James Roh YongJin

My image making addresses the agency of the unwanted and aestheticisation of the ineffable, in order to traverse what’s outside the dominant narratives and their representative possibilities. More often than not I explore the edges of the upper and lower limits of hypostases; where we suppose there being negation, the idea without physicality, or, the non-thing that gives form to every thingness. In my work, this idea takes linguistic/pictorial forms of zero. The recurring archetypal allegory shape shifts into circles, spheres, holes, ghosts, and what have you.

The ineffable is the reality itself, which we veneer with linguistic dimension that breeds culture, which then breeds politics and so on. The space between linguistic constructs (human culture), and the underlying essence (the ineffable) is a fertile ground for aesthetic conceptions. The ineffable escapes the limits of language, which I see parallels in artists’ general difficulty in translating a work of art into linguistic utterance. Mistranslation is inherent in any kind of translating. Walter Benjamin in Translator’s Task speaks of god’s speech occupying the ground of translation between nuances. I think this is where art, or the sublime language likes to situate, tending to the poetic embrace of paradoxes, produced in image collision/resonance or through linguistic effect. My visual language also tries to exemplify that, embracing a mythical quality – in a manner of old totems and ancient mystic artefacts, depicting magical beings as having a strange quality of amalgamation. Animals into plants, into objects, into humans, always one becoming the other, always wrong, an open state, positioning outside any one category. This is to recognise the fiction/mythopoeia in all creation (our construction or interpretation of reality), and to search to create the sublime that satisfy the multitude.

The images I create could be an observation of the clash/merging point within our interiorized metaphysicality – metaphysics not as the nature of reality or the external objective truth, but about the malleability of subjective experience ad infinitum (infinite subjective truths experienced by every thing that exist through time). So the ineffable is the spirit that haunts the work, as the ghost that escapes our measureable reality. We can only speculate and reciprocate this immeasurable substance of life, but somehow, we intuitively reproduce the image that existed before. There is nothing new under the sun (eternal return).