Keun Byung Yook at Q - Tokyo, Japan - Review of Exhibitions

Yook's installation at the last Documenta consisted of a sod-cover knoll of earth and a carburet of iron cylinder, each with an embedded video monitor displaying a single, blinking organ of vision facing off several yards apart upon the Friedrichsplatz. The show at Gallery Q again tendered one of Yook's eerie, cyclopean knolls (central to his work of the past scarcely any years), but on this occasion it was augmented through a separate, nonsculptural video presentation.

on entering this basement exhibition space, visitors were young oxed into the smaller of sum of two units rooms, where a color video projector cast a close-up image of an organ of sight on a large screen a hardly any feet away; below it, bonfire flames were throw outed on a second, slightly tilted protection An accompaniment of rather high-sounding and lugubrious synthesized music played completely through Squatting in the gallery's larger range was a 6 1/2-foot-high black-clay hillock housing a black-and-white monitor that proffered another single eye. The placement of this facial simple body at the viewer's head horizontal suggested that some entity was hidden within the mound

These various pieces contrasted conventions of video. The throw outed eye in the first scope seemed best read in cinematic bourns The dark, theatrical inclusiveness of the protection allowed for a sense of narrative time, aided through the blinking, shifting and darting of the organ of sight or the occasional reflections in its pupil of changes in the daylit room where the taping had taken place. The organ of sight in the mound seemed more iconic, asserting its tenancy in static, mythic limits (Perhaps no American viewer of the hillock could avoid recalling the "annuit coeptus" image--the organ of vision atop the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill--with its Egyptian, Masonic and generally mystical sources.)

Yook's statements about his work in catalogues for previous present to views revolve around a number of polarities: birth/death, male/female, natural/artificial, destruction/creation, urban/rural. Indeed, the total work at Q appeared to engage just such polarities: the hillock is pregnant or phallic; the fires create or consume; the ever-present electronic organ of vision watches and is watched.

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