Artist
Jaeyeol Han 한재열 작가

Nara Lee
Image Culture Critic and Senior Researcher
at Cinema & Transmedia Institute
Dong-Eui University


When asked about the starting point of his artist career, Jaeyeol Han refers to his service in Haiti as a part of the military response following the 2010 earthquake. To put it short, his art began at the site of a disaster. Of the numerous natural and man-made disasters, earthquake is peculiar in that not only does it cost human lives, it also splits and pulverizes the ground we stand on, the very shelter of our existences. It turns the earth into a collapsed background, upon which the survivors must build new houses. When a painting practice initiates from such a collapsed background, what exactly could it represent? After being discharged from his military service in Haiti, Han emigrated to Ireland, went out to its streets every day, and sketched the faces of the passersby. The ensuing Passersby series became a part of his practice for more than ten years. At first glance, the series, having been presented at four separate solo exhibitions (including this occasion), seem to be the unfiltered representations of figures torn apart by a disaster. His faces are robbed of features that make a person unique and distinguishable, such as eyes, nose, mouth, and social signs that imply the person’s race, sex, or social class. Blobs of colors constantly reminding viewers of their material origin. It would be possible to call the images “faces without faces,” the site where a face used to be, or the traces of a face. However, these “portraits without portraits” — both human and non-human at the same time — instead of disappearing from Han’s canvases, have kept appearing in his works, constantly creating series in the meanwhile. Just as how one could represent a shout via an image of silence — for instance, that of a closed mouth — the disappearance appearing here imprints viewers with beings that remain and do not disappear. It was no coincidence that his next series, Bystanders, would feature groups of people.

World War II was such a disaster for mankind that it put forth the question of what humanity is. Among its ashes, Hannah Arendt constantly probed into what the true nature of humans and politics are. To contemplate the realm of politics, she declared that one must first consider the men because the men are what involves modulability; meanwhile, the man is a word that recalls human in general or its overall characteristics. On the other hand, Arlette Farge, a historian who dives into numerous archives to study records made on nameless persons, has asserted that history must actively utilize the documentations made on bodily circumstances. Men without men, or the idea that the realms of politics and history could be revisited via bodily existences instead of the psychological — apply this idea to Han’s oeuvre, the faces in portraits (the Passersby series) and the portraits in faces (theBystanders series) strongly influenced by his love for Goethe’s Theory of Colors. As Han tears the visible world apart and shuffles the pieces simultaneously, his color-marks behave as modules, but not like the ones made for mechanic, automated repetitions. Instead, his ones are color-image modules that regulate the sensory region of disparateness and complexness beyond the boundaries of defined names and contours.

In particular, when we arrive at the Gathering series where Han takes sources from the image archives of disasters and modifies and rearranges the pieces, the politicalness and historicalness ingrained in the sensual realm of disparateness menacingly glare at the viewers. The black shadows in The Gathering, a Man with a Bottle, and The Gathering, Bystanders are such instances. First, the black shadows in Han’s images, serving as the pedestal to the groups of men, urge us to imagine the disasters the characters are suffering (or will be suffering). And in the next moment, we come to merge our faces with the “faces without faces” in his paintings. The black shadows that reminded us of calamities suddenly become shadows within our psyche, and we experience the character’s disaster as mankind’s disaster. The faces summoned in front of us turn into our faces, and at last, become the face within our psyche that stares us back. And in this exact moment, the thrill of the image conjures itself on Han’s canvases.

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