Geist in the Exhibition

Hyunjoo Chung

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 The space, filled with twelve gold acrylic mirrors, forms a vast circular arrangement just beyond the entryway lined with mirrors. As I approach the center, examining each surface, the mirrors endlessly reflect me back and forth, offering no place to hide. While in the previous section, the mirrors passively extended the “reflection” of the water’s surface, here, in Geist in the Exhibition, they become the surface that initiates an infinite space of reflection, endlessly repeating and distorting forms wherever the viewer moves.

The mirrors, arranged at 30-degree intervals, quietly hold images of a person staring straight ahead, maintaining the same angle while standing still. These images gaze toward the center of the space encircled by mirrors. The background of the models merges with the reflected images of the exhibition hall’s floor and pillars in the mirrors. The images project the past, while the mirrors reflect the present. Both photography and mirrors serve as devices that evoke the simultaneous absence and presence of the subject. The point she focuses on within the mirrors is at the center of the space, which is empty except for a marker on the floor. Four spotlights shine toward this spot.

I stand on the marked spot. My position overlaps with the model’s image, and the pillars and floor included in the image reflect the distortion of the mirrors, corresponding to the actual pillars and floor of the exhibition hall. Only when standing on the marked spot do I discover that I can hide behind the model in the mirror. Due to the limitation of my field of vision based on my height, if I am taller than the artist, I will see my head reflected in the mirror above the image. This is when I perceive the difference in my gaze, as it seeks to synchronize with the image of the figure. From the position where the mirror reflects, I also encounter something embedded within the objectified image—a gaze from the artist, rigorously exploring the same subject. What am I encountering? It is something intertwined with the image itself, yet distinct from it. The doubt about the noema meets with a kind of crack.

 In Geist in the Exhibition, I see a person who was standing in front of a mirror, captured by the “camera’s gaze.” The photographer’s vantage point is a specific moment in space and time, and the subject of the past (the image) looks at the viewer who now occupies the spot where the photographer originally stood. The gaze and corporeality of the artist, who examines the being and explores the position, meet me at an angle, like a ghost. Here, there is a delay of time and a gap between the past and the present. The mirrors reflect that “two people,” who are currently absent from that place, existed before me like ghosts. One person exists as an image in the photograph, while the other remains as an angle of gaze.

The observer is a witness to the past. The viewer examines the subject that was once present in that place, collects gazes, and assesses the differences between them to cognitively synthesize an event. For the viewer, who looks at the same object and identifies the artist’s unique gestures and viewpoint, synchronizing them with their own, the world expands with a gap in time. They become a viewer of the subject situated within the reproduced world of the mirror, alongside the gaze of the photographer and their own reflection. This perception is akin to reading a book backward, where nothing is remembered.

Excerpt from A Gaze upon Seulki Ki’s Gaze -Geist (ghosts) in the Exhibition, the Viewer, and the Return of Being