BABEL | yisak

BABEL, Iconography of Despair

and Distant Allusions of Liberation

Shim Sang-yong (Ph.D. in Art History, Dongduk Women's University)

The Formative Genealogy of "Babel-World"

Yisak Choi is not an artist who depicts the world darkly, but one who sees the darkness in the world. Describing something darkly and seeing darkness are completely different matters. While the former is a matter of subjectivity or taste, the latter belongs to the dimension of substance and truth. To use British writer Antony Micallef's phrase, the world is no different from a "a Disney movie which slowly turns into violent pornography." And we have no idea when and how it changed like that. The degenerated world has already corrupted the girl's prayer. The girl in Micallef's work prays: "Dear God, let all wars in this world end. And make my nose look a little smaller, my breasts a little larger." The world that turns the girl's prayer into sincere nonsense is the world of the tower of Babel. There, humans lead completely divided lives. They are entrapped on account of their ignorance, and their other desires lead them into delusion. Of course, the division is disguised as order. Since the larger the despair is, the more decorated it is with splendor and glitter, division and despair are not easily perceived. In the Babel-world, filled with grandiose and dignified things, people easily lose their way and themselves as well.

The frames of the Babel-world captured by Yisak Choi share a few definite points. First is the excessive deficiency of light, which often comes close to absence. Sometimes all light is extinguished except for the minimum required for perception. Even that is reflected light, with the light source nowhere to be seen. The main tones range between grey and black, but as the darkness advances to the extreme level, it often threatens the middle tones as well. Though the levels vary, the world Choi sees through his view finder is pressed into a heavy darkness that winds around the whole. This planet is a place that should be brighter, for sure. One should poke a hole through the sky covered in ash-colored clouds. The ominous grey that presses down should be covered with brilliant colors. But the signs of dawn are too faint.

The second is something that belongs genealogically to the core heritage of the tower of Babel incident, that is, the by-products of desire towards the realm of God. Objects soaring up toward the sky, skyscrapers in the metropolis, missiles and cannons raising their arrogant heads, flags, upward gazes, restless senses, greed for the seat of power... the only good or virtue in the Babel-world is the over-charged ego trying to go higher and higher, and the extraordinary expression of will towards that goal. As Nathaniel said, the creed and platform of this civilization is that nothing good can come out of Galilee. This is also a confession that continues to boil up within our minds as well as Choi's: "He―Yisak Choi himself―keeps trying to become the master of the world and thinks he can become perfect on his own. He attempts to build a tower within his grasp where he exists, and builds walls against outer intervention." What William Cowper (1741~1800) wrote about the naturally arrogant ego was correct: "How this heart, a spring of evil thoughts, overflows, it continues to boil up from below as my ego floats on the surface!"

Choi's reflections on Babel-world and humans' arrogant nature perhaps could be underestimated as some sort of ancient Baroque nostalgia in an age like today, where romanticism has so flourished and its atmosphere is at a climax. Isn't Romanticism itself a tribute to the greatness of the human being, who has already become a divine being? Who would not know that the ultimate message in the numerous poets' and artists' works since Romanticism have been a banquet celebrating the broken-down borders between the creator and creation! The mental state that projects all humanity as rising to the level of God is summed up in the text Níkos Kazantzakís wrote, expressing the virtue of his hero Friedrich Nietzsche: "The one to save us by fighting, creating and transforming material into spirit is not God. We will save God." But Nietzsche, who had Kazantzakís as a teacher, self-destructed due to the "entrancing equilibrium of danger" supposing that all will is good. Nietzsche rejected God according to his own will, and Kazantzakís chose himself as a savior. And of course, it still would have been possible to choose Schopenhaur or Bernard Shaw, but Gilbert K. Chesterton was one of the few who could see the madness of romanticism in them: "If Nietzsche had not ended his life as a fool, his idea would have."

Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, there has been no change in the fact that obvious spiritual languor flourished in the piles of fanciful ideas left by Romantic madness. Even Kitsch writers like Murakami Takashi, who is one of the stars on today's global art scene, wrote his "art struggle theory" as if to resemble Nietzsche, starting with the plausible claim that art is nothing but a "great adventure for the future"―even if there is a condition that what is to be obtained through the adventure is just honor and dollars. According to him, artistic value is something that is merely "created from fiction without substance, like the mind of an investor who is happy to see the stock prices rise, regardless of the company's results.” Watching him beautify his personal glory and profits, while mentioning his genealogy, I wonder how Nietzsche and his followers would feel. In the Babel-world, the portrait of the arts becomes more and more distorted with deceit. It―art―was once expected to be on the side of truth, but now it is openly serving falsehood.

Babel, Iconography of Despair and Distant Allusions of Liberation

Nevertheless, the essential positive function of art is related to the "non-concealment of truth." It is linked not to hiding what is revealed, but to revealing what is hidden. Art is ultimately different from flattery, strategy, marketing or technology because of its intuitive reaction towards the truth and reality. This is another name of the calling perceived by Yisak Choi world, and the mission he is carrying out. The reason he is looking at the dark world is because the truth must be revealed, and because people must wake up from the delusion of disguised darkness. The myth of the Babel Tower that humans can cultivate the path to becoming Gods must be exposed.

Choi looks at this world based on lies. He goes out into the streets so that we can see the world he has seen. He visualizes the truth of the Babel-world. Daily life is filled with absurdities made by the superego. The absence of justice is not ineffable. They reveal themselves sometimes through the forms of clouds hanging low, and thin tree branches, and sometimes in downtown show windows, or idle land in the outskirts of the city. People with open eyes will see the darkness setting in around our lives. They will sense the evil shimmering in the allies of life, and witness the death sauntering about in the streets. To say that Solemn Mass music is being played in the existence of every moment and every day is by no means literary rhetoric.

There is, however, an important fact. As Yisak Choi's Requiem series was not a narrative of the end, his Babel series is also something more than visual illustrations of eschatology. The reason Choi recalls the dark memories of the Tower of Babel is because the verbal action of light, known as lighting, reveals itself more visually within the darkness. To Choi, the darkness of Babel-world is not a reason to be pessimistic or to denunciatory, but only a condition in which one longs for light in a more intense despair. This is in the same context as how his Requiem series was not about death as despair or abandonment, but death as something that overcomes.

Today we live in an era of the broken tower of Babel. We have passed through eras of confusing languages, eras of scattered countries, and points of history stained with failure, division and war. But Yisak Choi never forgets to leave faint allusions of freedom and liberation here and there within his iconography of Babel. While composing a genealogical list of desires and deceits, he makes sure that signs of truth and healing are acting between the lines of the list. This world manages not to be buried in deceitful triumphalism, does not sink down in sighs and languor originating from pessimistic and atheist existentialism, and is not treated lightly in spite of denunciations and accusations as a result of materialist behaviorism. This is the true difference and significance of the world of Yisak Choi. Unlike the numerous artists today who tell lies by presenting bright and luxurious things, he--by facing the dark world--is stressing the necessity of light and truth. I recall the words of Martin Luther.

"God always judges what humans choose, and chooses what humans judge."