소 보 람  SOH BORAM    

How Does the Poetic Move Within the Structure of Violence?

 

                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                     Yang Hyo-sil

  

 

Soh Boram’s 2024 solo exhibition shares its title with an earlier one from 2017, He vs. It(그 vs 그것). In the intervening years, Soh has engaged in a number of “group projects” and, most notably, “personal projects”, the term Soh uses on  their website instead of “solo exhibition”. This terminological shift seems to imply a critical stance toward the conventional framework of the solo exhibition, namely that the traditional format of solo exhibitions does not fully align with the nature of Soh’s work.1) The term project can carries multiple meanings, e.g., a piece of academic research or a plan of action. In educational studies, it alludes to “a learning process in which learners independently select, plan, and direct their activities.” Etymologically, it comes from a Latin word projectum; pro(before) and jacere(to throw or to do). It thus refers to something that takes place before an action. In modern English, the word project is commonly understood as “a temporary effort undertaken by a team, organization, or society to bring about change.” In this sense, Soh Boram’s work stikes me as a project carried out by someone who positions herself as a pseudo-researcher.

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Having some a vague sense of underlying “motor” of Soh’s practice, I must admit that I begin this text with a specific “conclusion” in mind. That is, Soh is not an artist in the conventional sense, i.e., someone who keeps creating works of art repeatedly. Soh rather operates as a researcher/learner who connects a series of one-off projects, finding pleasure in the interplay between repetitions and variations. In this regard, it seems more fitting to treat Soh’s body of work as a “text”, woven or written, in a way Roland Barthes understands the term. In other words, it seems more appropriate to consider Soh as a transcriber who collects, expands, and layers of quotations, rather than as a conventional creator or singular author. That is to say, while Soh’s projects are grounded in sociological research and adopt a stance of a laboratory-based investigator, they seek the poetic and aesthetic potential that exceeds the borrowed structures of other disciplines. This is the “conclusion” I hope this essay can reach, even if it diverges along the way.

 

The 2017 “personal project” He vs. It originated from an incident: encountering a dead water deer in 2016. It was an accident, for Soh hit the deer already killed/discarded by someone else. More accurately, however, it was an event, for Soh started a project of taking responsibility for the deer on their own initiative. Soh describes the moment of self-recognition that followed the accident/event: “frozen inside the car, locked in a momentary, or perhaps eternal standoff with the others outside: the dead water deer, and an alive fawn beside it.” The dead water deer came to stand in as the “it” of the project. It was roughly the same size as Soh and could be translated as a sacrificial offering that preemptively responds to the spectacle of “my” experience witnessing the death of “me,” while still alive. (In the next piece, I will speak of “the still-living fawn” beside the dead deer—this small, young creature that exchanged glances with Soh, held onto that gaze, and may have become the “butterfly” that set off a storm of events.) After that day, Soh Boram has described how the dead and the living deer have returned interminably, whether in dreams or in waking life. It seemed as if they were making certain “demands”, insisting on their presence. For Soh, that address—obscure and indeterminate, suspended between reality and illusion—took a form of speech in which the Other refuses to release the self. It was, however, a demand that could not be translated into any known language.

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Soh firstly approached this demand through reading existing studies on roadkill. It was evident that “it was saying something”, but its content remained unknown. Soh initially adopted a “humanized frame” to open a gap between hidden meanings. After exchanging glances with a living water deer in the dark, I began to look into the matter for the first time. According to a 2007 report by the Korea Expressway Corporation, “deer species, including the water deer, make up the largest share of roadkill cases in Korea.” The Roadkill Information System reports that 16,000 out of 36,000 animals killed on roads in 2019 and 2020 were water deer. Yet such figures and statistics, abstract and objective data, failed to capture singularity of my deer who was both here and not here. Soh then turned to an ecological monograph Korean Water Deer (National Institute of Ecology, 2016) by Kim Baek-jun et al.. The book includes a close-range observation of Hydropotes inermis, the water-loving deer. In its final chapter, it touches upon the modern tragedy that the species faces, i.e., roadkill. It indicates how this species, too common and undesirable, has long been neglected in research. As this “first professional ecological monograph” appeared just in time, Soh was compelled by the insistent address of the Other (that refused to let go). Soh turned to it again and “exhibited” He vs. It at the former Myungsan Inn near Jeonju Station in 2017.

