The Island of Heroes
1.July~17.July
Incheon Art Platform (Crystal Cube)

Prologue: Hot Barracks
Kim Tae-eun's present exhibition begins with Dual-Head Shooting (2011). Installed at the center is a huge barracks reminiscent of a safety zone in a war with gloomy rambling of gunfire filling the exhibition hall. This is a trick. Everything is neatly arranged in the barracks and two war movies are simultaneously projected on the dual screens inside. The disparity, contrast and clash of different ideologies represented by the two movies generate strong energy. Tension builds up, because the films are the records of an historical event that happened only 60 years ago, at the place not far from where we are standing.

Episode 1: Two Heroes
The Island of Heroes is a media art project based on the historical facts and spatiality of the Battle of Incheon at Wolmido. The Battle of Incheon masterminded by General Macarthur is considered as the UN forces' strategic success that reversed the tide of the Korean War by putting a brake on North Korean army's series of victories during the first three months of the war. The operation has been commemorated in various ways. The Memorial Hall for Incheon Landing Operation was constructed in 1980s under the Chun Doo-hwan regime and a spectacular ceremony reenacting the operation took place in 2010 to mark the 60th anniversary of the operation.
There are three Korean movies dealing with the Battle of Incheon and Kim's project adopts two of them: The Marines who never return (1963) directed by Lee Man-hee and Wolmi Island (1982) by Jo Gyeong-sun, a North Korean director. What is most prominent about these films is that both describe how a war makes people miserable. The Marines who never return concentrates on the war itself from the viewpoint of an observer, while North Korean soldiers hardly appear on the screen. The North Korean film Wolmi Island also depicts a solider not as a combatant, but as an ordinary individual leading his life under the North Korean regime. However, there are two different heroes. Kim Tae-eun pays attention to the two different political ideas dealing with the same historical event. The two heroes made from different political ideologies are the icons of times created by the media to stand in stark contrast to each other by representing North and South Koreas. The artist brings the two heroes together in the barracks where the movies are screened at the same time.

“In comparing and analyzing the two films, I only focused on overlapping, contrasting and clashing of motions. I used blob detecting and binedge commands to simplify the areas of adjacent images into lines. I chose these methods because it seems both films are headed for the same direction. Even though the two films represent opposite political stances, they resemble each other in the use of camera angles and the actors' performances, because these are the factors serving the same purpose, making a war-hero. Ultimately, what I want to achieve from this project is the appearances, shapes and images of the common factors created by the clash of the two movies. (The artists' note)”

The difference in the visual images of the movies, in other words, the changes and clashes of ideologies are programmed through a certain process and the output is a set of values that becomes the source of the installation work on the floor. The values form a set of contour lines displayed under the screen to describe the energy of the war. The images coded through an algorithm into contour lines go through a process called rendering and become 3D data to create a virtual Wolmido.

Episode 2: The Memories of Wolmido
Wolmido, a place cherishing the memories of a war, is now an amusement park where old and new attractions are mixed together. Kim Tae-eun's Triple War (2011) is an attempt to show the images of Wolmido from the two movies through a different angle by way of programming. To this end, the artist arranges the battle scenes from the movies along the edge and remediates the seashores and the amusement park of the island through media image transforming. It seems like a sketch of our deformed history that the artist actually tries to demonstrate through the transformation or distortion of the two video data. The artist's gaze moves like a camera lens, penetrating the present of the island and tracing the places appearing in the movies, which reproduce the history of the past. The montages of Wolmido, the cut out and pasted images of the island, still remain in our memories and time adds to the layers of the memories, while the afterimages of hero-making will live in those layers forever.

Epilogue: The Island of Heroes
For the remediation of the movies on the Korean war, the place of historical events plays a very important role as the source of the narration. Overlapping movies of different ideologies seems to be an attempt to extract a political meaning from Wolmido that has been stereotyped as a place for amusement. In fact, the Island of Heroes is a politically-oriented artwork based on two largely political movies. Putting up different political stances against each other and revealing this structure as unfiltered as possible, the artist enjoys watching the impact of the conflicts between contradicting political positions and viewpoints. It is ironical that the two movies are aimed at the same goal, ideological education and propaganda campaign. They are like two faces of Janus, headed for opposite ideological directions, but striving for the same end.
The Island of Heroes is the first of the artist's local-connected series based on history and spatiality of different places. The local trilogy composed of Joint Surveillance Area (DMZ), Seoul Medley (central Seoul) and the Island of Heroes (Incheon) is expected to show how the artist's site-specific artworks develop further. Time turns events into history and records them as facts. What can we see in Wolmido in 60 years after the war? Wolmido is not an island any more, but a geographical part linked to the mainland. Even in the fast-changing multimedia era, even when ideology would become a relic from the past, Wolmido will survive. Kim Tae-eun shows how the modern history of Korea is converted into popular images through a media methodology of remediation. What will the virtual Wolmido created by the artist look like? How high or how deep will the contour lines be? It is up to the audience to imagine and give answers to all these questions.(Curator OH hye-mi)

 KIM Tae-eun
A media artist born in Seoul in 1971.
The scope of Kim's work ranges from movies, commercials, music videos to theatrical dramas, ballets and fashion shows. Since the first solo exhibition, Visual Sealing Apparatus at Seonam Art Museum, Seoul in 2000, he has participated in a number of exhibitions such as the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale at Seoul Museum of Art in 2006; ASIAGRAPH 2008 Shanghai, China; Artificial Linearity at Artcenter Nabi, Seoul in 2009; Door's Open at Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Gallery, New York in 2009. The artist takes cinematic languages to translate the connectivity between the reality and virtuality within the boundary of the media. His large-scale media performances of recent years such as Scrutinizing the Stealthy Desire at Seoul Square in 2010; Yokohama Dance Collection R, Yokohama, Japan in 2009; and The Great Book, a joint performance with Well Theater from Australia at Hi Seoul Festival in 2011, have introduced a new dimension of sense experience.

www.iiru.net