Wistfully, the Khan asks Polo, if, on the day when he knows all the emblems, will he then possess his empire? And, the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”¹ —Italo Calvino

Field Explorations

Daebu-Construction is an archive project featuring photographs of everyday and non-everyday scenes in Daebudo that were molded by a utopian imagination pertaining to the construction of Sihwa Lake. Originally an island, Daebudo is now connected to land by virtue of a tidal embankment which was built as part of the land reclamation project and now works as a bridge. Sinyong Park kept an eye on this region when he began working at the Gyeonggi Creation Center. His work was initially motivated by the bleak scenes of the Daebu area which was rampantly developed independent of any planning. The scenes of many small towns in Korea appear similar to those found in Daebudo. None of us can predicate that it is a phenomenon caused by a lack of legal regulations and basic principles. This is because such rampant development has elementally derived from the absence of ethics and aesthetics arising from the severance of organic relationships between land and humans. Sinyong Park’s work began at a construction site walled off using temporary materials at the entrance of Daebudo. Buildings have been sparsely set up and vacant buildings can be seen among fields and paddies, commercial facilities, and structures whose purpose is hard to grasp. Such bleak scenes may be quite familiar to us, but they are thought to have been particularly unfamiliar to the artist who has returned after many years of living abroad. Daebu-Construction is a project that was initiated by a cubic building commonly found in most areas of Korea and which has no definite identity. Park has continued his exploration for eight months since March 2019. He came to understand the dynamics between geo-politics and capital through which a building comes into being after learning about the development history of Daebudo, Sihwa Lake, and its surrounding areas. What is most important to note is “the present of the site” he explores, not an understanding of theoretical interpretation. It seems necessary to be familiar with the construction of the Sihwa tide embankment before analyzing his work.

Previously called Gunja Lake, the Sihwa Lake area was a salt-producing region, a cultural trading point with China, and a historic site with Masanpo from which a prince was sent away to China by force.² The Sihwa embankment built from 1984 to 1994 was the result of the largest reclamation project of the East at the time and was square one for the development of the west coast, straddling Gimpo, Incheon, Ansan, Siheung, Hwaseong, and Pyeongtaek. The construction of the Sihwa embankment was a project led by the state to boost domestic construction by making use of heavy equipment that remained superfluous due to the decline of the construction boom in the Middle East.³ National land development during the 1970s was steadily carried out with reckless development-centrism which derived from an absence of introspection into the ecosystem, the environment, and life. Nature was nothing more than a tool to forge the future and people were seen as a means to attain industrialization and economic growth. It was thought that interactions must precede the coexistence of humans with nature. It is simply not true that only a poet’s heart should listen to the voice of nature. Spanning 12.7 km and bridging Oido and Daebudo, the Sihwa embankment was initially designed to function as a reservoir for fresh water for agricultural and industrial purposes. Three years after its completion, however, the original plan was abandoned due to water pollution. Environmental movement organizations offered several warnings about water pollution that might occur due to a lack of sewage disposal facilities, but the Ministry of Construction and Transportation and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry ignored them and played a part in turning the sea into a reservoir of sewage. The Hankyoreh (May 8, 2014) argued that “as domestic sewage from Ansan city and industrial sewage from neighboring Sihwa and Banwol industrial complexes was trapped by the embankment and turned putrid, the water quality of Sihwa Lake fell into rapid decline. A variety of life forms including fish and shellfish began to die en masse. Additional fish and living things perished when oxygen was depleted by the decomposition of dead living things. This vicious cycle turned Sihwa Lake into the site of the country’s worst industrial disaster.”⁴ After desalination was stopped in July 2000 and seawater was once again allowed to flow into the area, the dying mudflat was brought back to life within three years. When Reed Marsh Park, an artificial wetland, was formed in the upper region of Sihwa Lake in 2005, it was brought into the limelight as a new habitat for migratory birds. In addition, a tidal power plant certified as an environmentally friendly facility began operation in 2011 and facilitated the circulation of seawater both inside and outside Sihwa Lake, serving as an opportunity to clear the region’s name. The tidal power plant was built as part of an additional project to reinstate immoderate development and the life force of nature while artificial efforts were dedicated to improving its conditions, but the already destroyed nature still remains a problem. Although the development of a power plant meant to improve the region’s ecology has been expanded to the Sihwa Waterfront (Sihwa Narae) Project and its improvement is ongoing in connection with the development of industrial, residential, and tourist complexes in Siheung, Hwaseong, and Ansan concerned with Sihwa Lake, public access to the Sihwa Lake tourist complex is currently restricted and remains closed temporarily.

