'Everything circulates': New 'Panorama' exhibition traces both micro and macro narratives to ask where society goes next

The first image in artist Ham Yang-ah’s new video work, shown at an exhibition that opened at the Art Sonje Center in central Seoul on Friday, shows a handful of ash being thrown into the sea. The last depicts water dissolving into data pixels. And in between these first and last images are seven chapters and 22 minutes of footage of a grave being opened, a birth, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher taking office, the logos of AI companies revolving on a light-emitting diode (LED) screen and a ring of eight projections, all focused on the notion of circulation and the relationship between humanity, our systems and nature.

A circle not ending where it began is a key concept of the new exhibition, titled “Undefined Panorama.” Ham has spent eight years on a research project about systems, and what she wants from a circle is not repetition.

“Everything circulates, but it always isn’t a cycle that repeats and comes back to the same place,” Ham said during a press conference for the show at the museum on Thursday. “We have lived through the Industrial Revolution, then the revolution of financial capitalism, and now we’re inside the digital one. I’m asking what our future becomes from there.”

“Undefined Panorama” is Ham’s first solo show at the Art Sonje Center since 2010 — a gap of 16 years, during which the museum kept communicating with her and eventually commissioned the two new works at the center of the new exhibition. In her artist’s notes, Ham calls the project an indramang, meaning Indra’s Net, a metaphor from Eastern philosophy that refers to “infinite connectedness.” Ham’s aim is to present a story that encompasses humanity’s history, an ambitious feat.

“I read the description that I had written myself of this work, and even though I wrote it, I found it absurd,” Ham said. “So I asked myself — what is this actually saying? Am I expressing it well enough? Does my work really hold what it says it holds? I keep asking, and I imagine I’ll keep asking.”

Where Ham’s earlier works in the “Panorama” video series took the macro narrative — states, markets, institutions — “Undefined Panorama 4.0” goes through the human body, which is why it opens with a funeral.

“The first image of Chapter 1 is cremated ashes being scattered into the sea,” Ham said. “The images after that run backward through time to a grave being opened; that’s the exhumation of my own maternal grandmother, filmed. Then a performance of funeral and birth, holding death and life together in a cycle.”

The macro bits arrive in the middle chapters and pass quickly, showing Thatcher in 1979 as the first to put neoliberal theory into practice, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan a year later asking Americans whether they were better off than four years ago, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, and then the 1990s, with Windows and McDonald’s turning up everywhere at once.

“Up to then, people had thought communal life and communal meaning mattered,” Ham said. “Then we entered a period where everyone had to survive on their own.”

Chapter 4 takes on the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and inevitably, the Covid-19 pandemic.

By Chapter 6, the work has caught up with the present and slipped past it. One group of figures accelerates; on the opposite arc of the ring, another slows down. Between them an LED screen cycles the logos of AI and tech firms, which are the parties now deciding what the future looks like, according to Ham’s explanation.

Chapter 7 puts the figures into a network and refuses to say what kind.

“The question is whether it shows solidarity, a bond between people — or whether individuals in a future society exist only as data suppliers excluded from policy and from anything that actually matters,” Ham said. “That might be what the human future looks like.”

The rest of the exhibition shows the archives of Ham’s work. “Undefined Panorama 2.0” (2019) opens on Dolly the cloned sheep and then reveals the government organization chart standing behind her. “The Sleep” (2015-16) lays bodies across a gymnasium floor after the 2014 tragedy of the Sewol ferry sinking — victims’ families, onlookers and the system that alternately shelters and controls them.

“I wanted to express what the country was feeling without expressing it emotionally,” Ham said. “How do you look at a single event, reconstruct it, and produce an abstracted reality? Where does this pain come from and how does the collapse of a system that produces it actually happen?”

“Undefined Panorama” runs at the Art Sonje Center through Oct. 4. Admission for adults is 10,000 won ($7).

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]