Contents
004 Foreword
Bartomeu Mari, Director, MMCA
006 Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories
Dae-geun Lim, Senior Curator, MMCA
021 Essays
022 Cheol-ho Mo Yiso-Sung Ho Choi
030 Like a Rogue Half-part of a Tripping Person: Based on Essays by Yiso Bahc - Hyo-sil Yang
044 Enjoyable and Essential: The Non-Artistic Work of Yiso Bahc as Institutional Critique - Hye Jin Mun
065 Artist's Notes
185 Biography
261 Exhibition View
287 Artworks
333 List of Artworks
338 List of Archives
343 Bibliography
STATEMENT
Yiso Bahc
My brain seems to be full of skeptic reflection on already existing order of all kinds of worldly things. For example, I am not sure why I am supposed to make effort on artmaking and there are wide spread belief that people must endeavor to accomplish something. we try very hard to communicate, but i have feeling that we do so only to misunderstand each other. All kinds of meaningful productions by human being seem to be only waiting for a moment to become a heap of waste.
The act of artmaking, for me, is in a way a process of justifying my endless doubts about everything by using images and materials. It is like that I am trying to maneuver in reverse mode into the vast and limitless field of "gap" among those already existing categories and meanings. Even though I try to put above mentioned reflections in my work, I am not expecting for transparent understanding from audience. I think mixed feelings, ambivalent emotions, hesitation and inconsistency are closer to the heart of matters of human existence.
Stationary art object on the wall have a potential of an interesting, if not effective and powerful, resistance against current environment of incredible speed and cyberspace, precisely because they are weak and ineffective. Under the fragility of my art "product" of visual "communication" I would like to hide a reluctant confirmation of how we are far away and ignorant of the things we think we already knew. Instead of concerns about truth of changing the world, I am more interested in blankness, powerlessness, unpredictability, disappearance, and aimlessness.
In other words, I make art mainly for myself as a self-therapeutic escape trying to get away from voidness of life. But I am still interested in playful communication, making serious joke using familiar material, images, and daily objects, hopefully triggering the viewer's own interpretation.
October, 2000