Sinking or Resurfacing: Revolving around the Sinking of MV Sewol

——The aesthetic embodiment of pain and comfort in Lee Insung’s “Island”

Lee Insung, Island(2015), Acrylic on canvas, 60.6cm X 72.7cm

1. What is hiding underneath the “Island”?

Three promising native Korean artists, LEE Insung, JEON Hyunsun and CHOI Sujin, smash the quasi-dichotomy between reality and fantasy with paintings in their very first group exhibition “Hay in a Needle Stack” in Hong Kong (Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong 2021a), curated by Korean Culture Center in Hong Kong (KCC). This two-month exhibition from 28th April to 26th June in 2021 is part of KCC’s “Korean Young Artists Series”, aiming to support the emerging artists of South Korea in the international art scene. The series has come to its fourth year and contained the spillage of provocative and pioneering ideas from the younger generation of creative practitioners, to plant a seed for the Korean era of YBAs (Tate 2021b) to come.

Borrowing from the traditional idiom “A needle in a haystack” which signifies the extreme difficulty in spotting or finding something, a little wordplay has been done on the sequence of wordings to name this exhibition “Hay in a Needle Stack”. It is modified from the traditional sayings of “A needle in a desert” or “A needle in the sea” to better deliver the message that the exhibits’ essence is hidden in the art world’s mix of imagination and real world waiting to be discovered.

The twist on this existing idiom is comparable to how Surrealism subversively harnessed the power of texts in generating provocative and disruptive dynamics. As Marcel Duchamp once said, “As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good” (Vila-Matas 2007, 50). When language is central to reasoning, wordplay stands with surrealism that upholds irrationality and unconsciousness.

The following exhibition review with multi-layered visual analysis is critical. First, general introductions to the selected artist Lee Insung as well as relevant styles and the movements he gets involved will be provided. More significantly, considering reading methodologies of the socially-engaged landscape painting, the French intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan will be employed to resurface how “Island” aesthetically delivers console to the traumatised in the Sinking of MV Sewol by decoding their pain and sorrow transformed into abstract elements in the work of art. According to Lacan’s 1963 essay “Kant avec Sade”, the interconnectivity between these two masters suggests the possibility of Foucault and Lacan should come in a pair, particularly in writing art criticism. Also, it should be noticeable that, Lacanian interpretative reading was recently proved applicable on Eastern philosophies such as Confucianism (Wu 2021, 187), which is the cornerstone to nearly all facets of Korean society.

2. Lee Insung: A Painter of “Jeong”

Born in 1982, Lee Insung attained his BFA and MFA in Painting from Chosun University in Gwangju (eazel 2021), the very heart of Korean traditional culture and the exchange nexus of contemporary Korean art in recent decades as the hosting city of Gwangju Biennale. Lee’s richness and delicacy in sentiments are undeniably attributable to his strong root in his motherland, a nation that highly upholds the idea of “Jeong”. “Jeong” (Chung & Cho 2001, 1-3), a complex term for non-Korean speakers to comprehend, refers to the strong emotional and psychological bonding between Koreans that values not only the inward sharing of other's pleasure and struggle but also the outward expression of affection, love, sympathy, and care etc., to others.

However, this exclusive Korean terminology and emotional-driven bonding chimes in intriguingly with Carl Jung’s collective unconsciousness, when the latter perceives one’s deeply-seated feelings and beliefs are genetically inborn and shared among the community of the same ancestral experiences and memories (Jung 2014, 275). This inherent connectivity is underpinned by Korean ethnic and cultural homogeneity, and is particularly manifested in “Island”, the only exhibited painting of Lee without any human figure. With soft strokes, hazy contour lines, and the orange dots without clear implication, Lee sets up the scene with peaceful otherworldliness. The soft and loose brushstrokes in unitarily linear movement and the use of complementary colours first produce a harmonious and peaceful note. As for the subject matter, the island is then suggestive of a celestial final destination not only because it is the vanishing point within the equal tri-sectional composition, but also for the surrounding layer of glow. It is self-illuminating without any reasonable source of lighting. Regarding those eye-catching serial orange polka dots that spread over the sea surface, “They are blank to contain the audience's thoughts and emotions. My artworks are given meaning by the audiences to be completed and sublimated” (Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong, 2021b). Absence on the canvas is never meaningless, and it cannot help but keep us wondering what the artist is trying to convey and imply.

