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The “patternized module” ¹⁾that artist Chu Mirim consistently presents in her work is generated by a “new vision”²⁾ derived from the act of viewing cities from the perspective of a machine. Hence, this paper will analyze the modes of Chu’s recent work in two aspects. One is the form and manner with which she treats and presents cities as artifacts; and the other is the question of visuality associated with the way she looks at cities from the perspective of machines such as satellites. While it may be natural to think that urban development and satellite development require two separate technologies, I believe that by materializing the two on one screen, the artist presents an allegory associated with the “new vision” created by technological devices.

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Sweet Section, 2020,  paper block, acrylic on paper mounted panel, (each) 60x80cm, 4 pieces. Courtesy of the artist

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A Formative Analysis of New Cities as Artifact
In POI: Point of interest, Chu’s second solo exhibition held in 2014, she used several cities across the globe in which she had resided as the subject matter of her work. In the later solo exhibition Satellites, held in Gallery LUX in 2020, she focused on a specific new city [or what is frequently referred to using the term “new town” in Korean urban development projects]. Chu’s choice of new cities as subject matter does not merely come from her experience of living in cities for a long time. The artist has always been interested in artifacts, and she possesses an analytic perspective toward design projects, which are exquisitely designed in advance and even affect the identities of the resulting artifacts. ³⁾ Design here refers to the materialization of forms with a specific purpose. A new city is a sort of artifact that is artificially designed, developed, and given an identity. As a new city is often called a “planned city,” fairly complex and sharply inscribed “intentions” are bound to be deeply involved in its development and organization.

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The complete view of a new city in Chu’s works that take on an aerial view can be seen as an intended strategy to explore the city’s network of relations by encompassing its various levels—from the physical landscape that had to have been taken into consideration when the city was developed to the subjective lines of movement that the artist has experienced as a resident. When a new city is being planned, the government inscribes clear “intentions” upon it ahead of time, but residents do not necessarily live by the intended course. In other words, urbanites reveal an urbanity that is formed while carrying out daily lives that do not necessarily correspond to the “intended urbanization.” Existing in Chu’s screen is a mixed array of the intended order of a state-led new development and an accidental arrangement that emerges as residents directly intervene in and partly construct the landscape. This is because parts of the cityscape or its respective artifacts are reinterpreted subjectively.

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Hence, it is difficult to conclude that the modules neatly arranged in a geometric fashion in Chu’s work are shapes that have been reduced and arranged through strong, subjective intervention and exaggeration. Such series of order and arrangement are probably derived from specific intentions in the designing and developing stage of a new city. In a number of works Chu presented in Satellites, in particular, neatly arranged buildings in straight lines are reduced to and materialized in a combination of modules. These works that demonstrate the beauty of formality through geometric composition, are realistic in a sense (despite not being realistic depictions) because new cities are intentionally designed to be geometrically well-organized. The artist seems to create a simple, neutral, modularized image of a city that at first glance lacks any political intention by reducing the specific intentions underlying the neatly embodied landscape of a planned city to the re-abstracted beauty of formality. Nevertheless, she simultaneously represents complex levels of the objective world and subjective experience by reconstructing them as senses derived from such experiences. Furthermore, when the artist rearranges the patternized modules on a plane, her own interpretation (based on the new vision generated by the visualization tool that is a satellite) of the artificial order works as an allegory.

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Paris 15e, 2014, paper block, acrylic on paper mounted panel, pen, 50x50cm. Courtesy of the artist

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A New Vision of Technological Perspective
Chu does not directly insert satellite images into her work, instead utilizing them as a tool to secure the perspective of a machine. She realizes urbanity by modularizing the things that she is able to see from a fresh perspective by way of the “vision” of the inhuman satellite into geometrically simple modules, then materializing them in forms in which she intervenes with subjective interpretation. Hence, a new method of visual perception and the sense of artifact that transcends human perspective brought on by the satellite’s vision are utilized as the primary aesthetic dimensions of her work.

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Viewing the Earth from 600 kilometers above ground presents a dimension that is entirely different from the humans’ standard perception. Thus, a normal sense of perspective practically disappears as everything is “planarized” from a bird’s-eye view. This sense of distance, which can in some sense be read as a rejection of sensibility, seems to disguise the pure eye. whose vision cannot be reduced to codes or rhetoric, in that it replaces every image with data. Yet, technology is never pure or objective. Though the gaze of the satellite, originally devised as a kind of war machine, may look at everything evenly, it cannot planarize the chain of centralized and hierarchical orders that are inherent in technology. Just as the neatly arranged new city is inscribed with political intention and purpose from the design stage, militaristic and political bureaucracy lies beneath the satellite’s operation disguised as general observation. Chu did not choose to center new cities or the perspective of satellites in her work to take a neutral perspective. By way of artifacts that are complexly organized, she secures a new vision through which she presents the possibility of capturing something that has thus far been invisible.

