Between Beauty and Memory

          Lee Hanbum

After hanging around the exhibition space for a long time, the word that suddenly came to my mind was “beauty.” Beauty, beauty… It is a word I almost forgot, despite being an art viewer for quite some time. It is like a still thing that will not move forever while the dust slowly accumulates on it because no one has used it for a long time. Even as I entered the exhibition space, I did not feel or think that the works there were “beautiful,” walking between the standing sculptures for a long time. The word "beautiful" came to me a little later. This is my first structured appreciation of The Stump. I stood between the art pieces, reflecting on the time gap between the exhibition and my delayed response. My body that was walking in space and looking at sculptures led to another body, thinking about beauty. I assumed that there was some kind of aesthetic program that Kim Minhoon's sculpture possessed, which made up the structure of it, and it was this power that inspired me to think of beauty. I contemplated that all his works were caught up in an aesthetic program. There must be something powerful within if the artwork is strong enough to structuralize the experience. For instance, Greek artworks followed the ideal of mathematical proportions, abstractly beautiful rather than visually beautiful. When I reached this point, I looked at Kim’s sculptures again and started walking through space. The standing sculptures were all slightly larger than an average human, covered with traditionally twisted strings that formed patterned surfaces, and were arranged regularly as if placed along virtual grids within the small exhibition space. At first, I thought they looked like alien figures far away from us, even though they resembled “us,” as if they were standing figures who may or may not be human. The large grid that composed these pieces contained a small grid of shorter and smaller salt sculptures. A thick rope hanging from the ceiling swayed, creating a rhythm throughout the space. Although the sculptures had different shapes and were made of various materials, they seemed to share the same origin and inhabit the same world.

“Who on earth made these?”[1] The same words French poet Paul Valéry exclaimed when he saw the spiral pattern on the shell came out of my mouth. An artist? No, it is a little different. One can measure an artist's presence by examining the intentionally composed things left behind. But that presence stimulated a desire or fear of truth. The sum of these sculptures evoked the sense of “there,” not “here.” These sculptures emerged from a system entirely distinct from the reality I currently inhabit. Just as human beings are inevitably fascinated by fantasy and imagination, we have no choice but to get excited about these speculative objects. I wondered if the beauty evoked in me was not some exceptional splendor but the kind of awe in which a whole unknown world was suddenly evoked. This is a type of experience for archaeologists who excavate artifacts from the earth that we usually do not understand, or anthropologists who witness the truth of societies distant from their own. Of course, such experiences are also possible in everyday life. However, it is only a privilege given to the vagabond. Anyway, I left the exhibition contemplating that my goal should be to reveal what the program that featured the arrangement of these sculptures had to do with a specific aesthetic program. Then, how can I identify the aesthetic program of these sculptures? It occurred to me that this question was also something I had forgotten because contemporary art can exist due to the absence of such a program in the first place. Art scrutinizes the program of contemporary society intensely, yet it rarely questions its own program. Formulating questions became a method for exploring the nature of art. As I reflected on my intertwined thoughts, I realized that someday I should ask the artist about the origins of his ideas of beauty. I spent a while embracing my experiences of beauty.

While spending my days thinking about beauty, I suddenly acknowledged that it would not be too important to reveal the origins of beauty in Kim’s work. There are two reasons for my conclusion: One was the anatomical coldness that is difficult to ignore. What can I gain from splitting the mystery that is still alive? I often feel that it is better to amplify mystery than to try to understand it. Another was based on my natural doubt that Kim’s work aims to navigate beauty not as a destination but as a stopover. My doubt arose in my daily life as I contemplated whether it was possible to understand Kim’s work in the exhibition as a form of land art. Land art... something like an old and distant story, passed down like a legend, yet I always have longed for. I have never actually seen a work of land art, significant to the context of art history because they are often situated in places that I cannot easily reach, and many of them have disappeared a long time ago. Our knowledge of land art is primarily derived from books. The old and vast works are slowly and distantly conveyed through books, and the books present to us the appearance of what was once old and vast.