From Lee's perspective, he interprets them as an emblem of something we have been longing for in our mind, but the highest respect is still paid to the audience's autonomy in interpretation because he includes us rather than leaves us as mere spectators. What the orange polka-dots represent might vary to everyone. After the Sinking of MV Sewol, young survivors openly asked for remembrance for their bereaved classmates while the bereaved families and journalists preserved with the belief that the truth shall not sink with Sewol (Choi 2020, Shin 2021) in their own ways. Survivors are still earnestly roaring “Please do not forget about us!” 40 years after the Gwangju Massacre. In the end, such historical trauma, even if it was not personally experienced, would more or less prompt us from desiring for the same to seeing the same in Lee’s “Island”. In the aftermath of tragedy and atrocity, the living would always long for truth, remembrance, apologies and comfort in the rest of their lives.

3. Minjung Art and Social Monument

“Artists don’t create society, they reflect it”, comedian Ben Elton’s incisive words on art and society proved to us that there is no way for one to be humorous but not wise enough. When art is born within the diverse facets of our society, contemporary art, in particular, is pervasively socio-politically driven. Hence, there is no way “Island” could be examined without taking its social conditions into account.

Reading this painting from a South Korean perspective dated back to 2015, the year shortly after the Sinking of MV Sewol where 250 were high school students on their way to a school trip (Choe 2019), there is a very strong relevance of this painting to the poignant accident. Since then, South Koreans have never stopped mourning and grieving for the deceased and as well as condemning the government for their mishandling and negligence. The maritime disaster traumatises the whole population for they share the harrowing pain and anger of the bereaved families, as a collective unit.

With such preliminary understanding of the relevant social background, “Island” can be perceived as a visual monument of the grief-stricken tragedy for its subtle similitudes with the actual tragic scene, from the "absent" ferry that rests under the water to the orange polka dots that symbolically represent the floating corpses and predominantly, the seemingly unreachable island at the center back that resembles the initial final destination of MV Sewol, Jeju Island.

Placing “Island” in Korean precarious moments, its correlation to the Sinking of MV Sewol proves to us its potential as a socially engaged painting. This assertion is further reinforced by its aesthetic lineage with Minjung art, a movement that emerged in the 1980s in the wake of the Gwangju Massacre (Tate 2021a) on how the painting likewise shares the intense emotions and socio-political aesthetic of expressing deep sorrow and critical opinions towards dark moments in modern Korea.

Figure 1. Song Chang, 꿈 (Dream), 2013, oil on canvas, 259 × 388cm, Courtesy to Hakgojae Gallery and the artist

When the predecessors such as the prominent Minjung artist Song Chang includes marks of industrialisation of the time in “꿈(Dream)” (TheArtro 2017) (Figure 1) to speak up on the arduous life of people and their atrocious living environment with the use of visually arousing colours and techniques that resemble traditional water and ink painting, Lee likewise presents us with the seascape of Jeju Island which subtly visualises the Sinking of MV Sewol, however, with modification and symbolisation. Not another round of accusation against the incompetent Park administration, the mind-comforting coordination of hues and the wholly western-style of brushwork offer a sense of peacefulness to Lee’s painting that to a certain extent may console the public on this national trauma. Nuances of iconography and techniques differ the two generations when their disparate attitudes in the midst of nationwide hardship are unarguably the most salient in differentiation, condemnation versus consolation, making one wonder will the latter evolve to be the new core rationale of Minjung art one day.

4. Absence of the “Ship of Fools”

The painterly isle on the image of “Island” is indeed a heaven in the artist’s eyes for how Brunelleschi's method of perspective is applied ironically by positioning the island at the center back on the canvas as the single vanishing point (Edgerton 1973, 195). Hence, in Renaissance aesthetics, the vanishing point is exceptionally reserved for the most significant subject, namely the divine and biblical subject. On top of that, we should also acknowledge the prevalent acceptance of religious-driven aesthetics in South Korea is inseparable from its strong and longstanding Christian share of South Korea’s population (Hackett et al. 2012, 49) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Christian Share of South Kore’s Population

Following this logic, it is straightforward for us to interpret the island as the imagined heaven Lee dedicated to all the poor souls suffering from the national tragedy for the sacredness furtively radiated in the painting of distinctive features of Renaissance art, which remind us of the Christianity-driven paintings and artworks that were prevailing back in Renaissance.

