Edmund Lee loses all sense of time in Alternative Space LOOP’s tricky attempt to contemplate the temporal dimension of video art.

Para/Site Art Space Until September 5

A visit to Move on Asia 2010, one of the two single-channel video exhibitions currently at Para/Site Art Space (the other being Videorama: Artclips from Austria), is not unlike a trip to a rundown porn theatre that runs its obscure erotic flicks in an endless cycle. Projected on a modest screen in the middle of the gallery space, more than two hours worth of video art work – made by 26 artists from across Asia, and selected by 16 curators in total – is presented in one continuous loop. Each work is only separated from the next by split-second title cards. As I watch the dizzying selection from a small wooden bench, sunlight steals its way in and flickers on the screen whenever the entrance door behind me is opened. Visitors come and go in disquieting frequency. I struggle to keep up with the names of the wide variety of work, as the incessant flow of images and insufficient identification of them begin to wear on my perception. My sense of time becomes hazy and adrift.

And that, ironically, might be the whole point: in this show, the spectator is meant to be experiencing “time” in all its distorted glory. Organized by Alternative Space LOOP of Seoul, this year’s Move on Asia – one of Korea’s leading video art initiatives – centres on the theme of “Sealed Time in Video Art”. On the one hand, it is interesting to note that the title – as confirmed by Suh Jin-suk, director of LOOP – is indeed borrowed from the writings of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who famously likened making a film to “sculpting in time”. Even if we overlook this seeming casualness in conceding the blurring boundaries between cinema and video art, the premise remains intriguing not only because “time” is an under-explored concept in the field, but rather that it is such an intrinsic component of the medium it’s hardly a serviceable anchor for an exhibition.

All in all, it comes down to this: can one possibly put up a video art show that wouldn’t also automatically fit the theme of “Sealed Time”? A video of real-life happenings is often considered a record of objective time, just as anything else – computer-generated animation, still photographs displayed in succession, etc. – can be taken as a platform for the viewers’ subjective experience of time. Zhao Yao’s Ten Thousand Times (2009) – which consists of a slideshow of exactly that number of photographs, of four cross-shaped rice grains taken over 14 consecutive hours – is a fitting illustration of this dilemma. The ‘movement’ of the grains was not so much captured on film then it is created through the viewer’s sensory illusion in real time. Similar effects are likewise demonstrated by Australian artist Benjamin Ducroz’s 32-second video Pin (2007), a stop-motion work that follows the dancing, circular pattern drawn on papers pinned across a forest. Both interesting works; but if, indeed, they are posing any questions, aren’t they the same ones that the Lumière brothers have already provoked when they unleashed their train on the audience over a century ago?

The difficulty in saying anything new about the medium’s temporal aspect may in turn explain the similar conceptual approaches taken by some of the works in the selection – for repetition is undoubtedly one of the simplest ways to highlight the notion of time. Bangkok-based artist Sathit Sattarasart’s Her Eyes were Rolling (2008), a travelogue video (shot along Istanbul’s Bosporus strait) that is accompanied by a fictional dialogue between two people shown in subtitles, is consecutively screened twice; while in Newton (2009), Singaporean artist Ho Tzu-nyen’s abstract portrait of man’s creative process, shot in blinding white colour, is repeated four times. This play on the medium’s temporal potential takes on a mind-numbing extreme in Henry Foundation’s Fantastic Loop series (2010), each of whose seven titles takes a short sequence from the 1977 movie Guitar Tua, and then repeats it to the extent that rhythms begin to surface from the disjointed images and sound.

Another form of juxtaposition – of images taken from different points in time and space – is equally prevalent among the works, as in Howard Cheng Chi-lai’s Stiffen Water (2009), Sudsiri Pui-ock’s Farmer (2009) and Kim Yongho’s Study for the Hay Wain by John Constable (2009). Of course, there’s only so much to be said about “Sealed Time”; it is then little surprise to find that some works, such as Yu Araki’s Deep Search (The Mouth Edition) (2009) and Ma Quisha’s From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (2007), are gripping for quite different reasons. While the former is a gastric-camera record of the artist’s search for a plastic human figure he previously ingested, the latter sees the young artist narrate her touching family story over the seven minutes’ runtime, before taking a razor blade out of her mouth at the end. Visceral and indelible, the two works cap a compelling catalogue of work – linked together, regrettably, by a theme so flimsy that it would surely have left even Tarkovsky baffled.