The Philosophical Forest
The forest is deep, trackless and dark. The first impression is of a curtain
of dim foliage accented by one or two spots of light. Darker than dim: Taechol
Kim’s photographs appear at first to be almost featureless tracts of black, but as
the eye adjusts to the light level within the pictures, more and more features
gradually reveal themselves. The darkness is not nocturnal; these forests are lit
by the sun, but the light is reduced by the forest canopy and registered with
tremendous subtlety by the printing process to produce a rich field of soft,
powdery blacks. There are no figures in these forests and no paths to suggest a
further destination. The forest is presented as an object of contemplation in its
own right.
The forest looms large in the history of human thought. It seems as if the
moment that humans came down out of the trees, they started to look back up at
them. The forest recurs throughout religious and philosophical discourse as a
metaphor for what we are and what we are not. Like all culturally important
metaphors, its significance is dense and various, to such an extent that its
outlines become hard to discern. Taechol Kim’s photographs operate within this
tradition. They are, in one sense, thoroughly abstract pictures, formal
compositions where the diagonal of a tree trunk acquires its significance in
relation to the verticals and horizontals of the edge, at the same time they are
absolutely figurative and there is barely a square centimetre that does not
contain the fringe of a leaf or line of a twig. It is by these means that they open up
the potential of the forest to generate thought.
There are many forests within the mind. There is the dark forest of fairy
tale and myth. This is the forest where children are abandoned, and where
wolves stalk their prey in the shadows. This is the forest that is prior to civilization
and which remains implacably hostile to it. It represents also our unconscious
desires, repressed in upbringing and socialisation. These desires are pushed to
the very limits of our being, but are never destroyed, much as we might wish that
they were. They proliferate in the darkness, and the forest is that part of
ourselves that we dare not recognise. The forest is within.
This forest is often portrayed as the forest of superstition, from which it is
our duty to extricate ourselves and emerge blinking onto the sunlit plains of
reason. It is this type of thinking that has led to the literal deforestation of large
areas of the earth in the name of progress. This forest is the enemy of
enlightenment; it is the nature that must be conquered and subdued to enable
civilization to come into being. In another variation on this myth, it is not what the
forest contains that is fearful, but the forest itself, which is alive, but does not
recognise human existence. In relation to the great age and bulk of some of the
trees, we are no more than a mosquito or butterfly. This forest embodies our
suspicion that we are not the pinnacle of creation, it rebuffs our egoism and
reminds us that the beings with whom we share the planet, have as much right to
exist as ourselves.
However, this is not the only forest of the mind. It has also been
represented as a place of liberty. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the forest was
mankind’s original habitat, where we lived solitary and free – a creature among
other creatures. This is the forest that is home; like the dark forest it comes
before civilization but rather than the enemy of all we hold dear, it is where our
most cherished values are preserved. It is a place that supplies all our essential
needs (food, water, shelter and occasional company) and which reveals the
superfluity of all those artificial ‘needs’ created by society (fashion, status,
reputation, originality). In history, and more especially in folktales, the forest is
where people retreat to when a tyrant takes control of the cities and the towns.
The great age of the trees and, beyond that, the much greater age of the forest
itself comes to stand for the immemorial and inalienable rights of human beings.
In folktales people come together in the forest to form natural communities,
based on mutual respect rather than fear of the overlord. Where tribal forest
societies still exist today, whether in Amazonia, Indonesia or Lapland, they are
presented as the last outposts of our original liberty and as the guardians of the
environment. In a typically 21st century reversal of this myth, the forest, rather
than acting as a natural defence for these forms of life, has become dependent
on them for its own survival.
In addition to providing a home for certain kinds of human society, the
forest has functioned for millennia as an image of community. In recent years this
belief has been bolstered by the study of forests as distinct eco-systems. This is
the political forest, where trees along with all the other flora and fauna are seen
as possessing distinct characters, and the forest as the complete expression of
their harmonious inter-relationship. This has also given rise to a distinct
vocabulary: where the dark forest of fairy tale is described in terms of age,
strength and power (the power to harm), the political forest is characterised by
co-operation and mutual aid. As an image it functions as an alternative to the
crude Darwinism of survival of the fittest that still dominates popular economic
discourse. Taechol Kim’s photographs are partly a response to the social
consequences of the IMF crisis of the late nineties, when the South Korean
economy, along with many others in Southeast Asia, fell into a sharp recession
and had to be bailed out. The restructuring that followed the bail-out was harsh
and its effects are still being felt today. Economic insecurity accompanied by a
pre-occupation with material wealth has altered peoples’ perceptions of
themselves, of society and of the natural world. The photographs are offered as
an alternative and a corrective to the myopic materialism that has dominated
South Korean social policy since the crisis. The forest embodies a different form
of life to the one enforced by global capital.
Finally there is the scared forest. Trees, groves and forests, along with
mountains have been, since the earliest times, revered as the habitations of the
Gods. Across the world, temple architecture is often held to recapitulate, in
geometric form, the arboreal spaces from which it derives and whose ancient
power it preserves. The sacred forest is understood as an object for
contemplation. The holiness of a forest requires a change in human behaviour;
sometimes it is not permitted for humans to enter the forest at all, at other times
the Gods must be propitiated before entry, or there may be other prohibitions,
such as a ban on hunting within the forest precinct. The forest’s primary value is
not practical or ecological but spiritual; it exists in order to draw our thoughts out
of our material condition and towards an understanding of our place in the
universe. It is variously wonderful, beautiful and terrifying, but these states are to
be understood as metaphysical states in the evolution of our being. It is a forest
of thought.