Figure 3. Hieronimus Bosch, Ship of Fools, 1510-15. Oil on wood, 58 × 33 cm. Courtesy to Louvre.

Ship has transcended borders and times to be a never-aging iconography in art and literature, and the iconography of “Ship of Fools” undisputedly masters the recurrent motif on the ideas of survival and isolation and was vividly performed by the namesake Renaissance painting by Hieronymus Bosch (Figure 3). The historical origin of "Ship of Fools", in general, is widely debatable but the assertion that such trope is derived from the expulsion and exclusion of the unwanted in medieval time is nevertheless upon universal agreement. According to Foucault, who mentioned "Ship of Fools" (Foucault 1998, 15-41) in his 1961 publication “Madness and Civilization”, madmen were expelled along the water of Europe following the initial isolation measure against leprosy in the middle age. Clearly, the image of "Ship of Fools" has been linked to serving humankind against disaster and pandemic, probably originating from Noah's Ark (some also consider it as the archetype of “museum”) constructed for the escaping from the catastrophic flood in Genesis.

Here, our discussion that the painting “Island” depicts or articulates the ship of fools cannot sound any more absurd when there is no ship at all on the canvas. Yet, one should never underestimate the idea of absence in the world of visual languages. “Island” is an aesthetic sarcasm to the tragedy, precisely reflecting the sinking of the vessel and the disabling of the “life-saving” function in both MV Sewol and other rescue boats.

On the other side of the coin, pondering its metaphorical meaning, the “ship of fools” is also inherently entangled with the idea of isolation and it is nowhere more intense than in Island. When “Ship of Fools” illustrates a state of quarantine from the rest of the society, “Island” reveals being secluded from the living. Madmen on the ship of fools may land someday, but for the MV Sewol’s victims, some of them are no longer reachable or forever missing (Bang 2018).

Figure 4. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Oil on canvas, 318 × 276 cm. Courtesy to Museo Nacional Del Prado.

The correlation between the Island and the Sinking of MV Sewol is hardly convincing when the elements such as the floating dead and the sunken ferry pointing towards the tragedy are apparently absent on the pictorial presentation, as well as the artist’s gaze. However, one should take note that absence is not in dichotomy with presence and is absolutely not equivalent to the state of invisible. Furthermore, in order to foreground our assertion, Foucault’s commentary on “Las Meninas” (Figure 4) in “The Order of Things” which highlighted the idea of the presence of the absent should be referenced to facilitate our understanding of how Lee’s invisible thought and sentiments towards the Sinking is made visible on the canvas.

“Representation, freed finally from the relation that offers itself as representation in its pure form. (Foucault 2001, 18). “Las Meninas” with Foucault’s interpretation demonstrated how interpreters can fill the void with what is absent in the work without confining to what is present. Three gazes were examined by Foucault in discussing Las Meninas, reminding us of the importance of gaze in interpretation. Is the absence of any concrete human body equivalent to the absence of gaze in “Island”? Comparing with “Las Meninas”, the painter’s gaze in “Island” is not visually entailed, giving us an illusion that it might be absent. When the spectator’s gaze overlaps with the models’ gaze in “Las Meninas” as proposed by Foucault, the spectator’s gaze this time collides with the painter’s gaze in Island. In this respect, Lee puts us in his standing point, seeing what he is seeing right at the seaside, which such perspective is best understood by paralleling the first-person narrative in literature.

