Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Kibong Rhee
There is no place
In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find
both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to
think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language
that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit
will simply be nonsense. 1
Like many contemporary artists, for Kibong Rhee the limits of Western
philosophy’s ‘grand narratives’ of representation and truth provide rich
subject matter. Rhee’s recent installations use metaphysics as a basis
for developing an ecological relationship between nature and human
intervention in art.
mediated by a screen, which relates to the intuitive processes of the
artist’s drawing practice. Human presence is positioned as diminutive
against the natural world and its inherent mysteries. Rhee explains this
relationship in his approach to drawing:
The surfaces, in endless transformation and combustion, together
with the quivering outline, disappear into a void, leaving behind the
traces of a certain accumulation. This might be seen as a ‘pattern of
slowness’, another kind of generative energy, of recurrent production
and renewal, exerting influence on the totality of motion and flux
known as life. 5
In a previous work entitled Bachelor: The dual body 2003, Rhee
presented a leather-bound copy of Austrian philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s 1921 text Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — which
proposed the impossibility of truth or objective representation —
trapped in an aquarium. Dense with the weight of history, this canonical
text was affected by the natural element of water, while air jets produced
currents inside the enclosure. The text and pages were therefore
subject to the whim of the water’s currents. Curator Park Kyung-Mee’s
suggestion of Rhee’s ‘free thinking acting upon objects’ is an apt
metaphor for the effect of such processes employed by the artist. 2
Wittgenstein was keenly interested in the representation of everyday
objects by the artificial framework of language or logic. He proposed
that we should examine the world through sets of propositions
or speculations in order to test the limits of representation: ‘In a
proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment’. 3
With this in mind, we might approach Rhee’s works as an ongoing
set of experiments or propositions about the world, mediated by our
individual experiences, language and preconceptions.
There is no place – Shallow cuts 2008, featured in APT6, is one such
experiment. Walking into a seemingly empty room, we are arrested by
the moving shadow of a willow tree behind a glass screen. A shadowy
mist partially obscures its boughs. As though taken from its natural
environment and placed within the gallery setting, the installation
reiterates the workings of Rhee’s Bachelor: The dual body; the artificial
tree becomes subject to a ‘natural’ element, produced through the
means of a mechanical fog machine. 4
Just as Wittgenstein exploited language’s artifice, Rhee is interested in
making works that are as much about the disappearance or obscurity of
objects as they are about their existence. Through the partial ‘vanishment’
of his objects in installations such as There is no place, Rhee asks us to
consider the natural spaces we inhabit and how we affect them.
The willow tree, for instance, is revered in traditional East Asian
painting and poetry. In this work, our impression of the tree is
The flux or energy that Rhee exploits through his works suggest
that logic alone cannot convince us of the objective reality of our
surroundings. The artist’s engagement with his immediate environment
and its contradictions — such as modernity’s insistent drive for progress
and preoccupation with so much visual, often empty, stimulus — is
crucial to our appreciation of his work:
Our history is racing toward a better new world with an unbelievable
speed. We used to be full of great expectations. However, we are now
left with a great deal of negatives as well: The universe became filled
with helpless images and symbols. Only empty feeling of non-existence
and aimless, mindless acts prevail in the contemporary world. 6
Kibong Rhee persuades us to shift our concerns from the global (‘infinite’,
philosophical questions) to the immediate (everyday locales, and the
objects and experiences constituting our daily existence), prompting
us to deepen our consideration of the objects occupying our lives.
Donna McColm
Endnotes
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, author’s preface, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans.
DF Pears and BF McGuinness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961, p.3.
2 Park Kyung-Mee, ‘When mind and matter meet: Towards minus entropy’, in
Rhee Ki-Bong: About Vanishment II 1997 [exhibition catalogue], Kukje Gallery,
Seoul, 1997, unpaginated.
3 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.031f, p.43.
4 This element of Rhee’s installation recalls the canonical work by Marcel Duchamp,
The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even, also known as The large glass
1915–23. In the work, an ‘illuminating gas’ is secreted from the abstracted bride
figure over her nine ‘bachelors’ below, instigating a schematic process of desire
and non-fulfillment.
5 Kibong Rhee, in Rhee Ki-Bong: About Vanishment II 1997, unpaginated.
6 Kibong Rhee, ‘Paint like a mirror, being erased by a painting’, Rhee Ki-Bong: Mind
and Mirror [exhibition catalogue], Gallery Meegun, Seoul, 1992, unpaginated.
Kibong Rhee
South Korea b.1957
There is no place – Shallow cuts 2008
Glass, fog machine, artificial leaves, wood, steel, sand,
motor, timer / Installation views, Kukje Gallery, Seoul /
Images courtesy: The artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
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