, a large double layered screen with audio, and a wall full of smaller screens that have short animations. The large double screen shows visually captivating sequences of 2D animations, mostly depicting clocks, timekeepers and personal memorabilia, like photographs. Two scenes are juxtaposed, with interventions of live action videos or photographs. A rich voice, which narrates and sings from time to time, follows a philosophical inquiry about time. I spent hours in front of the installation, observing the videos and stories, which included historical facts about Greenwich Mean Time, as well as metaphysical inquiries “What is time anyway?” After some time, I began to notice some scenes that repeated, although in different combination with the sound and narration. A same scene of a clocktower is narrated with a story about a man who repairs the clock, and another time with a different story. This aspect of ‘similar but different’ is also found in the visual style of Ho’s work.
The animation resembles Japanese Anime, but with a bit of ambiguity. It’s ambiguous because the characters and design elements are familiar — as if I’ve seen them in other movies, but it’s hard to pinpoint where and what film. In a catchy surprise, Ho employs an animation studio based in North Korea to complete some of his works, including The 49th Hexagram (2020).
Courtesy of Ho Tzu Nyen and Edouard Malingue Gallery
This scene, of protests with all the slogans and political messages erased, captures the essence of citizien-led political engagement, void of specific contexts. Ho prepared scenes of protests from South Korean movies, and asked North Korean animators to create these scenes.
Here is Ho’s comment about working with North Korean collaborators.
“Then I decided to continue my collaboration with the North Korean studio for the exhibition Night March. I would say that one of the main reasons I liked collaborating with them was precisely how difficult communication was. Zoom isn’t possible for North Koreans; I could not send them an attachment any larger than two megabytes. All the typical ways, all the conveniences we take for granted in collaborating with other people, we had to put aside and figure out a different means of working together with these very special animators. Of course, there is a long and painful history between Korea and Japan as well, so it was interesting for me to engage a North Korean studio to work on a project very much centered around Japanese wartime history. And this relationship is interesting, because you can see from the North Korean animation style that they were also, I would say, influenced by anime. There is a kind of dialectic going on in their relationship to Japan. So, I started using my projects and their processes to facilitate these strange types of exchanges.
I hardly ever spoke to the North Koreans. I haven’t had the chance to ask them if they’ve seen anime films like Ghost in the Shell (1995) or Akira (1988). All our communications go through a third party, “Sirius Black,” named after a character from a Harry Potter novel. I’ve been in conversation with Sirius Black for more than two years now, but I’ve no idea who he, she, or they are — I have no idea how many animators work on my project… . They are completely faceless to me. But at the same time, we have developed a strange kind of friendship over the years; or maybe I am over projecting. But I regard it very much as a close collaborators’ relationship. Most of the time, I have to make sure my documents are small enough to be sent through. I also give them a lot of autonomy in creating the final shape or form of the images.
The animation industry in North Korea is a rather large industry that has been ongoing for a long time. Quite a number of European studios secretly farm out their work to North Korean studios. In animation, you have two kinds of frames: key frames, the most important frames that determine the flow of the action, and the in-between frames, which continues the movement. In-between frames are the kinds of frames that the North Korean animators produce, which involve manual or repetitive work. But I usually give the North Korean animators very broad parameters, to see what they can do and what they’ll produce with their imagination. That was what I was curious about at the beginning: seeing what they would imagine.” (source)
What’s interesting for me about this unlikely collaboration is that it sits outside of what is typically understood as an artistic collaboration. Ho does not know any of the animation artist. It’s safe to guess none of the animation artists are aware of Ho or his work, and the types of venues they get screened. Ho’s outsourcing of labor to North Korean animators is not a singular example. There are various South Korean or international artists who engage with North Korean manufacturing systems, often playing in the threshold of what is acceptable or not, to produce works that are exhibited in the Global North venues. Yet, what I find interesting about Ho’s engagement with the North Korean animators is the ways his outsourcing of labor mirrors the ways in which the legacies of colonial systems operated, particularly the visual storytelling of Japanese animations from the World War II period that he critiques in other works.
