SEARCHING FOR WITNESS

JEONJU, KR, 2020

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Since 2016, through several projects in Seonmi-chon, I have witnessed the power structures and desires operating between the closure of the red-light district, urban development, and art. As an artist and witness actively implicated in these relations, I juxtapose five European paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to question the power dynamics surrounding Seonmi-chon.

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The five paintings were produced in Europe between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. I speculate that the composition of Joseph-Marie Vien’s The Rape of Persephone (1767) may have directly or indirectly influenced later works.* In the paintings, a figure in a dynamic pose on the right anticipates violence against a figure positioned diagonally opposite, a composition repeated and maintained across the other four works. This recurring structure not only reveals power relations between men and women, conquerors and immigrants, Black and white people, humans and animals, and adults and children, but also positions spectators who passively observe the violence. These spectators—figures who do nothing beyond witnessing the event—are identified with the artist as a witness to the political and economic structures surrounding Seonmi-chon.

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The five paintings can be understood as revelations of power structures by artists who were themselves witnesses to their time. I remove the figures occupying the position of spectators and relocate the pictorial compositions within the context of Seonmichon’s power structures. I also cut out only the figures depicted as spectators in each painting and compile them into a booklet indicating the project site, inviting a third spectator to move through the site in search of witnesses and to become a witness themselves.

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Through this process, the project reveals the artist’s double position as both spectator and witness—one imposed by institutional practices that seek to aestheticize and sanitize a place, and one actively assumed by the artist—and examines the position of Seonmichon and art within contemporary political and economic power structures.

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* This interpretation is not an academically established fact but is based on the artist’s own research.

* * Images were provided through contracts and permissions obtained at the artist’s request from the Louvre Museum (France), Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon (France), Grenoble Museum (France), Menil Foundation (USA), and Image Korea (South Korea).

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