Confluence

Art critic and Independent curator Valentina Buzzi

 

Confluence
[from confluere, latin | to flow together; an act or process of merging]

 

It is perhaps the most ancient way of seeing things, to regard humans as dialectic beings: driven by unconscious desires, molded by reason, we often reach a synthesis that derives from a dualistic challenge. These two dimensions of the human psyche, and a tension towards their resolution, have influenced the history of art in the most various manners, sometimes seeking conflict, other times tending to harmonic possibilities. In the work of Jungwon Phee, the desire for a resolution starts from the acknowledgment of the coexistence of two respective semantic realms and their aesthetic counterparts: the black component, where the self floats absorbed in the pure abstraction of negative space; and the intense matière, where the consciousness emerges, elaborates and channels a process of growth. It immediately appears evident that there is a conceptual neat separation between the two elements, one that seems to represent a controlled need for distinction. Yet, it is in the very cracks, layerings, and aggregations of matière that a dynamic, perhaps unconscious, desire of blending emerges.

If combined, these two elements represent an ongoing process of elaboration on the memories of the self as well as of others, one that the artist invites us to take part in with our own perspective. It is then in the encounter with the spectator, that the synthetical process transforms dichotomous conjunction into an act of merging. As Jacques Lacan¹⁾  would describe in his psychoanalytic interpretation of art, the act of looking at the painting (also known as gaze) allows the encounter between the artist and the spectato the absence left in the former, incorporated in the brushstrokes as action, becomes an evident presence in the latter, and vice versa: “I who speak, I identify you with the object which you yourself lack”.²⁾  Thus, in Jungwon Phee’s work two processes happen; the unconscious encounters its own elaboration at the moment the black color meets the matière, the subject sees itself at the moment the artwork meets the gaze of the spectator. Meaning is thus created through a process which we may call Confluence. These two actions are phenomenological thanks to their synthesis: not only do they resolve the most ancient dilemma - that of the dualism of man - but they also proceed in creating a new paradigmatic view which doesn’t lack to acknowledge the chaos (in a Nietzschian sense), but rather emphasize its importance at the moment that a resolution is suggested.

The act of Confluenceis thus possible because Phee’s work brings his art back to the origin of things, both aesthetically and conceptually it offers us a look into the essential as it is freed from anything superficial. The work becomes a mirror of our purest status, not as non-corrupted, but rather as naked, liberated from anything that is outside of ourselves, represented in the most fundamental, primitive abstraction. On a personal as well as a collective scale, it becomes a symbol of humanity’s own desire to investigate its monumental archetypes. Through this path of growth, Confluence is then an act of becoming where our own singularity meets the universal struggle of humanity dealing with the mimesis of its own unconscious, memories, emotions. The need for an audience further develops mimesis into methexis: it exists thanks to the encounter with the other, whether it is the painting and its viewer, or the subject and its representation. To quote the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, in the artwork “there is an interweaving that is as fleeting as it is insistent - of body, spirit, life, death, man and god, light and texture, color and curvature, representation with the unrepresentable”.³⁾  The moment in which there is an acceptance of this endless dualism, there is a possibility of its resolution, to transcend its temporality and meet unconditional freedom in a very Kantian manner. The eternal challenge of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac⁴⁾  find their synthesis in the realization of their mutual necessity, in their ability to modify each other, intensifying each other, so that they reveal their essence as a whole.⁵⁾  Hence, Confluence as an act of becoming is endlessly transformative, reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s vision of beauty,⁶⁾  which embodies the same salvific process that the Greeks would call thaumaturgic.⁷⁾

 

 

¹⁾ Jacques Lacan (1995), Seminar XI: Lacan’s four fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York, State University of New York Press

 ²⁾ Jacques Lacan in George Dimos (1987), A Liberating Use of Lacan's Analysis of Western Painting, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/366121

 ³⁾ Jean-Luc Nancy (2005), The ground of the Image, New York: New York University Press. p. 118

 ⁴⁾ In “The birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche refers with Apollonian and Dyionisiac to the two dialectic principles of ancient Greek Culture. Whereas the former represents beauty and order, the latter incorporates a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime dominated by Chaos. Nietzsche believed that the combination of the two would originate the highest form of art and tragic drama. For a deeper understanding see Friedrich Nietzsche (1994), The birth of tragedy, London: Penguin Classics

 ⁵⁾ This interpretation of the Nietzschian concepts of Apollionian and Dyionisiac derives from a reading of Benjamin Bennet (1979), Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, PMLA, Vol. 94, No. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 420-433

 ⁶⁾ In one of his most famous books, “The Idiot” (1869), which tells the story of a man that incorporates the concept of good (or god in Christian terms), Dostoevsky speaks of the salvific property of art and beauty within the realm of aesthetic and moral.

 ⁷⁾ In ancient Greek writings, the word Thaumaturgia (θαυματουργία) would refer to the capacity of an object or magician to “work miracles''. The word has been used in Christianity in referral to the work of saints, and has been translated in buddhism with the concept of “spiritual power” (神通 Jinzū)