상실의 공동체 혹은 공동체의 상실

Community of Loss or Loss of Community: On Sungnyemun Syndrome and Haegue Yang’s Sadong # 30

In this paper, the arson case of Sungnyemun and Haegue Yang’s installations are examined in terms of the psychosocial impact of loss and nostalgia in unifying individuals into a collective community. The social phenomenon after the recent tragic loss of Sungnyemun has proved that the individuals living in this current world of uncertainty desperately long for the complete belonging to a holistic community, which ultimately leads to a nationalist fervor. Nostalgia, sense of loss, and desire for community have become primary concerns of Haegue Yang’s practices, especially Sadong # 30, her first solo exhibition held in Korea in 2006. The artist invited spectators to a deserted house at Sadong in a dilapidated district of Incheon. Though the entire experience is charged with psychic intimacy and physical unity with the space, the individuals are fundamentally alienated from one another by the heterogeneity of their own corporeal perceptions and spatial experiences. Yang’s works thus abound with the sense of alienation and the loneliness of being disconnected. Yet, the artist neither speaks of this anxiety nor appreciates its libratory potential: she requires us to contemplate this state of displacement as an ontological reality. I contend that the disconnected subject in Yang’s practices suggests an alternative mode of being as conceived in Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “inoperative community.”