I am truly fascinated by the story that explains my interest in land art. Lucy Lippard is a critic who deeply explored the tendency toward dematerialization in contemporary art during the noisy and flamboyant experience of contemporary art in 1960s New York. In the late 1970s, she left the scene and retreated to the quiet countryside of southern England. There, she reconstructed the meaning of contemporary art through the traces of ancient civilizations she encountered while hiking in the countryside.[2] Lippard intersected ancient images, sculptures, and various practices of contemporary art in her subsequent book Overlay. This demonstrated how contemporary artists revisited the land and materials of the past to search for a world different from our current one, an effort that constituted a radical political practice. This is a world where nature, culture, matter, and humans were harmoniously integrated. While the world we live in is overlaid on the land of the past, these artists strove to overlay the land of the past onto our world. In so doing, they sought to resist the things we have forgotten and lost, the things that destroy us, seeking an alternative path. It does not simply mean that the past is better than the present, but rather that what we need is the work of remembering what has been forgotten. To me, land art is not just sculpture built on the ground outside the urban environment but rather a ritual that opens a faraway land reminiscent of the things that have disappeared and been forgotten in our time. In a barren land, we can witness the appearance of an old, blurry figure beckoning in the distance. We need to practice this journey to a far and empty land —not because building in stone, drawing a spiral pattern, and walking endlessly are attempts to uncover or summon some ancient civilization. Rather, it is an act of contemplation—a form of practice that reminds us we have forgotten something, and at most, a gesture that can merely suggest that something once existed. This process becomes a political action, given the strong social pressure to only repeat the present and forget the past. For these reasons I admire Lippard’s narrative account of this land art I have never seen before because of my desire to experience the speculative power of art.

“There is in matter something more than, but not something different from, that which is actually given.”[3] I often think about this sentence from Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory, a text I have recently read. Bergson assumes that matter and mind are a fundamentally interconnected continuum and explores their interactions, challenging the conventional notion that they are distinct. He argues that memory plays a key role in this interaction process. Memory is not just a record of the past; it is a mechanism that activates present perception and enables new perceptions. Although material exists independently on the outside, our perception and memory also shape it. Let us go back to Bergson's sentence on this matter. Matter is not just composed of what is visible or invisible to us, but there is a reality that exceeds it. This excess is probably related to the action of memory. So, what kind of memory allows for an understanding of the excess that goes beyond our perception of matter? I speculate that one of the forms of memory is beauty. Beauty. Beauty is not the result of the appreciation of matter but a force that radically reconstructs matter itself. It is a force and event that allows us to see more than is “actually given” in matter. In this case, is the aesthetic program that I originally thought of while navigating Kim’s work a form of memory? Ultimately it does not seem to matter too much. For now, it is good enough to acknowledge that Kim’s work reminds us of the world that has been forgotten, disappeared, and lost through matter so that we can radically reconstruct such matter through the memory of beauty.

The earth, rope, and salt that Kim employs are not chosen merely for their material qualities, but rather to open up a broader field of reflection connected to their inherent properties. Though he has not sought out vast and distant lands himself, his work seems to presuppose an imagined terrain that resembles such places. Perhaps this is what the shape of land art looks like today. What Kim brings forth is not the past itself, but our capacity to construct it. While past forms of land art attempted to awaken memory through direct intervention in expansive natural environments, the kind of land art Kim presents is more microscopic and technical. Could it be said that, rather than recovering the world of matter, he is trying to recover the world from within matter? If what has become more pressing in today’s artistic practice is the task of turning matter into something more than what is merely given, then the question of how to reinvent land art becomes all the more critical.


[1] Paul Valéry, “Man and the Seashell,” inMan and the Seashell: Selected Writings on Art by Paul Valéry, trans. Rakgil Chung (Emotionbooks, 2021), 123.

[2] “Hiking on Dartmoor, with nothing further from my mind than modern sculpture, I tripped over a s1nall upright stone. When I looked back over my shoulder, I realized it was one in a long row of such stones. They disappeared in a curve over the crest of the hill. It took me a moment to understand that these stones had been placed there almost 4,000 years ago, and another moment to recognize their ties to much contemporary art. I looked around that vast open space; the dog waited expectantly; I leaned down and touched the stone. Some connection was made that I still don't fully understand.” Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (The New Press, 1983), 14.

[3]Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (Zone Books, 1991), 72.