Statement of Purpose

I work with moving image and sound for their qualities as intimate, sculptural forms. They can be experienced and shared widely, without scarcity, and in many contexts - potentially with the fullness of one's presence and spirit. It exists and then not at all, much like a sunbeam and birdsong. This interest has followed me always. Conventional, albeit outdated 3D computer graphics software and sound synthesis interest me primarily for similar reasons - as spatial and material mediums that are intrinsically without, if anything but austere mathematics of geometry and frequency. Although my process is not without frictions - at times feeling like manipulating objects inside a foggy and viscid glove box - it's an approach that, so far, has accommodated my wish for starting with absolute emptiness. It allows me to attempt at zero symbolic and lingual texture; to see what appears in the wake of interrogating and rejecting what I might've ambiently taken (or mistaken) as adequate description. I find poetry in the way that the forms, from a lack of the usual translational drag of physicality, pulls from inside itself and myself. With both image and sound I think primarily as a painter and sculptor, working with immaterial events that do not lend themselves well to commodity - to being ascribed use or exchange value - at least without some resistance or skepticism.

To attempt to do so is undesirable for me. I trade labor for wages so that art would not have to perform; so that I would not have to barter with my self over "what it means" if it did. Career artists might liken their efforts to that of an under-compensated (cultural) worker and align themselves with a peripheral precariat position, but this is usually a false parity on the grounds that they were ever able to choose the means to their livelihoods in the first place. Oddly enough, it's an awkward and decided narrative standard in common art practices that the arts themselves have largely been determined by one or more of the paradigms of a global north: their contexts, purposes, participants, audiences, standards, sensibilities, valuations. It's true, but the analysis has always needed to go further and address them all at once. The socioeconomics and class dynamics of arts education as business model, institutional access as either daycare or migration (or, more critically, both), funding, the resulting and ever-expanding and international reserve army of "labor", its speculative market forces, the effects of mass (social) media, and the inextricably dominant socio-cultural hegemon are each mechanisms of a primary contradiction which delimit for the sake of a specific mirage of western bourgeois society. To then engage in the art world as it stands is to demand shares of this reality, or, at the very least, to be beholden to it and seek legitimization through its processions.

Resembling their entrepeneurial counterparts, many artists absolutize bare-life and labor in an alienating and individualizing competition with themselves and each other. A flux between an excess of capital and self-exploitation in pursuit of a nebulous kind of freedom creates a canonized archetype of the artist - of one sifting the wreckage of a predominantly established human experience. This is one carved out from centuries' worth of violent and industrialized colonizations with the rooting of culture and knowledge production at its imperial metropoles. Established and burgeoning art spaces often contribute to a knife's edge of neocolonial extraction and performance, choosing to justify a twice-alienated labor through discursive analyses of free-floating signifiers (as opposed to central relations of power). Much is then surrendered to the individual, and the creation of new reference points, objects, and places is relegated to be contextualized by the self-same forces that largely destroy them.

This is all to say very little of social media, which has become a working artist's job requirement, or last bastion. Largely palliative and consumer-focused, its best use-case is what works against the designs of the platform and its advertisers - when some of its users force its other users to see the world for what it is. It's a strange idea for me to struggle for visibility in the same space that very actively suppresses far more urgent voices of our time in the interests of a privatized west's inferno of the same. Yet, a "web presence" is a means to an end, and the end itself. Saying nothing (either in words or working sensibilities) is often seen as either paralysis or transcendence, but it's merely compatible with being online. To be detached is to not be so boring as to notice the world around you and take a stand for something - but also the pace of the feed, trend, news cycle, etc. disincentivizes. To make work primarily contextualized by social media is to compartmentalize yourself and labor as something to be consumed as quickly as possible, and to optimize your efforts for maximum legibility within the confines of a scroll and an alienated attention localized to where you've been recommended. Simultaneously, to see oneself as navigating this by curling inward into any subcultural fixation (reactionary to the wrong things, no less) severed from the broader human experience is an equal farce. So for now I continue to use the archaic container of a personal website, because there is also nothingness here - no incentives, yet also no disincentives.

For these reasons, I believe in the importance of a historically and materially-conscious approach to an art practice, as well as daily life. This emancipates the art and artist from a hopelessness of illusory aspiration, an anxiety of obtaining relevance in a broken political and economic operation, and a confusion produced by unnecessary canon and its assigned value systems. Social capital bound by these things becomes meaningless, and the urgency for associated proximity and belonging no longer holds. Instead, art becomes one step toward the plurality of a greater kind of memory and repossession. It's granted potential to create new symbolic orders to replace those that have been superimposed over us, and also those that have been destroyed over the course of history as genealogical wounds; for those that have been wounded. It becomes a Fanonian tension of being in a constant state of becoming, a potentiality on the horizon. And so it can only be hopeful in the face of destruction, melancholy, and abandonment.

As with any form of expression, moving image and sound are efforts at lending a certain permanence to things. There's a wish to share parts of living that would otherwise fall into an incommunicable obscurity. Personally, these are things I find to be clear in meaning, feeling, and certainty, while also remaining distressingly nameless, ill-defined, or momentary. To this end, they are markers which help to orient during a collective and continuous unworlding. There is a hope of opening a dialogue with the past and the future, amidst hegemonically and algorithmically defined (s)paces of aesthetic consumption. With this hope I can walk towards a brighter future with an unmuddied vision, finding audience not here, but there. This is how I will show solidarity with humanity. And so, it's difficult for me to find a good reason to opt in to "the arts". It's even more difficult to find a better reason for making work at all.

- Eric Hyunmin Ko
December 4, 2023 (last edited: January 28, 2024)