스킵네비게이션

Dave Hullfish BAILEY, Pusan Perimeter in Three Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 2020, Archival pigment prints and clay-on-paper texts, mixed media, variable dimensions

As I was unable to visit Busan, I set about an experimental map that looks in from the outside, emphasizing connections to material systems and imaginary places far beyond the city’s limits. These include the Nakdong River, a conduit for people, trade, and sediments from the country’s interior, as well as mountains near my home in Los Angeles, which stood in for Korea’s wartime hinterlands during the filming of a television series (M*A*S*H*) I watched as a child. Those first representations still shape my imagination of Korea, even though I know they are fictions. I’m interested in the limits of our ability to know and represent, and how often our systems fail us: what they get wrong and what they leave out. Central to the work, then, is the attempt to create new descriptive systems that weave together human and non-human histories, near and far, language and matter. 

The project is informed by the wholistic premises of Hangul script, as well as the alchemical merging of symbol and matter in Buncheong pottery from Gyeongsang Province. The auger bits or ‘cutters’ of modern cutter suction dredges are equally important for my thinking and for Busan—without them, Busan as a global city could not exist. Literally speaking, these cutters are the precise point of contact between the natural systems that formed the harbor, and the human narratives of expansion that seek to re-shape it. Their spinning teeth initiate a transition between two systems of order: the hydro-geological dynamics by which sand, gravel, clay, and silt are deposited in complex layers over eons, and the mechanical sorting of those sediments by size and composition for use in building the port’s future infrastructure. To me, the moments when, as a muddy submarine cloud, these sediments are literally suspended between natural history and human instrumentality suggests a concrete model for a new descriptive poetics or at least a place in which to look for one. In this inchoate state, where both time and place have been scrambled, there’s a clearly great risk of murkiness but at least the possibility that unforeseeable alignments may form and more integrated patterns of relation will emerge. If anything positive comes from the ‘suspension’ of the pandemic, perhaps it is that something similar can happen.

- excerpt from the artist's note