It is infinitely growing into its inside: Lah's Ontology
Alex Taekgwang Lee (critic)
I can think of no artist other than Sun Lah that is more consistently interested in 'thingness'. From early on in her career, she did not regard anything as a fixed object. For her, all objects flow and the 'flow' became her focus as a thing in itself. In her world, an object is both extensive and intensive. Any entity has an extensive quantity and an intensive quantity. Extensive quantity is quantitative accumulation, while intensive quantity is qualitative depth. However, her sculpture creates quantitative decrease. In particular, her art gains its the paradoxical meaning by the profundity of it existence as wooden sculpture. She cuts off margins of a block of timber for her work. This diminution of quantity of the woodblock achieves her outcome. The lesser quantitatively, the bigger qualitatively.
<Skin and Flesh> shows this tension more frankly. Lah intends to get over visible boundaries and tries to bring in the synesthesia of things. Extensive quantity can be calculated, but intensive quantity cannot be measured by calculation. You can count the number of trees in the forest but cannot gauge the growth of the trees. Growth is quality, which can be thought of as 'intensive quantity'.
Lah is always interested in the polarity between 'extensity' and 'intensity'. These two bars provide her with a criterion for recognizing the mode of objects, which escape from a fixed locus. Regarding her wooden sculpture. In previous work, she decreased the size of the material and increased the number of individual items for her inquiry into the interaction between extensity and intensity. The works were in this sense, phenomenological. It is her motive that produces an object and her intention that is expressed into the thing. Her pieces are small, yet at the same time grander with their purpose.
Lah attempts to reveal her elaborated grammar through previous works, which investigated the qualitative depth within thingness. In <Skin and Flesh>, her instalments do not stay in a single place but float away from their point. The wooden material stands at the location but decrease in quantity. This thing is no longer a tree, it is dislocated. Dislocation brings forth signs and meanings. Signification relies on our linguistic system. Lah suggests to the viewer that language is trapped by the system. She wants to liberate thingness from signification. In her early works, we can 'interpret' them with those signs, yet, in this exhibition, she removes the possibility of such convenient signification based on the given codes. She asks us to observe materiality. We habitually make sense through signification, even when listening to the voice of things. We call this habitual reasoning "appreciation". Lah challenges this static signification. This rejection of meaning is an unprecedented leap towards a novel dimension. Her works go beyond the realm of the visible. Any numerical increase is meaningless here. The dislocated sonic effect resonates with the invisible and a monistic ontology emerges from this sonorous device.
Above all, all works of art stand for the geometrical grammar in their formal logic. However, the idea of geometry does not belong solely to works of art. We all form ideas, but an artist uses the idea for their work. We then use this idea in order to understand the work of art. But, this observation is subjective. We believe that our gaze is empirical and universal, but the meaning of any work is based on a unique code system. With this conceptual knowledge, is any work of art significant any longer? Against this given perception, Lah suspects the mechanism of this signification. Opposed to the extensive sense of a unified code system, Lah attempts to unify the ontology of things.
It might be easy to think of Lah's sculpture as a 'body'. However, she suggests skin and flesh cannot be a single body. Two elements shape one body but exist separately. Therefore, the body as such would be the locus of multiple intensities. In this sense, Lah's concept of the body is not the primordial stance before recognition but the ontological substance of thinking. Thinking, in which sense and nonsense are intertwined. There is no sense without nonsense. Likewise, there is no visible without the invisible. What we observe in her instalments reveals its invisibility by its sonic effect.
Nevertheless, the invisible reality comes into existence by continuously escaping from its figurative quality and constantly growing in its intensive quantity. In her works, there is no inert thing. Her originality lies in the way in which the intensive quantity is endlessly increasing through the dislocation of its texture and density.