Bokyung Jun is an artist who works from the relational, the video, the installation and the poetry. In an attempt to know, preserve, archive and poetise manual works that are disappearing due to technical development, the artist makes encounters with people who have done manual labor for many years. In Buenos Aires, she met Elías Fernández, the founder and still an umbrella maker at the Paragüería Victor, in the Boedo neighborhood, and Lidia Quipildor, cook for more than 10 years at Fundación´ace.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Getting old is a process of writing a personal history. One African old saying goes, “When one elder man dies, a library is burned down.” Like an annual ring of a tree, a human inscribes time in one’s body, and one’s skin becomes hardened with memories.

But redistribution of labor through urbanization, mechanization and digitalization through redevelopment alienates the old and the human body from the culture or art. These days structure or system only emphasizes the newness, speediness, and sophistication. I would like to re-write the relationship between art, labor, aesthetics and non-aesthetics by recalling the memories of relatively obscured individuals and redefining their relationship with history.

How has the value of the human body’s significance been changed by industrialization and civilization? Unlike Taylorism, which empties work of meaningful content and generates alienation by emphasizing simple repetition in working process, is it possible to re-discover the aesthetic sensibility they have in their labor? If it was theoretically explained that the beauty and charm of the bodies in labor, it would certainly take the place of beauty in the field of aesthetics and be categorized as an art. But the beauty in labor did not considered as an art. In this regard, French philosopher Jacques Rancière wanted to expand the arts with ‘aesthetic things’ instead of the norm of aesthetics. For him, the politics of aesthetics was made up of the logic of exclusion, so that all human beings could not participate in judging the status of beauty. I want to find the charm of people who have been excluded from the world of aesthetics but have potentials to be aesthetic elements.

The way I conduct a project is meeting (act), listening (story), and writing (visualization).

The project that I pursued at ´ace is an attempt to discover the aesthetic sensibility memorized in working gestures by recording people who keep one’s handcraft work. The concept has been borrowed from the field of alchemy. Alchemy, which believes that the universe is a mixture of the four basic elements (fire, earth, air, water), can be gained by combining these four elements well, and eventually gain the gold. However, to me, is not a simple material, but rather a psychologist C. Jung’s opinion of self-liberation, self-realization. Jung emphasizes that the work of alchemists attempting to make gold is a “self-realization” that psychologically finds his own unconscious and completes him/herself. Self-realization is a ‘homo artis (human who can do art)’ who develops his own intellect and creativity and performs self-emancipation and self-artistry.