Bohnchang Koo, “Chasse Rou”, 2004

#somereallygoodones, #bohnchangkoo, #chasserou, #evidence

“I took my girlfriend to the circus to see what she could see

And when she saw what the elephant had

She wouldn't go home with me.” - Anonymous

Bohnchang Koo is an internationalist, an old word used here in the sense that this artist’s work is informed by his unique experience and appreciation of the world, the whole world.

It is not too complicated to sort through the different threads running through this artist's life and extensive work. “Threads” make for a decent analogy given that Koo is the son of a father who worked in textiles. The father imported yarns; later he becoming vice president of a mill of weaving fabric for men’s suits. The artist can remember seeing a variety of beautiful dyed wool threads with color gradations and the range of fabric swatches. In terms of nationality, passport if you will, we can identify him as Korean — South Korean — from an area near Seoul. He was born there, and that is still his base.

He left home to study economics in Germany and eventually photography. He made his reputation initially in other places like the US, Japan, and France.

His is a long career from “Good Bye Paradise”, from Natural History specimen boxes with delicate pinned photographs of butterflies and beetles done in the early 1990’s to his recent studies of worn down bars of “Soap”. The work has become increasingly abstract or at least spare.

So what are we to make of these images of chasse roues *1 (2002-2003), street level doorway protectors in Paris of stone or iron guards dating from the 15th century? These behave like a peculiar form of street furniture, sturdy decorative sentinels guarding building entrances.

As expected there are references to Koo’s experience of the world and to his earlier bodies of work.

Begin close to home with the so-called Asian character of his work with its restraint and the Zen-like minimalism. This is especially evident in his grayscale seascapes in his “Ocean” series, horizon-less considerations of the sea. Describing these as Eastern may also be a fairly myopic Western way of looking at the work.

The chasse roues also behave like systematic records, Becher-like German typologies. Again this may seem like a limited or rhetorical reading.

Go back to Koo’s early “Breath” images of a timepiece, a clothing hook on the wall, or a dying father very close up. These mark a transition from strict humanistic street work to more considered yet surprisingly empathetic still life. Are these chasse roue vintage architectural details intended as homage to Eugene Atget or Eugene Cuvelier or Charles Marville? Is this a Proustian photographic sweep through the doorways of post-Hausmann Paris?

Koo’s work is always managed with a high degree of refinement, a kind of “Purity”, as he called an installation. The sensuousness and handsomeness of the artist’s “Vessels”, vintage Korean porcelains, is in their shape and in the tactile appeal of the surface. Those elements seem to be attractive to the artist. There is an elegance in the image and integrity to the printing.

Aesthetics aside, what is consistent is Koo’s regard for history. It is as if the wear and tear of life slowly scrapes away at the surface of things to reveal truth. Time rolls on, and these chasse roues are literally the capture of that, the legacy of wagon wheels that came too close. Time is the central element in the record of the dusty stuccoed temple walls in his “Portraits of Time” or the invasive ivy anchoring itself into the surfaces in “White”. “Masks” are his attempt to record vanishing indigenous folk tradition. His “Pencil of Nature” works are pencil or engraving-like images of pine needles on snow that offer the barest of visual information but reference the very first photography book.

These are all offered as thumbprints or history. Evidence.

These chasse roues conjure up sculptural references from primitive stones placed alone to Brancusi graceful works in their simplicity and organic nature. They are evocative. Koo sees them as lonely,*2 which I also recognize. Their immovable quality has a quiet stoicism, holding vigil in their apartness,.

But these observations leave out is a major element that seems entirely new.

S-E-X.

Only Koo’s earlier “Fountain” with its vaginal — filleted or bisected -– symmetrical bodies of water reference sex, and then it is female.

My first sense of the chasse roues was that these were a natural follow up to his “Vessels”, his fleshy anthropomorphic pregnant women, his Venuses of Hottentot. But that was wrong.

This is guy territory. Look at the emphatically phallic nature of these photographs. This is very, very Freudian with all of these penises or penetrating sex toys: solid, rigid, and sizable, guarding the open doorway female orifices. There is a degree of defiance in these too.

If these are not penises then they are positive forces at the very least. It is as if all those negative spaces in Koo’s images of empty white “Boxes” (which reference Harry Callahan’s female vortex abstractions), of the hollows of his eyeglass case still lifes and of the recesses of his abandoned rooms with walls of peeling paint, it’s as if they have found their inverse.

Maybe the artist’s work is not about the void but rather about what fills it. What initially seem like his unique investigations of emptiness may be about positiveness, with the artist’s maleness filling the spaces. It is about his affirmative presence. Male. Active.

This may be directed completely from the artist’s unconscious – in my analysis — nonetheless it is manifest in a most provocative and startling way. Even if the artist’s initial fascination with the chasse roues was one of amusement, this work has an unexpected and substantial impact.

So let’s look at it all differently. Don’t miss the physicality in the work.

The seeming innocence of the figurative work of “In The Beginning”, his nude studies of dancers may merit a fresh assessment. We may have to look at all of the artist’s work differently.

There is even an abruptness to how these works are observed and cropped. It is all very surprising. Even the words in French chasse roue have a dynamic sound. It is fun to say. Roll it around in your mouth.

Mr. Koo has traveled the world and returned not only with his enhanced appreciation of the past and but also a heightened libido. He is an internationalist, and he is worldly.

*1 This is the Artist’s spelling. Chasse rou — without the e — may be correct.

*2 Conversation between the artist and writer, 2014.

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