[Argoul]
Published January 26, 2018 - Source
By Argoul, Translated from French
Gina Kim is a video artist—in other words, an artist whose pencil is a camera. She sees the world only through the eyepiece of the lens. Which is to say: her hometown, the capital of South Korea, appears strange to her now, having left it at the age of 23 to go to the United States. She returns, and nothing is as it once was—except perhaps the oyster smell in certain neighborhoods or the shouts of children in another. As for the buildings, they are either in ruins and undergoing renovation, dating from the Japanese colonial period, or they’ve been rebuilt entirely in glass, so that all you see in them is yourself.
Faces of Seoul is a video in praise of the city she returned to in 2001 to accompany her father. Fragments of film, painstakingly gathered despite the rain, the glass, and the constant refocusing, eventually became a documentary in 2009, in English and Korean. In 2017, the author reimagines it as an illustrated book, with text drawn from the documentary: one page in Korean with its French translation, plus a full English translation at the end.
The images, photographed off a video screen, show their scan lines. They’re taken so close-up, or in such dim lighting, that they could be from anywhere. In other words, the images in this book hold little interest for the average reader. Must one have seen the 2009 documentary to appreciate the 2017 book? Publishing in this way is a bit odd. Is it a matter of being able to return to the words, as the preface writer suggests—something that’s impossible in video? Perhaps memory is at stake here: memory that believes it recalls, even when reality says otherwise. But neither the jargon-heavy preface by Dominique Bluher nor the wordy postface by Jean-Louis Poitevin offers the key to appreciating this 'experience' of a book.
Let’s say it’s “art house,” meant for insiders who speak the same language. The author states, on page 51, that: “The image only confirms how impossible it is for us to understand what it represents.” She’s speaking of Buddha, for whom all is impermanence; but she might just as well be speaking of Seoul, which keeps changing as it adapts to modernity. Glass creates a sterile landscape.