개념미술의 시적 변환: 안규철 전시 <안 보이는 사랑의 나라>를 중심으로1

Ahn Kyuchul’s exhibition, Invisible Land of Love, can be classified as a kind of poetic conceptual art. The artist murmurs a complaint that poetry might be superior to the visual arts, because the power of an artwork is measured by the minimal use of materials for the maximal expression. In extending Sartre’s thesis on literature into the arts, we can affirm that the poetic conversion means to turn things into wild natural objects by virtue of irony. Artworks become capable of reflecting spiritual essences in breaking off relations between images and concepts that have been fixed by commercial advertisements, and the like. While the exhibition explores more and more immaterial and spiritual levels, it is the scattering voice’s pure time which is discovered in its final stage. This is an “auto-affection” in a Derridian sense. This kind of temporality is not filled with a solipsistic consciousness, but with (re)inscriptions that transmit and transcribe texts. The artwork “1000 Scribes” is constructed upon a family scene in which a son looked at the back of his father who was writing. We understand that an ancient tradition, that is to say, the Confucian formation of the humanistic subjectivity and the moral relations work in the depths of this poetic conceptual art exhibition.