Description of one of such projects by Adeline Chia. “Hotel Aporia (2019), a six-channel video which features several Japanese figures who have lived through World War II, engages the intellect, emotions, and the body. The viewer sits on tatami-covered floors to watch the video screens (each contained within a traditional Japanese house); one focuses on the kamikaze pilots and their final gatherings before their suicide missions, while another revolves around Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s short time in Singapore to make a propaganda film for the Japanese Imperial Army, which did not materialize. Clips from Ozu’s films are included, but with the faces of the actors replaced by blank, grey ovals. Another video explores the philosophies of the Kyoto School, which fused Zen concepts of nothingness with Western ideas of being. Some of these philosophers were notoriously pro-war nationalists.” (source)
Is it a tragic irony or intentional critique? Perhaps it’s both? I have no way of knowing the working conditions of animation factory in North Korea, how Ho’s production budget can transferred between the middle man and those in North Korea. The beauty of his work is the precise juxtaposition of the reality we live in (post cold-war era of permanent ceasefire with no sign of peace or justice) and the reality of the colonial period in our distant past. I’m interested in making works about these complex conditions, not as a documentary or activism, although much of the work can be informed by such practice, but as philosophical mediation and provocation.
Dominated books
How these works inform my current research. Between 2022 and 2023, I was an adjunct professor at Yonsei University, Department of Sociology. I taught two classes, which was a delightful experience to meet local and international students. I spent some time in the university library, looking through old books and documents from the Japanese colonial period of Korea. Technically, it was before South and North Korea were formed. A more correct way to describe the time is between the fall of Chosen dynasty and liberation from Japan, which conincides with the end of the World War II.
On the third floor of Yonsei University library, I found a critical mistranslation in one of the signage. <Dominated books> should’ve been <Donated books>. Considering how the university takes pride in its global rankings and international diversity, I can’t stop to think this must have been a librarian’s dark humor. In fact there are documents of colonial domination through the ages in this land, the Chinese imperialism, Japanese occupation, ongoing American military presence. The story of dominated books here is not only a collection of South Korean victim’s sufferings. Recently I’ve been noticing South Korean activists, writers and artists to acknowledge the past and present colonialism and war crimes that our elders and our fellow citizens have committed, including but not limited to South Korean troops during the Vietnam War, and more contemporary forms of military/energy/industrial complex that South Korean government and corporations embark on the Global South, South East Asia and Central Asia are some of the regions with the most immediate impact.
The complex web of the colonizers and colonized mirrors the relationships between humans and machines. Science Fiction of Asia, both the types of Japanese Sci-Fi and animation that I grew up with, like Galaxy Express 999, and more contemporary Sci-Fi literature from South Korean authors like Kim Cho-yup. In one of her most well known books, humans fall in love with humanoids, including those whose body and decision making capacities have been enhanced with robots. In the unclear line between what is human and non-human, we ask ourselves the agency we have in shaping our sense of the reality. Recently, I’ve discovered the rich culture of Sci-Fi literature from North Korea, which happens to be one of the few genres that writers have agency to have critical voices. It’s interesting to think about Sci-Fi as a record of our collective imaginations past and present.
Lastly, I’ve been working on writing and drawing with new methods and collaborators. I work with a graphic and spatial designer Beomjum Kim, who created 3D environments based on my work.
Some of which are available online in this article, Where would you like to place your pet giraffe? and in a book format for THIS TOO IS A MAP, AN ANTHOLOGY.
I wrap up my note at this place. During the lecture, I speak of other projects, including Ecological Futures, Forever Gallery and future works.
Side note. I admit the two artists I’ve introduced are both Asian men. I don’t think I’m inspired by their work because of their identity as Asian Men. However, there must be some aspects of their lived experiences, one as an Asian American living in East Coast of the U.S. and another as a South Asian living in South Asia (although Singapore is an exception in terms of it’s relationship to Capitalism and authoritarianism) that inform their practices, and that I relate to. There are numbers of female and gender nonconforming artists that I follow with great interests, and have collaborated with. This particular lecture focuses on these two artists who have directly influenced me because of their systems of practice. I shall write another note to focus on other artists from the region and diaspora who are not men.
