Erasure held like a fierce lantern

Kang Seung Lee at the Talbot Rice Gallery

For the last three weeks I’ve been reflecting on the current exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh: ‘The dead don’t go until we do’.

From the exhibition booklet:

As Rebecca Solnit has argued throughout her political writing, we live in an age where forgetting is everywhere. Contemporary politics operates on short timescales, obscuring the power of people and grassroots movements to effect change, which can take years or even decades. But where forgetting can lead to despair, remembering can lead to hope.

The dead don’t go until we do brings together four artists who demonstrate how we stand hand in hand with those who came before us...

…In the background of each of these projects is a sense of nature and an awareness of how traditions and systems of knowledge that root communities have been broken. Without a nation, or stable and dignified place to call home, the stories carried from family to family, friend to friend, mean everything. Here, landscapes, plants and animals are also called to bear witness.

One of the most interesting things for me was the spatial layout of the exhibition, which leads the viewer through four very different rooms. Four different installations, each one presenting a perspective on histories of marginalisation, struggle, suffering, and loss. As usual, I hadn’t researched anything before going, wanting to feel my own impressions and reactions before getting into explanations and context.

I’ve previously written about Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, and Dalit artist Amol K Patil, whose work was presented very differently in the first of the two spaces. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s large fabric collages were presented like paintings in a traditional white cube, except that the white cube was painted a bright cobalt blue. Moving on to Amol K Patil’s work I had to climb a flight of steep stairs, leading to a contrastingly small, dark space, sparsely populated with three sculptures, one drawing, a film and a large text on the wall.

After this, through a set of double doors, I found myself in a circular, white-walled space, lit from above by a glass cupola.

It was so bright after the darkness of the previous room. Quiet, no soundtrack or film, just white brightness and silence. A circular plinth on the floor echoed the circular structure of the room. It was covered with a delicate woven fabric, scattered with photos, objects and dried leaves.

Threads hung over it, suspended from the cupola, tied with more twigs and leaves.

Between the cupola and the plinth, a curved drawing, taking up half of the wall space.

On the opposite wall, small watercolours of plants growing in the crevices of stone walls.

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, why all of these objects had come together in this way. I started studying the circular centrepiece on the floor.

So many small, delicate things. Signs and symbols embroidered into the fine cloth in a thread so pale that you could only just see it.

Shapes cut out of the fabric, laid with such precision and care. The curling edges of old photographs, a small original watercolour. Natural materials. Dried leaves, twigs.

The subtlety and delicacy of so many fragile things, so carefully arranged together, whispered in my ear, though I couldn’t understand the words.

I moved on to the curved wall. A watery world, created in pencil, which partially wrapped around me as I looked at the images it displayed. Exquisitely detailed drawings of more water.

I knew that this was a conceptual piece; obviously so many carefully-chosen things were there to tell me something.

There was a large piece of text on the wall by the entrance, which I hadn’t yet read. But even though I had no idea what all of this was supposed to be communicating to me, it had already touched me with its mysterious beauty. That felt new. My experience of conceptual pieces has often been that they’re careless or ugly; unskilled in their wielding of paint or material. This was the opposite; I was hooked, I wanted to know more.

I read the wall text. I didn’t find it easy to map everything I was seeing onto the ideas, but I understood that this was a work of remembrance for queer artists from different parts of the world, with links to specific sites in Edinburgh. The wallpaper and the drawings of water were based on the work of deceased photographers who documented queer life and experiences. Water was seen as a symbol of a fluid state of being between those who had gone before and those still alive in the present. The finely woven cloth was a Korean fabric used in funeral rites. The small cast silver objects included symbols used by another queer artist in his paintings.

When I read that the small watercolours of plants in walls were based on photographs of historic queer sites across Edinburgh, I was suddenly zoomed in from the broad scope of slightly abstracted ideas about other places to the histories and current day experiences of real people living in my city. The plants and other organic materials on display had been taken from those sites.

Lee considers plants and stones as long-term witnesses.

Witnesses. That small branch, that cluster of leaves, the dried seed head, had witnessed… and here’s the strange thing, in this piece the story itself is never told. Where the texts by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s work explain how many Roma people died in the holocaust, or that Roma people have traditionally been cast as beggars and thieves; where Amol K Patil’s work shows you people trudging barefoot over sticks at night on their way to seek work in the city, and the booklet tells you of 10 people crammed in to a 10x12 foot room built by the British to house their workers - Lee’s work tells you nothing at all about the experiences of queer people.

He makes drawings from photographs by queer artists, has silver printed with symbols used by others, presents paintings and natural materials from significant queer sites across the city of Edinburgh. It’s a very subtle form of remembrance; fighting against erasure through aesthetically reinstating people and places that have been are forgotten or are unknown;

…his drawings, watercolours, embroideries and installations create conversations with overlooked, deceased artists and with sites where communities, including queer communities, have historically gathered.

Exhibition booklet

There is no story. Only an aesthetically poignant arrangement of references which, like the other artists in the exhibition, say ‘Look. Listen. We are here, and we refuse to let you erase us’.

I needed the combination of objects, paintings, drawings and articulated ideas to understand this message. Unlike my experience of other conceptual pieces, which have often seemed to deliberately defy beauty and aesthetics, here aesthetic subtlety and artistic skill are not only present, but communicate something beyond the words, which also have to be known to receive the work as a whole. Have I finally understood what ‘conceptual art’ can do ?

Something that keeps striking me as I write about this exhibition is how much I missed when I was actually there. I could see what was in front of me, I could read the explanations, experience the sounds and the light, the colours and forms. And yet somehow it was only when I sat down to write about it, looked at all my own photographs, that the layers of meaning and story truly began to roll over me.

I looked at everything, focussing probably more than I would have done if I hadn’t been going to write about it, and yet somehow it was still impossible for me to take in more than a certain amount. Which makes me wonder, how much of what an artist is trying to tell me do I usually miss?

There’s one more piece in this exhibition left to explore, but I seem to be unable to write about it at the moment. Next week I’ll probably move on to something else, and wait to see if the final piece comes to find me in the coming weeks.