Sébastien Galland
Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 33, 2023, pp. 119 - 138
https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.23.005.17567From the series Event of the Night in 1972 to Neige in 2003, via Gouttes d'eau (1979-2013), the painter Kim Tschang Yeul has developed a poetics of formlessness in which negation, emptiness and absence direct the creative process. The Korean plastic artist offers through the materiality of the work a meditation on the fluence of worlds and forms. The drop of water expresses the precariousness of things, but also evokes a beyond of representation whose richness is as great as its restraint. Water is the metaphor of the void without which the full cannot unfold; it introduces the practice of non-action, which does not consist in doing nothing but in letting the supporting factors at work in the form happen. The creative process abstains from any intentional action, to let the invisible power of the tao act.
Sébastien Galland
Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 23, 2020, pp. 63 - 77
https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.20.012.12819An emblem of heterology, hair causes horripilation and fascination: it is a part of the shapelessness that signals a rejection of rationality and philosophy, of metaphorisation and aesthetics, favouring instead ugliness, abjectness and material baseness. It verges on an unheimlich (uncanny) zone, which borders on the unrepresentable. Thus, this irreducible object unleashes the transgressive power of the sacred, that, no doubt, of eroticism, but even more so, that of the Dionysiac, which is the will for power and an increase in the feeling of being alive, against ascetic, hygienist or fascist ideals. Hair would be the fetish, attesting to the perverse structure of the forbidden and of civilization.