Applying Foucault’s philosophy of interpretation to “Island”, one should resort beyond what is present in making sense of the painting. The corpses and the MV Sewol, the two seemingly essential identifiers of the accident are simultaneously absent and “present”. The former is “present” in a sense that dead bodies are transformed into relatively obscure symbol of orange polka-dots in accordance with the eastern taboo that rejects the explicit depiction of death, corpses in particular. The gulf of eastern and western aesthetics in terms of illustrating death comes clear in “Liberty Leading the People” by Eugène Delacroix, of which sacrificed bodies of the soldiers and citizens are painted with details in a very straightforward manner. The sunken ferry, on the other hand, is also “present” when we make association to the actual situation of the Sinking of MV Sewol. Everything has sunk to the bottom of the sea in the poignant disaster, leaving the sunken ship hardly represented on the canvas but “present” under the water.

Magritte, who closely subscribed to Foucault’s arguments on art, once wrote to him, “But painting interposes a problem: there is the thought that sees and can be visibly described. “Las Meninas” is the visible image of Velásquez’s invisible thought? Then is the invisible sometimes visible? on condition that thought is constituted exclusively of visible images” (Macey 2019, 189).

In my point of view, Magritte’s comment on Las Meninas cannot be more accurate in describing “Island”. The heavenized Jeju seascape where dead bodies and the ferry are either transformed or kept away, which should only exist in Lee’s invisible imagination but is now visibly described from Lee’s first-person point of view. In short, such a dynamic between presence and “absence” reinforces the imaginary implication of “Island” I have foregrounded above.

5. Death Drive

“Island” at this stage seemingly consoles South Korean by abstractly depicting the peaceful afterlife of victims heading to the restful afterworld. Yet, the artist’s process of creation itself is actually no different from self-destruction, which Sigmund Freud would conclude as death drive from a psychoanalysis perspective. The father of modern psychology was once confused by why surviving veterans of World War I repeatedly dream of the traumatic experiences from the war that would “bring him back into the situation of his accident” (Freud 1975, 7), which was extensively contradictory to the pleasure principle.

Nearly a hundred years apart, “Island” embodies Freudian death drive against the social background of a heart-rending tragedy that is equally traumatic as the World War. Here, the process of painting “Island” is already a demonstration of Freudian death drive through the act of re-enactment. Artistically re-enacting and replaying the sinking tragedy is undeniably a self-destructive repetition for the artist when he “repeats the repressed material as a contemporary experience rather than remembering it as something belonging to the past” (Freud 1975, 12), closely interweaving oneself with the tragedy and such unconscious tendency perhaps can also be traced in other South Koreans in grief and mourning.

Aestheticisation is not solely meant for console. The sorrow and grief from the sinking accident still linger and will not be easily canceled out by the heavenly narrative articulated under the Foucauldian perspective on text and “absence”. As mentioned above, the process of painting “Island” is an embodiment of Freudian death drive in Lee. Thus, to present a more comprehensive analysis, another consideration on death drive here defined by the Freudian reader Jacques Lacan will act as a multiplier to how the artist aestheticises the Sinking of MV Sewol with the highest regard to its tragic facet in the canvas as to amplify the sorrow.

Being situated in the symbolic of his topological model Borromean knot, Lacanian death drive differentiates itself from Freudian death drive for its embedded culturality and sociality, but “is never a biological question” (Lacan 1977, 102). In this sense, the embodiment of Lacanian death drive will never leave signifiers behind (Lacan 1998, 213), which is central to the constitution of subject and meaning in the image-based symbolic realm. On top of that, all the floating implicit signifiers can indeed be “considered as the subject to the so-called death drive” when “every drive is virtually a death drive” (Lacan 1966, 275). As a key successor of Freudian lineage, Lacan did not entirely reject the original conception of death drive of the tendency to restore back to the inorganic state but perceived such tendency as culturally and socially constructed rather than biologically given in the seminar of 1954–5 (Evans 1996, 33). As a result, the dots can be taken as the visual representation of victims returning to the inorganic state under cultural and social influences (Evan 1996, 34) from a Lacanian perspective. “We don’t want to die! We don’t want to die!”, a student shouted when the ferry was leaning uncontrollably proved no biological tendency of returning to the inorganic state in passengers (Choe 2014). No one knows what happened after the leaked videos, messages, and phone calls, but from the survivors’ testimonies, we were able to know that some victims performed death drive established under critical environments.