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Donna Haraway speaks of the visual tools of technoscience and the image literacy produced by them. She reminds us that advanced visualization technologies such as satellites, ultrasound machines, fiber optic technology, and microfilm photography as well as digital media such as computers and video cameras visualize what we had not been able to see before their development.⁴⁾ As vision has securely settled into norms, it has produced people who are highly adapted to good visualization methods. Additionally, forms of image literacy such as the use and understanding of perspective (as in painting) conform to a normative worldview filled with only images that are produced according to these visualization methods. A new vision is required to be able to see previously invisible or obscured things that we cannot perceive through refined image literacy. According to Haraway, the expression of images that have blossomed today has been refined by methods of training vision. In other words, image literacy, as a way of producing knowledge in the past, and its history have been elucidated only “by someone about a particular someone” and has produced “a missing gaze” as a result. ⁵⁾

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Technoscientific visualization devices have brought the images that, though existing in the field of vision, were either too big or too small to be seen in the past, into the range of human visibility. Things that could not be perceived by the human eye are now clearly visible thanks to visualization technology—this is the environment and conditions in which Chu’s work is placed. Looking at Chu’s work by way of Haraway, the mechanical vision of the satellites that views an artificial city can be interpreted as a way of seeing what was once invisible through a method different from ways of seeing that people have been attached to in the past. We can clearly tell that the artist has struggled with new ways of looking at things and arranging them in new forms based on that vision, as she has equipped herself with her own objective lens, explored the formative order of new cities through the new vision that penetrated that lens, eventually held on to a vision about equipping herself with a new vision mediated through new visual devices, and drew out an unprecedented relationship between the city and humans.

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A New Vision of Vision
In her second solo exhibition, held in Space Willing N Dealing, Chu concentrated on creating a subjective and sensuous map by visiting and adding her own experiences to the urban landscape of the cities that she has lived in through Google Earth. The map assumes the form of abstracted images in the pattern of modularized figures, but a unique three-dimensional effect is created by the accumulation of several layers of paper. As such, the map is reconstructed in a relatively subjective fashion as materiality and volume is added to it. One can even read this choice as representing the system of artifacts and underlying pipelines behind the intended arrangement of the city, like the parallel circuits that are revealed when a machine has been disassembled.

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Installation view, New module born from a rippling grid, 2016, Trunk gallery. Courtesy of the artist

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In Chu’s third solo exhibition New modules born from a rippling grid, she underwent a major renewal in her approach to mapmaking. This methodological leap came from her adoption of a stencil technique in which she prints out a design created on a computer, cuts out each part of the module, and creates a sort of a template. This template is then placed on another sheet of paper upon which images are produced by using it as a stencil to “print” images with brush and sponge. What is interesting about this work is that the templates used in creating the final printed images are exhibited as part of the work. This leads me to believe that the artist created the stencils with a precise understanding of what she has come to see through the new vision that she acquired from mechanical visibility. Starting from her third solo exhibition, due to her renewed vision, she showed the grammar and order of a city by displaying the templates not of the urban structures themselves, but of the space between them. The inclusion of the stencils with paint smudged all over them was a move away from her previous exhibitions that focused on embodying the urban structures from the perspective of a machine. This is the visibility that cannot be acquired when one resides within social and technological order. The new vision generates a landscape that was not seen because it was unable to be seen through the stencil technique. ⁶⁾

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Interchange, 2020, acrylic on paper mounted panel, 80x100cm. Courtesy of the artist

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In Chu’s latest solo exhibition Satellites, her modules display an even more refined level of formativeness in that they are intricately and structurally connected. At the same time, the interesting rhythm of patterns present a strong sense of vitality. The most noticeable work in the exhibition is InterㅡChange. While visually embodying the fluidity of the interchange that connects Bundang and Seoul, which is complex but has its own order, the artist acutely captures the way in which the technological order inherent in such artifacts is arranged as well as the vitality (directionality, mobility, and energy) running through them. It feels as though Chu is demonstrating a techno-human vision. In this solo exhibition, Chu presents an important new experiment in which she materializes a full-fledged and serious “narrative” through the Castle series and the video work Windows. She has focused on formatively arranging the surface of a city seen from the perspective of a machine (the satellite) as patternized modules, but in these works, she has started to register narratives into modules as well. In her move away from using modules to formatively embody artificial structures, modules have now become the window—both a crack and space—through which one can look at the world. When a city is viewed from the perspective of the human-machine, who is the main character of the story that unfolds in that world outside the window? To put it in Haraway’s terms, the artifact that has never been seen by us has never been able to become the main character in existing stories, hidden from sight due to missing gaze. However, it can now lead a new relationship based solely on the new vision of vision and may finally be able to play the leading role in the world outside this window.

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[Footnote]

¹⁾ A specific form that regularly appears in Chu’s work and has often been referred to as a “pixel” by critics. However, I deliberately avoid using that term pixel in order to reject the limitations to the form of expression entailing this particular concept. If the basic geometric units that repeatedly appear in Chu’s work in which urban images are abstracted and patternized are referred to as pixels, interpretations may be reduced to a very limited few as viewers are trapped by the fixed visual notion implied in that expression. As an alternative, I describe Chu’s work with the concept “patternized module.”
²⁾ The concept of “vision,” which comes from Donna Haraway’s use of the term, refers to its lexical definition as “the faculty or ability to see” or “range of visibility,” but in a customary sense also refers to the ability to think about or plan a positive future. I aim to discuss Chu’s form of art with the term “vision” to refer to those two different meanings.
³⁾ Chu worked as a user interface (UI) designer in the early stages of cellphone technology development.
⁴⁾ Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge: New York, NY. 1997. (Korean translation by Min Gyeongsuk, Galmuri Publisher: Seoul, 2006: 338–339).
⁵⁾ Ibid. 389.
⁶⁾ In this context, the geometric template ruler (official name: icon template) that Chu created outside her artwork is worth noticing. It is a tool with which one can reproduce the pattern of Chu’s modules, which can simultaneously serve as a formative structure that has its own spatiality.

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※ This content was first published in 『2021 MMCA Goyang Residency Program Catalogue』, and re-published here with the consent of MMCA Goyang.