Life in Contemporary Society Read in Terms of Death in the Garden

Death is being industrialized. Aging is deemed a social issue, but death has been something to eschew or remove. As death was ‘medicalized’ in the early 20th century, “all the gruesome sights, smells, and sounds of death were removed from view.” As the invalid and elderly are sent to sanatoriums, “death could be something to be concealed” and handled swiftly and neatly by funeral services. In contemporary society, we keep all aspects of death at the distance. The reason why death means nothing is because contemporary culture denies decomposition and imperfection. The everyday seeks youth and health. This exhibition is designed to touch on death. It intends to address problems in contemporary society in which our lives are marginalized by masking death and handling it promptly through discourse on a naturalistic garden embracing the processes of plants as they are born, die, and vanish. Daegil Lee, a gardener who is inextricably bound up with what is revealed in the soil such as fresh plants and animated insects, as well as what is concealed under the soil, states that contemporary society’s isolation from earth brings about a divorce from death. Death in nature is part of the cycle of life, and earth has all the aspects of its beginning and end. The absence of earth in the urban environment (inhabitants here live in paved areas during their entire life) enables us to witness our lives wrapped and disregarded by death. Lee as an artist who has always faced the really living and really dying in the garden vertically stands the abandoned artificial flowers whose extinction is not allowed due to human desire for life. Beings that cannot wane with time seem to have forfeited their right to wither. His Tower of Babel resembles a human character that is not allowed to lie down on the land and has to always stand. In contrast to the Tower of Babel that pays tribute to life in vain, Daham Yo’s Tomb That Will be Broken Tomorrow is horizontal like the earth. To Yo, a blanket is "a thing that remembers what happened after I fell asleep." The time of slumber, during which the conscious falls asleep and one turns over, is considered a time for practicing death. When undergoing the death we cannot experience in advance and grope its traces, is it approximate to something like a flexible mass caught by its corners or something like a blanket with one single layer? Yo’s other work Incense Smoke states that the nature of death probably approximates that of smoke, commenting on the banality of death, the other side of life. After lighting incense, it burns with smoke and scent and then is reduced to ashes. Since the two have no size or form, we cannot realize where they are and remove them. Is death closely enclosing me like incense? Death feels like a chasm in the real space dominated by life in Mirror in which a performer wanders around mountains, fields, and the waterside carrying a mirror. Invisible deaths such as layers, chasms, encircling like a net, and masses are in the category of life in which a form of death can be assumed. Death becomes more physical in Aesop’s work that records a companion animal’s death. Aesop, who didn’t euthanize her dog and let it die a natural death documented all the changes in form, smells, tactile sensations her old companion dog underwent when suffering from dementia and physical frailty. Death recovers its continuity, not being severed or divorced from life through the actions of the living body that passes into death, unveiling it with the camera’s eye capturing and amassing situations and sensations. Aesop’s work embraces the time of condolence in contemporary society that gives the funeral a lick and a promise, just like “dying is not cared of if death is not cared of”. Aesop’s work makes us see death in the same category of life, bringing any abstract discussion on death down to the dimension of a material and cyclic process. It is necessary to change our relationship with death. Death should be ‘known’ and ‘taken care of’ in terms of a physical and emotional process for a better life. This exhibition is intended to examine contemporary culture that denies death and isolates it from life in a garden where both creation and destruction are associated with nature’s grand project. “In the midst of life we are in death” (Media Vita in Morte Sumus). We intend to share perspectives and attitudes toward death as a human condition through the eyes of the gardener and the artist who try to realize the nature of life and living. The sun is not going down but going home. We have to see the death of humans as part of the cycles of nature.

Curator / Eun-young Kim

참고자료: <https://bmca.or.kr/Exhibitions-Past-2021-The-Sun>