Put it clearly, it was their socially constructed sense of responsibility that rendered them prioritising others’ safety before themselves under the threat of death just like how Park Ji-young, a young crew member, refused to get out of the ship before making sure that all passengers were out and pushed shocked passengers toward the exit even when the water was up to her chest (BBC 2014) and Ko Chang-suk, the unaccounted teacher victim who could have escaped earlier but stayed behind to take care of his students till his last breath (Kim 2017). “The field trip was my idea and the death of the students was my fault. I will take all the responsibility.”, the vice-principal of Ansan's Danwon High School Kang Minkyul committed suicide three days after being rescued and marked his overwhelming guilt to his students and staff (Jang & Park 2014). Even survived the tragedy, the survival guilt derived from his role as a leader to the school still haunted the living and pushed him to commit suicide.

Figure 5. Signifying Chain

Proceeding the signifying chain under Lacanian death drive, the repetitive and static orange polka-dots in “Island” are perceived as signifiers (S) to the corpses of those who willingly submitted themselves to death (S’) (Figure 5). The orange polka-dots are inorganic to impossibly perform any autonomous movement. Yet, Lee intentionally allocates the dots along the invisible path towards the island at the center back obscurely suggesting a direction for the dots. If we accept the dot as the symbol of victims who have passed away, I argue that there is a set of progressive significations embodying the Lacanian death drive. In the first dimension, S is the island and S’ is the mother’s breast in the signifying chain. This signification is first visually valid for how the island alludes to a side breast of oval shape.

Figure 6. Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead, 1883

Nevertheless, Lacan remarked death drive as the nostalgia for a lost harmony which is identical to our desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (Lacan 1984, 35). That is to say, when the dots are facing towards the island and perhaps moving towards it, which is an alternative to the gesture of returning to the mother’s breast, they are committing Lacanian death drive. One will then wonder, what exactly makes the dots move towards the island? In order words, what could be the reason for the victims submitting to the death drive? The same question also arises in spectators upon Arnold Böcklin’s “The Isle of the Dead” (Figure 6), which Sigmund Freud once hung a replica on the wall of his counseling room, on its comparably mind-blowing iconography, when the person covered in white cloth and the boatman are willingly heading to the isle strongly suggestive of death. Integrating the first dimension, the subsequent signification between the mother’s breast (S) and Park Guen-hye (S’) (Figure 5) helps explain what is behind the Lacanian death drive embodied through the island and the dots.

The bluish sea surface is the last signifier of Lacanian death drive-in “Island”. Lacan expanded Freudian narcissism with the Greek mythology of Narcissus (Taherifard & Eslamieh 2017, 186-187) and further linked death drive with the “Narcissistic Suicidal Aggression” (Lacan 1966, 174, 187). It is the mirror that constructs the subject’s ego, and it is also the mirror that can drag the subject into self-destruction when faced with disintegration between the spectated image and the subject’s real body.

The reflection available in the seawater is no different from the natural “mirror” Narcissus drowned in at last. In this sense, the sea surface (S) in Island signifies the media covering the aftermath of the sinking tragedy(S’) (Figure 5). The media arguably has functioned as a spectated image to Kim Gwan-hong, capturing Kim as a civilian diver who has voluntarily participated in the after-search of the Sewol, even though it is not an actual mirror.

The identification of this so-called heroic image sustained Kim’s devotion to the sinking and he even shared news about the accident one hour before his death on Facebook, which one can conclude as an erotic attraction to the spectated image available from the media. Yet, this spectated image was contradictory to the real-life Kim who was deeply tormented by “the guilt for not saving the children.” and the state’s betrayal (Lee & Parl 2016). Such discrepancy eventually pushed Kim to commit suicide, registering the aggressive nature of narcissism in Lacanian death drive.

6. Curatorial Summary

In the final part of this exhibition review, critical assessment of curatorial strategy is focused on. As we have discussed previously the relationship between art, gaze and power, which is central to Foucault’s ideology, and art museum is one of the institutions Foucault would find disciplinary power residing in, resembling prisons same as factories, schools, and hospitals, etc (Foucault 1995, 228). Museums establish power through the shaping of knowledge through saying (discourse) and seeing (visual technologies) (Hetherington 2015, 21), and such power is always directed on the body (Foucault 1995, 25) which implies visitors in accordance. KCC, indeed, is no different from a museum and perhaps generates greater disciplinary power regarding its official status to Korean culture.

