Exhibition Information

			Earthbound-the earth, infections, speculative beings

You should be anxious. You should be in fear. An infectious disease spreads while ultrafine dust covers the sky. The ocean with inflow of radioactive water, unstoppable forest fires, and the iceless Antarctica has become a reality. Climate change has become a climate crisis, a catastrophe. Some call this era of collapse ‘the end of stationarity,’ while some call it ‘negativity’. There are unknown factors to instantly stop and tear down our daily lives and order everywhere. This time, the disaster came to us in the form of a virus. Masked faces move their fingers on their smartphones, that we should overcome this crisis and escape this disastrous situation. They pressure our daily lives to be restored, to reclaim the stationarity, and to recall the myth of positivity. There are overflow of outcries that we should blockade the influx of the virus, shut down the borders, and take preventive measures thoroughly in the comment sections.
We shouldn’t overlook the anthropocentric carnivorous-capitalism that originates this calamity. The world is like a sand castle built on top of countless deaths committed by humans. Humans have been mercilessly taking non-human lives. In other words, species other than humans have not been even sensed as lives. It is because the anthropocentric universe considers everything else other than humans as resources. Since the modern era, humans have always been striving for more. Modernization, developmentalism, and leap towards the frontiers were hopeful forward steps towards a better world. We have repeatedly advanced along the rainbow named progress. Suddenly, humankind was stuck. The situation that interfered with advancement was named disaster, and became a task to overcome. Is the virus just a disaster that requires preventive measures? Most of the infectious diseases that broke out jumped across species. As long as humans keep utilizing non-humans as resources, new forms of viruses will continue to appear.
The title of the exhibition Earthbound originates from the compound word ‘Earthbound’ created by French scholar Bruno Latour to criticize anthropocentrism of the past and suggest a new relationship between human and nature.. In his book Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, 2017, Latour suggested “the Earthbound people” as a new form of humans to resist modernity. The word ‘Earthbound’ defines the state of being physically bound to the earth. With this terminology, Latour proposes a new direction that humankind should head towards. ‘Earthbound’ is another term for relation-oriented beings that assimilate with other countless beings bound to the earth by renouncing the progressive human form striving for advancement, and viewing disastrous situations as a non-negative. This exhibition was curated to challenge anthropocentrism in the artistic languages with Narae Jin, Hwayong Kim, and Soyo Lee, Sanghee Song, Ji Hye Yeom, and Hyun A Cho, and to reflect on the utilization of visual reproduction and aesthetic studies as human actions throughout the history of art.
Sanghee Song arouses a non-human origin of human beings with portrayal of love among Khora, an amoeba in the shape of a human being, dinosaur Plesiosaurus, and Leviathan, the ancestor of whales. Furthermore, by recognizing the earth as a living organism, Song recreates the global environmental issue around oil resources in the story of love among lives of different species. In her book The Companion Species Manifesto – Dogs, People, And Significant Otherness, Donna Haraway portrays interspecies love as a devoted form of love crossing the boundaries of species, and expressed it as “developmental infection” that sensitively considers the significant otherness. Haraway distances interspecies love, replaced by animal love in the text, from anthropocentric relationships that only satisfy the quality of human life by making improvements by eliminating adversities in the surroundings. Carnivorous capitalism that utilizes non-humans as resources have passed over the threshold of ethics long before. Song expresses criticism on anthropocentrism that provided the logic to rationalize the aggressive governance over nature in warm and delicate pencil drawings. In a similar context, Yeom observes human actions taken in the Antarctica based on modernist blind faith towards science. Yeom questions if we could become ‘real friends’ with seals that she encountered, reflecting on the limitations of human reasoning to relate with animals, the other.
Nowadays, the modern idea that humans will be the heroes to save the human race from environmental crisis created by humans, is considered as either a delusion or a political scheme. The reality of the catastrophe that we are facing right now is outside the reach of human capabilities. The ultrafine dusts are absorbed in our body with ease, and it is not perfectly clear on how they affect our bodies. Just as ultrafine dusts floating in the air, there are microplastics in the ocean affecting marine lives. These plastic particles, too small to be even detected by human eyes, have already infiltrated the marine ecosystem and come back onto our tables polluting fish and other forms of seafood. We have been exposed to radiation since the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, but it is difficult to tell how much it affects our body. British philosopher Timothy Morton calls these tiny particles ‘hyperobjects’. The disaster of our era is slowly revealing itself starting with hyperobject pollution. The idea that humans control disasters and overcome them should be discarded. We are not the modern people who strived for advancements and wanted to be the subject of the world any more. Humans are one of the objects polluted by hyperobjects, stuck in the dilemma of having to struggle to survive alongside other beings bound to the earth.
Ji Hye Yeom’s Current Layers covers layers of contemporary civilization as chronological research on the earth and plastic, a hyperobject. Yeom portrays the earth as an object whose texture is either hard or soft. Also, ‘plastiglomerate’, a by-product of the human race who depends their lives on carbon based fuel and unilaterally influencing nature, is a contemporary proof that threats from environmental crisis derives from the results of human establishment and destruction. The attitude the artist takes on the earth and plastic in this work is speculative in the sense that it is similar to attitude towards odd objects which instead of being returned to, resists human attributes. This work utilizes Speculative Turns to challenge the dichotomy of anthropocentric subject and object and contemplates on the relationship between human and non-human beings.
Hyun A Cho, starting from an interest towards still-life paintings of the 17th-century Netherlands, paid attention to many paintings of a certain tulip with eccentric patterns on its petals. With advancements in microscope technology, it was discovered that the strange look of the tulip was created by virus infection. Artists of the time produced many paintings mesmerized by the looks of the infected tulips that look as if its patterns were bursting out, ripping its flesh. These paintings created with desire to capture what cannot be preserved or possessed, makes us rethink art as a product of a rather human-centric perspective.
Ultimately, this exhibition leads to further consideration on how contemporary art, a product of human activity, has been reproducing non-human beings, and has formed relationships in the artworks. Narae Jin, Hwayong Kim, and Soyo Lee have carried out studies on artistic creations released after the 20th century with adoption of non-human living organisms, and presents the processes and results as texts and visual materials. Visual arts inevitably has to rely on the human act of bringing something as an object for appreciation, spectacle, or attraction. The three artists reveal the visual-centric and anthropocentric nature of art with case analyses of non-human living, or once were living, organisms are introduced into an artwork. Critically looking back at visual arts, this exhibition hereby suggests through the participating artists’ artistic languages, that humans, as hybrids also influenced, polluted, and infected by hyperobjects, are also Earthbound beings in this era of grand infection.(MinHwa Yun)