UNDRESS ME MY LITTLE B U D D H A

The first exhibition station will be the IPO Alternative Artspace in Seoul (South Korea) from 3 to 19 November 2023. A second exhibition is in Mexico D.F. in February 2023 in collaboration with Hashi Gallery and Sphere Salon. This third part of the trilogy is set across a wide range of media: Byunkaka and Ying Yun Chen, for example, place artistic emphasis on dance and performance, others work with photography such as Lena Nowhere, video sculpture/object art or installation. Of course, not all conceptual approaches can be described in detail or even mentioned here.

HIDDEN Messages“ was about artistic statements by contemporary witnesses about their real experience of social isolation during the Corona pandemic of 2020/21. nomansland.academy“ dealt with „identity“ in various socio-cultural contexts, including the processes of transformation from the real-analogue to the digital or the changes we are now experiencing as a result of the climate crisis. What significance then do rituals still have under today’s social, technological and cultural conditions? What does „belonging“ or „home“ mean in the current globalised world, where on the one hand the traditional social rules of a tribal society still apply in many regions, but on the other hand the individual is often exposed to a situation of uprooting and alienation? Lynn Hyeong, for example, deals with this in her series „Chaosmose; in which she examines the interplay „between personal disturbances and the challenges of climate change“.

In this part of the project „undress me my little B U D D H A“ (whereby this poetic title refers to two media images by Arthur Jafa and Rainer Junghanns), the aim is to reflect on an idea of the „true self“ under the premise that this „self“ is ideally able to express itself in different strategies of artistic self-discovery. Such „self-discovery“ in artistic creation can then expand sociologically into the assumption of a special role.

In the 19th century, for example, the bohemian or the dandy practised a form of life that was considered a counter-design to the existence of the bourgeois, the citizen of capital. The German and other European „painter princes“ of the 19th century and their public’s fixation on the hand-generated individual work celebrated a romantic individualism of the artist that had an anti-industrial character in that it consciously opposed uniform mass production in factories and the formation of mass societies at a time when, for example, the populations of Paris and Berlin increased tenfold between 1800 and 1900, i.e. within a single century. The promise of „Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness“, i.e. as a guarantee of personal happiness, as enshrined in the US Constitution of 1776, proved illusory in everyday life in the former slums of the industrial metropolises.

Some artists reacted to this with an escapism tired of civilisation (female artists were still underrepresented in the art world of the late 19th century). Paul Gauguin, for example, retreated to the Pacific region because he hoped to find personal happiness and thus his „true self“ in an apparently „unspoilt“ natural habitat. Such artistic self-realisation was only possible, however, because the bourgeois revolutions in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries abolished the guilds and introduced freedom of trade, which – with a parallel enforcement of academic freedoms in the face of feudal despotism – allowed artists to develop their own personal style, both in their external habitus and in their creative work.

Whereas until the end of the 18th century the painters‘ guilds had laid down technical rules that did not permit frank experimentation, and the patrons, nobles and church dignitaries, almost always determined the content of the pictures, the role of the artist changed in the era of bourgeois emancipation in Europe from that of a craftsman bound by the guild to that of a „freelancer“. In the 20th century, this changed understanding of the role culminated once again in the self-representation practices of classical art performance since 1970/80 and in the revival of the aforementioned „painter principality“ in the neo-expressive German painting of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the development of recent art history, however, this did not go unchallenged: As early as around 1960, Andy Warhol countered the anti-bourgeois bohemian attitude with his „factory“ principle, and in his painterly iconography he replaced „identity“ with a medially exaggerated and enraptured „image“. In that era, stars like Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley embodied a super-aesthetically staged image that was communicated through the media but had nothing in common with the actual character traits of the private persons Monroe or Presley, i.e. with their „true selves“.

In other artistic strategies, individual authorship is currently being questioned, for example in appropriation art or in the current collectivist models, such as those presented at the Kassel documenta 2022. Here, it is no longer about artistic self-expression out of an inner necessity, but only about art as a means of realising activist projects with which political goals are pursued.              