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I was one of the visitors invited to that exhibition. In a hazy memory—where reality and illusion blur—I recall what may have been the cry of a water deer in that dim, damp inn room turned into an exhibition space.2) I also recall the way Soh Boram arranged numerics into a form marking the annual toll of water deer lost to roadkill. The title of the exhibition, according to Soh, sought to give form to “an internal conflict over how to refer to the body of a dead animal—caught between the personal pronoun he and the demonstrative pronoun it.” This became a way of making visible an aporia: the inability to determine a proper name for a dead Other with whom identification had occurred through a mirror-like projection.

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I asked Soh why they chose he, despite the probability that the animal accompanied by a fawn was female (given the absence of antlers in water deers). The response came in a long message:3) “I used both he and she for its English title. In Western painting, the hunted animal is usually depicted as a stag with antlers. The myth of Artemis and the hunter from Ovid’s Metamorphoses served as a motif for the geometry of the hunter. I borrowed the moment where Artemis transforms a male hunter into a deer.” Soh borrows the subjective “stage” on which the deer is killed from Greco-Roman mythology. This framework was shaped by long periods of study in France, and by research during residencies in the Netherlands and Switzerland. This approach overlays the mythic violence of divine punishment onto the indiscriminate, modern violence of infrastructure: the unchecked construction of roads and the distorted conditions of survival, or systemic violence, faced by water deers in Korea. Rather than representing this as a sociological or ecological system, Soh attempts to replace structural objectivity with a singular narrative—one in which imagination transmutes collective brutality into myth. In this myth, the deer—that water deer—was Actaeon:  an human-animal who transforms into a deer and dies as so, always already both. This project, translating death of  the deer—that also mirrors Soh’s own self—into the death of a human who violated a taboo, has conducted twice, first in 2017 and again in 2024. With this, Soh Boram seeks to expose a kind of “permanent condition” of modern tragedy imposed upon animals. Art, here, intervenes within this “internal” matrix of violence—opening a gap and creating a suspended interval of time. Perhaps this is all art can do, or perhaps it marks the limit of art’s transgressive potential.

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Installed on the left wall of the 2024 exhibition space were fragments of a certain modern “structure” that Soh Boram had unearthed directly from paper and digital newspapers. In 2016, while initiating the Sunmichon Project(선미촌) in Jeonju’s red-light district, Soh set out to examine how sex workers had been represented in Korean media. The initial aim was to search through a century’s worth of newspapers  “in a brute-force, unsophisticated way” to collect content. What emerged, however, was not the content of representation, but the very structure of representation. There are things that can be seen not with eyes looking straight ahead, but with eyes glancing sideways. What surfaced was not the object itself, but the invisible premise, or embedded ideology. Soh arranged in a row the repeated patterns and rules of the uncovered structure. These newspapers depicted stories of marginalized neighbors and animals living in misery and dying in obscurity. Beneath these articles appeared advertisements—ads for products that, in effect, upheld the very systems oppressing those neighbors and justifying the brutal slaughter of such animals. In 1983, for example, Korean daily newspaper The Kyunghyang Shinmun published a front-page photograph of a caged moon bear under the headline, “Save the Moon Bear: Day Three of Emergency.” Just below this article was Daewoong Pharmaceutical’s advertisement featuring a massive bear mid-roar, radiant with strength. In 1984, The Chosun Ilbo ran an article titled “Neighbors Forgotten in the Flood.” Right next to it (in the ad column) was a cheerful image of a family making half-moon rice cakes for the holiday, accompanied by an commercial campaign for digestive medicine. It was a warning against overindulgence during Chuseok, Korean thanksgiving holiday. In 1992, The Hankyoreh featured a photograph of a horned stag imported from Austria and locked in a cage. Beside this photo appeared an advertisement for Ursa—a fatigue-relief medication produced by Daewoong Pharmaceutical. What Soh Boram chose to do was to erase everything else from each newspaper page, leaving only these juxtapositions between news and advertisements. This contrast laid bare the “unconscious,” mechanical, and capitalized violence operating across the society sections of every major newspapers, regardless of ideological leaning.

