We live with daily disillusionment that is generated as our village life becomes more formalized and village streets turn into urban ones with repetitive patterns of lifestyle. To escape such disillusionment, an old and worn amusement park can be regarded as a temporary shelter of the mind, and this video work is to record short and long times of disillusionment, based on the merry-go-round shot for 24 hours straight.
On a terrain clearly exposed as unpaved, there used to be flowers and trees everywhere, and people walked around freely. Over the past decades, unstructured land and informal neighborhoods have become dense with urban streets in a defenseless state, and the surface of land is filled with such tension and silence that we lose all sense of direction.
While hovering around on the surface, we find ourselves going back to square one from time to time, like a merry-go-round. No matter if we are either walkers or performers while wandering about streets, we may have both senses of unfamiliarity and familiarity from our experience of various kinds of streets. Such a hybrid culture and community we face between cut-off streets come across mind like an organic whole, but they will keep tearing down and building up over and over. A particular moment felt as a milestone of time is merely a part of such process. It is because memories of senses divided in detail, not as a single identity, will be what we are able to feel at present only.
Repetitive patterns of life we face along the circular road will be like light and shadow filled with tension and anxiety from the present point of view, and looking back on the space, we may find it similar to a merry-go-round on the circular street. Even at present, many of us still start walking or running along the Moebius strip-like road. All the conditions of this road are reflected on our breathtaking life on this land, and memories of time split on the space will start and end on the very circular land.
Jaeik Kim focuses on restoring lost or damaged memories through the imagination and expression of visible/invisible phenomena entangled behind various places. It has been accumulated and generated from the remote past, and it is intended to pay attention to ‘accumulated experientiality’ in order to represent the outcomes of the evolved event. Especially, he expresses the layers of memories that became extinct after being generated by events derived from specific locations composing the framework of urban social environment. The double-sidedness of the visible and invisible world is shaped through a specific exhibition place in order to examine the context of the material, non-material environment that occupied each space at each point in time.