In non-European cultural circles, identity politics as a process of self-discovery often leads to an anti-colonialist strategy of overcoming centuries of cultural paternalism and thus foreign domination, which in some places still has repercussions into the 21st century. This project „undress me my little B U D D H A“ therefore also explores the question of how different ideas of freedom (and experiences of freedom) are discussed under today’s conditions of media communication in the respective social spaces. In her work, Hyekyung Son ties in with a concept of alienation critical of capitalism and thus also with the 19th century romanticisms just described, when she explains that the human being „hardly exists any more as an independent self or ego, but as a mere component of capital; in other words, capitalist society, which represents modern human freedom, conversely stands for the degradation of the human being and his self…“.

In terms of the sociology of art, it has long been accepted that in the 20th century there was not just one European modernism as a leading cultural model, but rather a multitude of modernisms that developed in parallel and independently of each other on all continents at the same time. „In the past, the idea of pop was that people gathered to form collective identities,“ says Jens Balzer about the development of the „zeitgeist“ in Germany and some other Western European countries in the second half of the 20th century. With tattoos, for example, the „will to be different… seemingly irrevocably inscribed in the body“. In the highly commercialised art trade of our day, however, the artistic personality style has been transformed into a mere trademark – at the major international art fairs, it is ultimately only about „branding“ for an oligarchic collector audience, but no longer about an existentialist self-exploration, which in performance art can sometimes lead to a physical borderline experience or even transgression. In a world of sober economic rationality, however, it is at the same time a privilege to deal in art with longings that cannot be further explained, as Melanie Balsam Parasole puts it.

In this third part of the trilogy, the artists use very different strategies to explore the question of who one really is in the age of avatars and artificial intelligence, and how this could be expressed artistically. Setsuko Fukushima, for example, who is represented in all three parts of the project, develops her works from found objects from walks and then transforms these objects and materials into works with a highly personal signature. She physically compiles her drawings from the last two years in a book and thus achieves an intellectual condensation of the material. Choe Rayun also works with materials taken from everyday life or nature. Keisuke Matsuura, on the other hand, lays out his works in space and as wall pieces with formal rigour, using gold leaf in a series of works in a manner reminiscent of Buddhist mysticism. With „Renasce“, Omar Rosales ties in with Buddhist ideas of karma – i.e. the idea of a spirit continuum that passes through many lives, whereby the concrete conduct of life in the now can produce a determinant consequence for a life in the future. Miryeon Kim documents mental changes after a serious illness and thus achieves a reconfiguration of her ego in her paintings.

Not only in Kim’s work, but also in other contributions to this project, mental processes represent inner movements, as they could be described in a novel of development, and in the age of a globalisation of politics, economics and cultural exchange, they are at the same time equally connected with external movements. Maho Maeda focuses her introspection on the formula „me inside me“. In May 2023, Rainer Junghanns showed an installation in Cannes with a wide-stretched line of clothes hangers from which photos hung. In these photos, he himself is usually only seen in a back view, and yet this work is to be understood as a cipher of how privacy is experienced and can be communicated to the outside. An inner, mental movement merges into an outer movement. This can also be described as a kind of pilgrimage: the traditional pilgrimage is always about repentance, purification and spiritual experience. Sunjoo Lee’s photographic works can be described as a lyrical journey into her personal circumstances, and at the same time she explores the world through an interweaving of different time levels. Erik Bachtold M does this in a similar way with a video that consists of four levels with similar images, but which were created at different times and in different places, „but which we perceive at the same moment“.

Thus, in artistic travel projects and exchange projects such as those initiated and carried out by Junghanns, movement in (global) space cannot be explained solely in terms of the logistically significant vectors of acceleration as in high-speed trains or in telecommunications with its split-second data transfers. Paul Virilio described such movement processes in a transhistorical way in his Dromology, and Jean Baudrillard propagated „the end of perspective space and the panopticon“ and even the „end of history“ as a consequence of this global acceleration. But man is precisely not a-historical. One of his most important anthropological conditions is the ability to see spatially. Thus, in a current phase of his work, Harald Hofmann starts from scenographic sketches that are to be understood as extended painting. The spatial models he develops from this sometimes refer to Albrecht Dürer and to the world view of the early modern period, in which a different understanding of space was arrived at than was customary in the Middle Ages. I-shu Chen, meanwhile, addresses spatiality with „fake landscapes“, and June Pak questions the concept of nationality, which is always tied to territorial hegemony. In this respect, some artistic concepts, especially where they are utopian, prove to be counter-strategies to the sober rationalism of purpose that dominates politics.

August 2023