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In the final works, all the other content was replaced with blank white space, amplifying the grotesque nature of the everyday violence observed and exposed. I was so shocked and speechless before what could only be described as a ‘different’ kind of violence—one under the dictatorship of the 1980s. When I finally turned to Soh and asked, “Do you think the journalists knew?”—referring to ads featuring tanks as symbols of coups placed side-by-side with smiling brides in wedding dresses—images too horrific even to include in the exhibition—Soh replied without a moment’s hesitation. “They knew.” When the results of this project were presented in the Netherlands, one person among the audience responded with a doubt, calling it “a leap.” I too felt the same defensive mechanism. The questions—was it done in collusion, knowingly, or repeated out of ignorance?—forced reflection on our modern “emotions” such as anger, shame, and guilt. Soh Boram, having conducted direct research, reached a conclusion, but I did not. Instead, I was left with a knot that could not be cried, yet the tears remained suppressed, unable to pass through any opening. Certain sorrows surfaced as excuses to vent those unshed feelings, but they always proved insufficient. My own complicity and ignorance prevented me from pushing that lump away. It felt beyond my strength to expel it. What occured to my mind was a line from Guy Debord’s writings in the 1960s: “Life is nothing more than a magazine; truth resides only in a cigarette; and the real world has been entirely inverted by the spectacle, to the point of becoming a horrific yet mesmerizing, indiscriminate documentary unfolding on MTV.” That line, penned by Debord—who ultimately took his own life—returned to me once again.

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Soh Boram overlays the ambiguity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy found in the dictionary onto the cold, indifferent structure as a foundation. For instance, the first, seventh, and ninth definitions of the word “yak” (약) listed in the Standard Korean Dictionary, are superimposed on a newspaper page where an article exposing the brutal reality of bears confined in cages and killed for their gallbladders appears beside an advertisement for gallbladder medicine by Daewoong Pharmaceutical. The first definition of “yak” refers to “the active components of a plant” or “a strong sense of disgust.” The seventh definition, 약 (藥), includes what is commonly known as medicine, substances used to eliminate harmful organisms—even gunpowder. The ninth definition, 약 (弱), means “lacking strength.” In this way, “yak” may refer to the chemical property of a plant, a human emotion, a substance that prevents illness or injury, a chemical that eliminates pests, gunpowder, or something extremely weak. The notion of medicine as a substance one consumes to recover is only a small portion of the spectrum of the signifier “yak.” These secondary, seemingly minor meanings—attached to the dominant signifier-concept of “yak”—act as residual elements that shift within the structure, creating cracks in an otherwise closed system of representation.

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Elsewhere, the word “uri” (우리) from the Standard Korean Dictionary is placed atop a newspaper juxtaposing an exposé on animals literally confined in fence (“uri”) with an advertisement depicting a group of men in wool coats—an image used in a wool coat clearance sale. The word superimposed on that page is “uri.” The word “uri” (우리)—meaning both “a cage in which animals are confined and raised” and the first-person plural pronoun “we”—is held in deliberate juxtaposition. This very juxtaposition reveals the structure itself as a form of violence: within the uri, who are “we”? Or rather, how does a “we” emerge—one that is possible only within such a structure? Soh Boram delineates, in neutral terms, a structure we already recognize as violent—one that cannot function without violence, and within which we are already confined. On top of this, something else is layered: a possibility that might tremble the structure like an aftershock, might register as a residue, may be overlooked like a trace, or may be encrypted like a riddle. The homonym carries within a single visual and auditory signifier, the residue of Others—those always already weak, those deemed impossible—and it is by holding onto that narrow margin of possibility that the project continues: faintly heard, scarcely visible. In an email she wrote: “Yes, that was exactly what I was trying to convey. In the process of mulling over a single word through multiple meanings, I hoped to present the power dynamics between the images as poetic imagery.”

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This text ends with the phrase “poetic imagery”, as Soh Boram puts it. The word “poetry (詩)”gestures toward a linguistic act—one that seeks to bind the power dynamics operating between worn and exhausted images of representation. That gesture takes form here in what we might call poetic imagery. Whether such imagery gives rise to beauty or enchantment—even within a structure of violence—will be addressed in the next piece: how beauty, even amid the structure of violence, might still call forth a “we,”  for its beauty refuses to wane.

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Yang Hyo-sil is obsessively devoted to a mode of reading texts in which the (aesthetics and) politics of feminism-queer as attitude are embodied. Primarily engaged in art criticism, Yang also ventures into theater, literature, and performance. Yang is the author of 『불구의 삶, 사랑의 말』 (Crippled Life, Words of Love) and 『권력에 맞선 상상력, 문화운동 연대기』(Imagination Against Power: A Chronicle of Cultural Activism), and has translated works such as Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind into Korean.                            (Source: SEMA Coral)

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