Present, Here This Moment

Overview

Ahn Pil Yun moves adeptly as an artist between light and its mirrored refraction: she performs a symbolic ritual, out of which tradition is electronically deciphered. The process resembles an interior beinq pulled inside out like a black hole. The intensity of light refraction in works like Deep Mirror, act as both a vanitas and as transmitter. In Deep Mirror, neon light seeps through gaps of stone slabs, giving the impression of snakes.

She speaks literally of the innocent aspects at the heart of the split in process between changing traditions, altered memories and their transparent a d negative potentialities. The work embodies a kind n] utopian vision, through performance and installation. Her role as interlocuter between these symbolic/real worlds is situated also in the imaginary of the urban and its infrastructures of communication. The introjection of its technologies is becoming a part of an everyday story telling. In this case, she speaks of the ordinary man of, say, 70 years life expectancy. How is it for such a man? It would be too easy to address to the many to be popular, especially in a time of emergencies. Ahn Pil Yun asks each visitor for their password.

In Password, two-way mirrors disorientate by way of semi-transparent walls. However the artist dislikes any singular metaphoric interpretation, pushing and pulling in/from the experiential, physical impression of film and video and its surface. She employs ultrasound devices and projection beams through these transparent mirrors. The video image, telephone calls on one screen to the other are (dis)connect, whereby the viewer acts as intermediary. The author and the subject act mutually as mediumistic guides through zones or spatial thresholds, to lead an adventurer to a point of illumination, a 'blue' room. (These blue rooms were early tv sci-fi stock and trade for special effects). Ahn Pil Yun often talks in an uncanny form of address, an untainted space traveller arriving with a future that violently but prettily, interrupts the seamlessness of the secular, isolated, present. PL