The Greens: Langue III
Single Channel 4K Video (03:52). Sep 2024 

Talent: Garam

Music: Zhao Jiajing

Original Text: Muguasu

​​

 

The image is not an object but a ‘process.’ Even if an image appears utterly simple from the perspective of an object, we cannot fully grasp the potential of these images. This is not the language of names or voices, but the language of images that resonate with sound and are tinged with color — Langue III. (Omitted) The exterior of language is not only images but also “vastness,” which is space. The execution of Langue III involves not only images but also space. (Omitted) As long as the realization of events is possible within space, space enjoys potentiality. Therefore, space precedes realization, and potentiality belongs to what is possible. But isn’t the image precisely of this nature?

— Gilles Deleuze, The Exhausted

 

In Heidegger’s early thinking, space expands according to the gaze of the one who cares. This is akin to extending what is usually considered a physical space into a semantic one. Just as Jacques Derrida spoke about the shifting of meaning through his concept of différance, Heidegger extends space into an individual's realm through a phenomenological methodology.

 

Dreams are the starting point for expanding the meaning of space. Cartesian space is governed by Cartesian logic. Since the world of dreams operates outside of logic, it allows us to semantically extend what is considered physical. Extending the illogical sense of space from a dream into reality is not difficult. When I walk along Queens Gate Street for the first time, the street seems to stretch ahead of me, but when I walk the same street from the Natural History Museum toward the RCA, it feels as though it leads northward. This is an example of the semantic expansion of space. In other words, the semantic expansion of space is an attempt to understand and interpret the world based on how a being with imagination engages with it.

 

Greens is a record of the artist’s process of semantically understanding a space where they spent two years. In this work, the gaze represents the consciousness of phenomenology. Just as the scope of consciousness constructs an individual's world in phenomenology, the gaze captured by the camera constructs the artist’s semantic space. Many of the greens prominently featured in the artist’s semantic world serve as a metaphor for cycles and infinity, provoking ambivalent feelings of both anxiety and comfort in humans. When humanity’s vague awareness of the infinity represented by the color green is not processed mathematically but functions as a conceptual totality, the sublime, which emerges from the incomprehensible, transforms discomfort into pleasure. This is the joy that comes from contemplating one’s finitude, relieving the burden of life born from the infinite, and accepting the lightness of one’s existence, bringing one closer to an existential state. Furthermore, it is also a process of objectifying oneself as a finite entity, demoting one’s ontological status to a being-in-itself, thereby gaining a sense of fundamental stability. In other words, what the audience sees through Greens is the construction of the artist’s world, a world filled with green, aiming at existential recovery.

 

A world filled with green, aiming at existential recovery, embodies the coexistence of both anxiety and tranquility. The text is adapted from the preface of <안녕한 가>  by the Korean writer Muguasu. This text affirms a life that gently cares for its surroundings. By expanding the sense of daily life through space, humans come to embrace the lightness of existence. Additionally, to emphasize the emotional unfamiliarity and the spatial expansion of Deleuze’s concept of Langue, the narration is delivered in French.