2023, Vol.70, No.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.81

pISSN : 1229-0246
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksasa

Yiso Bahc’s pioneering activity is significantly important to Korean contemporary art during the 1990s. Despite antecedent studies on Bahc, an academic analysis of his installation drawings has not been a focus yet. This thesis seeks to elucidate the meaning of Bahc’s installation drawings and establish their status by considering the inherent subject of the works conceptualized as “informality.” So far, prior studies on Bahc made dichotomous categorizations such as the period of “Mo Bahc/Yiso Bahc,” Yiso Bahc as an artist/activities” and “art/non-art activities.” This thesis, however, adopts a holistic perspective embracing Bahc’s entire works to place the acts of resistance and “postcolonial resistance consciousness” in his artworks in a coherent continuum. By referring to the practice of “writing-back,” observed in postcolonial literature, “informality in installation drawing” is positioned to the realm of artistic postcolonial strategies, and are thereby given higher significance. By expanding the scope of the study on Yiso Bahc’s practice through his installation drawings, this thesis underscores its importance in adding a range and a layer of interpretations to his artistic output.

This article attempts to analyze archives, focusing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995). “Archive fever” is a desire to obsessively return to the source or origin of memory. However, for Derrida, origin does not exist from the beginning, it exists only as a trace. As with memory, the original memory does not exist. Therefore, the duality inherent in archives is revealed from the role of forgetting in memory. According to Derrida, the duality of the archive is inherent from the beginning as the power of arch-violence. This is the energy to destroy the archive at the beginning, just like Freud called the death drive. The death drive of the archive, or the power of arch-violence, is a kind of “ability” and becomes a condition for the establishment of the archive. This archive-ability is a movement toward destruction and division at the same time as the institutional establishment of the archive. Along with this, it is also the basis for the archive to remain in the future. This article basically deals with the archive itself based on Derrida’s ideas. We will see that archives and archivists, the place of archives, and the archives to come are all based on the arch-violence power of archives. Thus, it shows that the archive is open to the future as a possibility.

The Tamra Artists Association, established in 1993, has been organizing the Sasam Art Exhibition every year since 1994 to ensure that the Jeju Sasam is remembered and the truth around the historical event is known. Although many works of Sasam art have been produced and introduced through the thirty exhibitions held so far, Sasam art has not been dealt with as a subject of academic research until now. Therefore, this thesis takes Sasam art as a research topic in response to the need to study Sasam art, which has received little attention from researchers compared to the importance of its historical, social, and artistic values. In this thesis, I borrowed the concept of ‘montage image’ proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman in his analysis of photographic images related to Auschwitz-Birkenau. My analysis of the images of Sasam art based on the concept shows the images they help viewers to imagine and think and eventually reach at the truth around the Jeju Sasam. Due to the montage that juxtaposes images with images or text in one scene, the images of Sasam art propose a dialectical reading — that is, they collide with each other while revealing differences, all of which helps viewers to approach the real of the Jeju Sasam. Leading the knowledge into the truth and reserving people’s memory is a matter of ethics and politics. Thus, this thesis demonstrates that it is an ethical and political response that the images of Sasam art has continued the memory struggle for thirty years.