1 September 2025, hyun-suk seo, Art Monthly. (https://monthlyart.com/)
Review (KO)

빛과 의식의 파동 간섭 - 서울에서 중첩되는 제임스 터렐, 하이너 괴벨스, 안소니 맥콜의 빛

Wave Interference of Light and Consciousness: The Overlapping Lights of James Turrell, Heiner Goebbels, and Anthony McCall in Seoul

"Because of light, all things exist and vision arises, and visual art is the human activity that owes the greatest debt to light. The works of James Turrell, Heiner Goebbels, and Anthony McCall, gathered in Seoul this summer, do not treat "light" as a tool to illuminate and make visible objects, but rather treat light itself as an object of perception and thought. Their light manifests itself, without any representation of external reality. The works "emerge" before the viewer's eyes. The mystery of light is projected into consciousness with greater density when we go beyond observing their commonalities and contemplate the new questions they generate through their overlap. "When consciousness moves, it is like light."1 - James Turrell " {....}

"Following its trajectory, it faintly draws water, walls, ceilings, and pillars out of the darkness, engaging in a multifaceted relationship with two light figures. The small, intermittent undulations on the water's surface, created by six wave machines, distort the reflected light and thicken the interference effect. Furthermore, Goebbels's installation, rooted in music (unlike Turrell and McCall's works, which radiate light in silence), is accompanied by an auditory layering through eight-channel audio. The soundscape, created by overlapping songs and spoken words collected by Goebbels from around the world, including Korea, creates a counterpoint tension with the lightscape. Fragments of writings by John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Hannah Arendt, Robert Ruttmann, and Heiner Müller also add subtle linguistic meaning. Philosopher David Thoreau's Walden (1854), written while he was living in seclusion in the woods and experimenting with a life intimately connected to nature, served as a significant foundation for Genko-an 12353, but only a few fragments remain in Genko-an 03062. These material and linguistic fragments form a dispersed composition, without forming a single central theme, narrative pivot, or dominant element such as a "protagonist." This loose arrangement of fragments is a key principle of his methodology, which he calls "the theater of absence."

The alchemy of Genko-an 03062 arises from the overlapping, collision, and juxtaposition of various audiovisual fragments, much like human perception. This "polyphonic" reality, which is created, transformed, and dies, is simultaneously self-contained and open to the outside world of perception. Thus, the waves of light, sound, and water overlap and cancel each other out, deeply interfering with the wave of consciousness. Water deeply penetrates the work's phenomenal world, but the "polyphonic"

metaphysical eternity created by reality creates a correspondingly large gap. Perhaps it is this gap that opens up a majestic curvature of space-time, more so than the one-hour cycle of the loop that constitutes the work. A transcendent time where even consciousness is absent. {....}

on: Genko An - 03062 Seoul (Installation)