People who overtly insist on the proliferation of digital, Technology, accelerated from the end of the past century, and the “visual bond” of the present are anticipating the new sense of the mainstream who will reclaim the future by resetting the wasteland-like reality. Others analyze the flow of reemergence and merging of artistic forms of the past century in contemporary art, and claim that this is the new mechanism of the digital communication network diverged from the ideological customs of the past. The new century, vainly started severed from the future, focuses on its famine and uncertain “reality.” In other words, if the past century instigated intense controversy about the “existence” hidden behind a veil, the beginning of the new century rather encourages novel sense and independence that is able to reclaim oneself in the unsealed reality like a lifeless black hole. Therefore, I can start this discussion without hesitation, on novel visual sentiment or sense, which is something anyone who experienced the weighty waves that rattled the Korean art world in the 2010s.
In this sense, Intuition 2017, which is a second group exhibition after Intuition in 2010 Hakgojae Gallery is holding, seems like an attempt to assess the visual bond of the new century facing the deteriorated reality, and the lasting values created by it. Six artists are participating in Intuition 2017, and five of them were born in the 1980s. However, this fact does not act as a category depicting a certain generation’s uniqueness. This fact rather presents a possibility of novel perception of the mainstream as the contemporary sensibility subordinated in this period. In this sense, it is worthy to compare Mario Perniola’s argument, “the proposal of oneself as a sensible object and accepting an object as a sensible being is the novel experience of contemporary sense,” and Hito Steyerl’s argument, the images created with this sense is not a reproduction of reality, but “the fragment of reality.”
The expression, “erased path” Alain Badiou borrowed from Yve Bonnefoy’s poem implies the passionate scene of the 20th century racing towards the absence of the meaning of reality. Badiou claims that the irony of having to overcome hope under the state of absence as the essential idea of the 20th century. He also states that the 20th century was “a prison as well as the dawn of a new day,” referring Mandelstam’s poem. And the beginning of a new day is accomplished when “the stiff knees of everyday are gathered by the pipe (art).” It is the 21st century now. The new days have become grey ruins, and then became the grounds of our generation. Perhaps the century’s tragedy has repeated itself. We will hear the pipe of reality, on the erased paths, in “waiting itself,” not promises of the future nor innocent nostalgia, standing on the threshold of piteous yet novel days.
Excerpt from “Intuition 2017: About Novelty” l Soyeon Ahn, Art Critic