Taechol Kim’s images articulate their own space among these
philosophical forests. His forests are not portraits of particular locations. While
there is a specific place from which each photograph has been taken, the
pictures are not about the special quality of that place, but about forests in
general. There is an effort to distil some essence of the forest from the
contingencies of its appearance. There is a global, as well as a specifically
Korean dimension to these images. Their darkness is not terrifying and there are
no monsters hiding in the shadows. Nevertheless, they are pictures of a world in
which humans are not necessary. They make it possible to conceive of (but not
calculate) the number of leaves in a forest, each one a distinct individual.
However, the attempt to mentally picture all these leaves swamps the viewer’s
power of imagination and brings him/her to the edge of the sublime.
There is much in Taechol Kim’s photographs that is deeply traditional.
They hang free like painted scrolls, and forest imagery has been a mainstay of
Korean art for centuries. Like many of the finest Korean landscapes, Taechol
Kim’s juxtapose foreground against deep space, but they reverse the traditional
conventions and emphasise proximity over the idea of the view: a distant hillside
can normally be glimpsed between the boughs of the trees, but rather than being
the centre of attention, it is reduced to acting as a foil to the foreground sprays of
foliage. Some of the photos also feature forest pools, but these pools are left
undefined and function mostly as a backlight to set off the complex calligraphy of
sprig and stem. While the intimations of distance are essential to conveying the
idea of the forest’s extension, they do not compete with the interplay of mass and
line that compose the nearer forest-scape.
The photographs maintain a traditional emphasis on the picture’s edge,
which is always active in relation to the composition. The pictures are cropped
decisively and often quite dramatically: a slender leaning trunk may be cut at the
side and the top, intensifying the viewer’s experience of it as an abstract element
at the same time as signalling the continuity of the forest beyond the picture’s
borders. While the emphasis on an active edge is traditional, Taechol Kim uses it
in a distinctive way to bring the content of the photographs to the very front of the
picture plane. The viewer is not allowed to stand back from the forest and
contemplate it from a distance, but is brought by this device into the thick of it.
This feeling of being plunged into the midst of the forest is heightened by
the lack of ground. There is no secure spot upon which the viewer can vicariously
place his or her foot and survey the scene. Groundlessness is one means of
removing the images from specific spatial and temporal co-ordinates. While we
normally think of a forest as springing up from the ground, of having a base and a
top, this is not at all the kind of forest that Taechol Kim depicts. He shows us
instead a forest that is draped like a curtain, that is suspended without strain, like
the sheets that the photographs are printed on. It is possible to move through this
forest - and perhaps beyond it - but not by walking. Groundlessness gives rise to
weightlessness: the trees are not rooted in the soil, but appear almost to float on
the paper. The viewer is similarly uprooted and occupies an undefined space
between earth and sky and, given the artist’s interest in the metaphorical
dimension of the forest, this position itself should be understood as having
spiritual implications also. The forest that Taechol Kim depicts is not out there,
but is all around us: not a particular place, but a state of being. In this sense it is
primarily a philosophical, rather than material forest.
Though the pictures are dark, there is always some sunlight visible.
Sometimes just a solitary trunk in the mid-distance catches a ray of sunlight that
has penetrated the dense canopy. These occasional spots of light look at first like
focal points among the gloom, when actually they are accidental, inessential. The
pictures are not really about how light models form, though being photographs
that is one of the things they inevitably do. The artist is less interested in how the
light falls on particular objects than in evoking the idea of the forms’ continuity
whether the light falls on them or not. The pictures are not ‘impressionist’ in any
sense; they are not about the quality of the moment in time. They are the
opposite of this and, if anything, they are about the moment beyond time. The
course of the sun, whether rising or setting, plays no part in the effect that the
photographs produce in the viewer. It may seem paradoxical to attempt this
through photography, which is so tied to a particular moment in time, so it is
testament to Taechol Kim’s skill in manipulating the photographic apparatus to
enable the pictures to do just that.
The artist’s title for these works, Beyond Visibility, alludes to their
paradoxical status. It seems a strange desire - to make visual art about the nonvisual, but these are not anti-visual works. The artist does not pit himself against
what is there to be seen, it is simply that the visible on its own is not enough.
Under the current economic conditions, only those things that are visible, tangible
and commodifiable are deemed to have any value. The insistence on the visible
constitutes a kind of blindness to that which lies beyond. This opens the door to
mysticism, and there is certainly a mystical element in Taechol Kim’s work, but
the word ‘mysticism’ is often used to label those experiences that empirical
science cannot classify. It is in any case impossible to have a purely visual
experience, since everything that we perceive is overlaid with a tissue of
associations. By means of the visible the artist hopes that we, as viewers will be
brought to an acknowledgement of the invisible trains of thought that they
prompt. The poet Norman Nicholson writing of the discovery of Uranus, inferred
from minor deviations in the orbit of Neptune, wrote that ‘the unknown is shown,
only by a bend in the known.’ These photographs, by alluding to that which is
beyond visibility, allow us to glimpse a small bend in the known.
Dr. Jonathan Clarkson
Lecturer in History & Theory of Art
Cardiff School of Art & Design
UWIC