Reflections in Jaedon Shin’s “Double Moon”
by Soo-Min Shim
Critic Soo-Min Shim reflects on Jaedon Shin’s current exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, guest-curated by Eliza Jung.
Anyoung haseyo (hello) in Korean translates to “Are you at peace?” We greet each other with well-wishes for peace. Not prosperity, fortune or success. The humble offer of being calm, of being whole.
I feel that there is a certain irony in this greeting, from a country that has not been whole for 69 years. Peace seems distant for a country whose borders were constructed from warfare and consolidated through a series of post-war military dictatorships.
In Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (2020) political prisoner Ahn Hak-sop who was tortured from 1953 to 1995 for protesting South Korean totalitarianism and United States occupation, states that Korea is “a country that’s not a country, a divided country.”
After the Korean peninsula was divided into two in 1953 by the 38th parallel North, South Korea’s first president Syngman Rhee’s repressive authoritarianism sparked student-led demonstrations as early as 1960 leading to Rhee’s ousting. In 1961, General Park Chung-Hee led a military coup which saw him in power for the next 18 years. Park was assassinated in 1979 and General Chun Doo-Hwan took control through another military coup. In 1980, Chun declared full martial law throughout the nation. Chun shut down universities, banned political activity and arrested student leaders as well as political rivals.
In Gwangju, a city on the South-Western tip of the peninsula, local university students began to demonstrate against the martial law government. They were fired upon, killed and beaten by government troops. In response, local citizens took up arms and nearly a quarter of a million people participated in the uprising. Whilst official government statistics state that around 200 people (mostly civilians) died during the massacre, Gwangju activists, students and civilians state that the number is closer to 2000.
Gwangju is full of reminders of this history. The large public square where the protestors gathered is empty. Jeonil Building, a dilapidated and abandoned 10 storey building next to the public square has been left untouched. Its exterior is pock-marked by bullet wounds.
Minjung art, a socio-political art movement, was established in response to the Gwangju Massacre in 1980. Translating to “the people”, Minjung used woodblock printing and painting to critique Chun’s authoritarian government. Minjung artworks were characterised by a celebration of the working class and a call for democratisation and Korean reunification. In many ways, Minjung was an artistic reckoning with capture, torture and massacre.
Decades later in 2020, Don Mee Choi writes in DMZ Colony that “the language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to decipher.” In her attempt to understand this language Choi turns to what she calls “mirror words” which are seemingly nonsensical words created by mirroring the written word. She writes that “mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance… mirror words flutter along borders.” Choi finds freedom in mirroring as she understands “mirrors as sites of translation, deformation zones.”
Whilst Minjung art unflinchingly reflected Korea’s socio-political concerns in a language that was accessible and immediate, Choi’s “mirror words” construct a new vocabulary entirely. They are novel yet still exist in relation to the original decipherable words, creating new modes of meaning that are different, yet also apart.
‘Peace’ is not immediately recognisable in the volatile polychrome paintings of artist Jaedon Shin. In Shin’s Double Moon 2 (2017), we are overwhelmed by the collision of jagged contours of colours. Serrated peaks of mountaintops crash together in waves on the large-scale canvas. Shin’s brushstrokes are distressed and frenetic.
There is only the promise of peace in the slim margin at the top of the canvas. Two orbs shine down, their faces rotund. They are whole, full and at peace. Viewing the large canvases, our own necks crane upwards to the night sky in yearning.
In History Landscape (2017) the mountains are again fragmented, their fractures outlined in a bloody red. It is a hellish landscape as pale blue outlines of skeletons and skulls scattered on the fields can be discerned. Silhouettes of soldiers yielding guns and donning metal helmets are outlined in a translucent blue in the foreground.
Again, the double moon is present yet in this canvas they seem indifferent and painfully distant. They stand as silent witnesses to brutality. Through the opposition of the seemingly static cosmos against the turmoil of human activity, Shin raises the question of history’s cyclical nature. Conflicts continue to erupt and cruelty, in its myriad forms, pollute the land that holds these traumas.
Born in 1959, one year before Rhee was ousted, Shin lived through the dictatorships of Park and Chun. Growing up and living in Gwangju in his 20s, he was part of the fomenting student movement against Chun. Shin’s friends and family witnessed the bloody massacre firsthand. For Shin, peace seems to be illusory.
Indeed, History Landscape (2017) is a more explicit reference to Korea’s turbulent history. There are certainly traces of a Minjung art influence and a comparison with his Minjung peers might allow for a broader appreciation of the magnitude of the political unrest in Korea in the 1980s. Yet, Shin’s practice cannot be reduced to simplistic Minjung stylistic influences. There is a Minjung spirit perhaps in his investigation of socio-political themes, but the abstracted figures also speak to more existential questions of migration, movement, temporality and history.
Unlike the sentimental, nostalgic and victorious images of reunification often depicted in conventional Minjung art, Shin’s paintings are ambiguous as there is no ‘perfect’ unity. The double moons, though hovering in tandem, are slightly different colours; one is a paler blue, the other tinged red.
Rather than embodying a dogmatic stance on North and South Korea, Shin depicts the complex, paradoxical entanglement of Korea’s reality in which both are separate but also together. From this cultural perspective, Shin expands into greater ontological enquiries on the bifurcation of conflict that is predicated on binaries such as us versus them, good versus evil, knowing and not knowing. In Double Moon 2 and History Landscape the tumult of the human realm renders it impossible to distinguish enemy from ally, therefore possibly pointing to the myopia and the folly of dichotomy. In History Landscape amongst the pale blue details, banners are raised in protest. Yet the characters are indecipherable as Shin obscures the ideology under which these people gather, thereby strategically refusing to brand himself under a single ideology. Instead, through the device of ‘mirroring’ it is possible to see an emancipation towards a bigger understanding of historical events, where ‘both’ sides are reconciled.
In Shin’s new world of mirroring, people and places are different, yet also apart.
Soo-Min Shim is an arts writer living, working, and writing on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Find Soo-Min at soominshim.wordpress.com.