Since the mid-20th century (commonly referred to as the post-industrial era), countless conflicts and struggles as well as discussions and compromises pertaining to urban development have been taking place all over the world. Many are still ongoing and more are likely to emerge. The Sihwa area development project currently in progress aims to create a governance in each city in a typical Darwinist manner. Unlike that of yesteryears, today’s society pursues ethical values that respect ecology and the environment and reject one-sided developmentalism and unconditional profit making. Carried out for over 20 years, the development of the Sihwa area has been influenced by the mythical model of a utopia as a symbolic ideal for the formation of places such as generally advanced post-industrialized cities and American-style developed cities. Geographer David Harvey presents the city as a symbol of a utopia like Thomas More did. He describes that even if a utopian urban construction project turns out to be a failure, “it has a grave impact on urban planning today”.⁵ Park witnesses how a site is constructed by exploring the inside of the closed Sihwa tourist complex. Be that as it may, we can hardly say that he is criticizing the subject of development or aiming to comment on some ethical practice for the sake of an artist’s social participation. Rather, he discovers contradictory close links between invisible elements such as capitalist ideology and administrative absurdity and the haphazardly developed periphery of Sihwa Lake. He captures objects, intentionally excluding his subjective sensations and eschewing a reportage approach. There were perhaps many different reasons for why he could not permeate the issue more deeply. Of them, the working period was above all relatively short and the very complex issue of the west coast’s development had an effect on the region.

Under Construction

At a glance, Park’s work seems to derive from his geographical concerns. And yet, it is hard to see it as his initially planned position. Instead, his intention to be involved in some place and present some view seems clear. Presented above are several reasons why the artist could not deeply infiltrate a place. Let’s examine what his work tries to say. His works are a showcase of images that are the results of gazing at very concrete objects and places, but those images do not work as symbols or emotions. And, anyone is able to distinguish images but that is not enough to understand his work. Daebu-Construction, Archive was the first work Park did when he came back to Korea after living overseas but it was an extension of a piece he carried out in Berlin. As its title suggests, its first purpose is to be temporarily involved in a specific site. His work at large provided visual information images with which we are able to predict the near future by setting up temporary structures (fences, scaffolds) in a real space or heap up construction materials after setting up similar structures in the interior of a building (Untitled, 2018, Germany). Construction Site in Böcklerpark is only work that enables us to assume how his involvement has been made.

Park interprets “construction site”, an English term referring to an area or piece of land on which construction works are being carried out, as a structure or element specifying a space, regarding it as his work’s conceptual, practical motif. As this term is used as an analogy of a construction site but actually has no meaning, it is as good as a place of vacant symbols. His work seems to represent a construction site commonly found in big cities throughout the world, but this installation merely puts emphasis on the signifier of a construction site but has no object of construction or plan to carry out. The object and scene he chose in Daebu-Construction, Archive are also interestingly impossible to be interpreted in semiotics. Thus, his photographs are vaguely couched in visual language but his architectural structures or gardens are still anonymous and non-semiotic. Instead, they have something in common in that they refer to a state in which something is under construction. These photographs showcase transmission towers cutting across the sea, a construction site covered by temporary materials, natural scenery, and temporary structures. Some seem to give prominence to the purpose and function of an object and others look like common scenes. While each object is easily perceived, the entire theme and intent of each photograph is not easily grasped. However, an unexpected link appears if we change our point of view. For instance, his photographs feature small and large elements forming a place. All the same, these elements do not enable us to predict what they form or show. This is because each element does not share any plan or principle through which they have a link to their surroundings. Daebu-Construction, Archive consists of photographs taken in the process of a preliminary investigation for actual intervention, but the artist probably perceived the vacantness of the ideology of development such as tireless development and endless growth that was pervasive in Daebudo and its seaside villages. For example, Untitled (2018) he worked on in Germany disturbs or weakens the function of a place, filling it with wood wastes. This installation looked like an act of sabotage to deconstruct a place’s identity by dissolving the symbol of its outer appearance. Recently, site-based works particularly tend to be regarded as a specific genre. If so, can Park’s work be included in this mode of being?

So-called site-specific art is of significance in that it suggests a concept and criterion encompassing the limit and value of notions jumbled up close together in a variety of genres from public art, monuments, public sculpture, and environment art to public design. Author Miwon Kwon states that site-specific art has elementally emerged as a will to stand up against capitalist aesthetics in which phenomenological ontology in modernist art circulates as an exchange value. Site-specific art includes the process of experiments to explore new media, materials, and means in a confused situation of aesthetics. Accordingly, site-specific art encompasses even nomadic activities such as autonomously traversing the inside and the outside, region and region, and nature and civilization. Site-specific art has been accompanies with the new tendencies of art since the mid-1990s, such as art institutions, reality after globalization, publicness of art, and communities. Of course, we cannot put aside the public art institution distorted by public art service activities as the negative side of site-specific art. All the same, his work seems to try non-public intervention in public spaces by temporarily deconstructing any site-specificity or blurring a place’s identity. In Invisible Cities (La Citta invisibili) Italo Calvino pays attention to a city’s invisibility as its title suggests. That is to say, Calvino sees a city as something formed by memories, experiences, and accident. He seems to whisper to take out our own fantasies from our lives and to make our own lives, not given ones. Park’s work seems to mask its true intention to reduce the present to a zero degree. He made a kind of observatory structure with scaffolding after spreading sand on the floor in a group exhibition at the Gyeonggi Creation Center. We become perplexed at the fact that there’s not much to see at the dead end from which we have to come back. He is apparently forging or mending something. What we expect is what will come up next in his work.