#critiqueen

Jan Creutzenberg (theatre scholar)

Mirrors offer a simple yet empirically sound proof of existence: I move there, hence I am here! In the post-truth era we live in, it thus doesn’t surprise at all that mirrors of various kinds abound as once clear-cut certainties blur. When we look into a mirror, though, we rarely see more than ourselves.

In her recent work, Yong Hae Sook has arranged slightly angled stainless steel pyramids according to celestial constellations. In these ‘supermirrors’ one’s own face is hard to find and when the searching gaze is caught by the polished triangles it tends to multiply. Unlike her earlier panorama series, where people and their actions were central even when looking away, her new photos – likewise wide-scoped but now reflected by a supermirror – bear no trace of human acts, let alone faces. The six works on show in “Endless Garden” present the nature of Hongcheon county, mirrored and cut-up as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Only when looking closer, it becomes clear that these images break down not only landscapes, but various visual traditions as well. Projected onto the flat picture plane, the reflections of Hongcheon’s greenery create an odd 3D-effect that turns heaven and earth upside-down. Plein-air cubism through the looking-glass, so to speak.

What kind of garden can we see?

The artificial vanishing points evoked by the triangular mirrors’ edges retain the illusion of eternity but rarely allow the mind to wander like it is used to. The horizon, reflected beyond the frame, is ungraspable. A garden contained in its own image, yet without an end in sight. But the lush greens turning yellow, the hundred shades of pink, or the rusty-white purples suggest otherwise. The trees, bushes, and flowers, like all plants anywhere, still live but their life is cut short. Their foretold death is due to the transience of nature and its colors, as well as the medium of photography itself, but more specific symptoms can also be found in the images: the cranes that loom large in the background of one, the power lines and the barbed wire that criss-cross others.

These details raise another question: Whose garden is this anyway?

Amongst traces of human intervention visible in some triangles, like trash left by the wayside of a road trip, stands out the eye of the camera that turns ever-changing nature into a still image. Erected amidst folded foliage and logged wood, on crippled legs and unmanned, the artist’s stand-in is a constant reminder that this scenery is of our own making, a product of our idealizing yet fragile gaze. This garden may indeed be endless, but only in the self-reflection of mirrors, an effect that can be experienced in the exhibition as well. Withering heights that used to inspire artists now face the jagged shards of a portable mirror. In this sense, the oxymoronic title that couples utopian allusion with marketing speech – Hongcheon county used to be branded as “Garden City” before becoming a “Health Playground” – only adds to the irony.

Renaissance man Leon Battista Alberti suggested that every garden mirrors its owner’s character. If the whole countryside has turned into horticultural display for city-dwellers, urban gardening notwithstanding, then Yong Hae Sook’s photos are more than portraits of a perpetual periphery or still lifes of a fractured landscape in full bloom. They are oversized selfies of our own, unlimited egos.