A question thus arises, in what way this exhibition “Hay in a Needle Stack” disciplines the visitors, in particular, in what way “Island” as one of the exhibits exercises the disciplinary power? Letting go of the sophisticated interpretation, the visual representation of the Sewol sinking produces relevant knowledge on the tragedy in a straightforward term, from the sunken vessel, the missing victims to the absence of rescue, irresponsible and selfish adults, and also the incapable administration. In the end, beyond merely bringing visual pleasure and emotional comfort to visitors, this painting aims to discipline the spectators on remembrance by aesthetically recalling their memories of the tragedy with the knowledge presented on the plane. “Please don’t forget them.” (Park 2014), the disciplinary power exercised in “Island” supposedly answers the call of the survivors and the bereaved.

However, the curators of “Hay in a Needle Stack” arguably fail to activate the disciplinary power of “Island”. Under the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, power is constituted through knowledge (Foucault 1995, 27-28) and thus a subject could never be disciplined without acknowledging the knowledge produced in the painting. Yet, the insufficient supporting documentation and text on the Sinking of MV Sewol is like a broken bridge to the visitors and eventually weakens the disciplinary power of “Island”, as well as the whole exhibition as the lack of context also applies to other exhibits. To expand my elaboration from a set of Lacanian theorems, when language is the signifying medium (Olivier 2004, 5), the lack of language in providing basic context for one to comprehend “Island” implies the malfunction in the symbolic order and subsequently the collapse of the Borromean knot (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Borromean Knot (An illustration of the interdependence of the three orders: the real, the symbolic and the imaginary)

Curatorially speaking on the three registers, while the visuality of exhibits satisfies the imaginary order in the triad, which is “the realm of image and imagination, deception and lure.” (Evans 1996, 84), the fall of symbolic order preserves the real. As the register of impossibility and unknowability (Evans 1996, 163) that resists symbolization to an absolute extent (Lacan 1988, 66), the real can be understood as the visitors’ unclear and impossible to rationalise the state of mind in looking at “Island” without any supporting material and text. Here, without a well-executed curatorial arrangement, visitors leave with a complex of emotions but never the reminder of remembering the sinking tragedy.

Putting away the telescope on KCC and “Island”, the statement that “Museums as Socially Responsible Institutions” is rarely refuted but more concerns have been placed on the questions of “extent”. “Not to punish less, but to punish better.”, Foucault marked the shift in the western penal system, from public torture and execution to the discipline on the soul (Foucault 1995, 16). It has been more subtle and penetrative, but simultaneously making us less conscious of the power/knowledge and subsequently discouraging us from resistance (Pickett 1996, 458). Considering the inherent subtleness and implicitness of aesthetic presentation, are art museums favourable or capable of promoting resistance against social oppression? Or, the ethical and social responsibilities of art museums actually lie elsewhere? These critical questions come to me during my evaluation of the curatorial performance of KCC and they are definitely worth thorough discussion in the near future for their salient implications to the inextricable relation between the art world and our society.

“Artist always comes before psychoanalysis” (Brillaud 2017, 35), this saying by the Lacanian psychoanalyst Daniele Brillaud corresponds to the paramount finding in this research paper that artworks and art exhibitions announce and cure the trauma in our society. In Lacan’s account, “the traumatic event is the encounter with the real” (Evans 1996, 25). When the traumatised group of people are suffocated by the unrepresentable and impossible to be integrated unconscious after a traumatic event, artworks and art exhibitions are there to enter the psychic to counterbalance the real’s “traumatic quality” (Evans 1996, 163). Metaphorically speaking, “Island” can be the bandage, or the “fourth ring” in Lacanian sense to the traumatised Korean population in despair, grief as well as anger but it might never reach the “patient”. When the exhibition is the clinic and “Island” exposes the trauma, the lack of intervention of societal materials in curating is identical to treating a patient without any past medical history and pathological assessment to the real cause of suffering. Ultimately, art exhibitions can be an alternative clinic for healing to occur, but its treatment will only be successful with the profoundly narrative curatorship.

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