Long Time So Long (Photographs)
2022, inkjet prints, varied dimensions
Humour is often used as a tool to express discontentment with those in power, to challenge norms and to say the unsayable. Humor is present in traditions like Talchum, a Korean mask dance that tells stories of social rebellion, and in contemporary digital communications like memes and emojis. In merging these two sources, the artist creates a provocative images that references these practices of resistance, both ancient and new.
Untitled 6 (Long Time So Long) and Untitled 7 (Long Time So Long), 2022, (installation view), inkjet prints, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches) each, The Image Centre, Photo credit: James Morley
Untitled 6 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 7 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Bringing together the pre-modern and the futuristic, Long Time So Long’s masks mash up the ubiquitous emojis we use to set the tone of our digital relationships and characters from talchum, traditional Korean dances that tell stories of social rebellion against a dominant order. Through their saturated colour and exaggerated expressions, the masks express an extreme intensity, while the figure wearing them adopts casual poses as if this intensity is the most natural thing in the world. In a costume made of space-age fabric appliquéd onto unbleached cotton, the figure appears in different masks on and around a seven-and-a-half-kilometre sewage pipe hidden within a jetty extending off BC’s Iona Island.
Iona Island’s history is one of environmental ruination and colonial atrocities, but it is also the site of a semi-successful political protest and a reclamation project. Today, in addition to the sewage plant, it is home to a park and bird sanctuary.
Untitled 1 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 1 (Long Time So Long) and ChronoChrome 2 (Long Time So Long), 2022, (installation view), inkjet prints, varied dimensions, The Image Centre, Photo credit: James Morley
ChronoChrome 2 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print,182.9 x 121.9 cm (72 x 48 inches)
In this photograph, a figure wearing a silver mask stands on an endless road. Reflected in the mask is the image behind the camera: a continuation of the road, receding into the distance. In a tunnel-like form beside the road is a concrete jetty that houses a sewage pipe, the literal and psychic underbelly of Iona Island, where the long shadows of histories intermingle.
Before it was a sewage plant, Iona Island was ancestral territory that supported 9,000 years of Musqueam history. When it built the plant in the 1950s, the British Columbia government paid one dollar to lease (in perpetuity) a portion of the Musqueam reserve to run the pipe. The plant treats sewage from municipalities outside Richmond, where Iona Island is located. Protests from the people of Richmond were not able to prevent the plant from being built; however, extreme pollutant limits were imposed on the developers by cleverly declaring the island a nature reserve.
Acknowledging the past and turned towards the future, ChronoChrome 2 presents an image from the pivot of time.
ChronoChrome 1 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 203.2 cm (55 x 80 inches)
Untitled 8 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 203.2 cm (55 x 80 inches)
Untitled 5 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 8 (Long Time So Long) and Untitled 5 (Long Time So Long), 2022, (installation view), inkjet prints, varied dimensions, The Image Centre, Photo credit: James Morley
Untitled 2 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 9 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 203.2 cm (55 x 80 inches)
Untitled 2 (Long Time So Long), Untitled 9 (Long Time So Long) and Hin Saek Piper 1 (Long Time So Long), 2022, (installation view), inkjet prints, varied dimensions, The Image Centre, Photo credit: James Morley
Hin Saek Piper 1 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 152.4 x 228.6 cm (60 x 90 inches)
Long Time So Long emerges from the experiences of many Canadians during the pandemic: the forced isolation, the strange sense of time, and the anxiety of living under constant threat while going about our quotidian lives.
The mask worn in this photograph is hin saek (“white,” the funerary colour in Korea). With a mouth made of three fluted orifices, the work seems to be haunted by both COVID spikes and the Pied Piper. In the 13th century, the German town of Hamelin called upon the Piper to play his magic flute to lead away the rats that were causing plague. When the citizens refused to pay him, according to legend, he led the children of the town away as well.
This photograph seems to elicit a feeling of impending doom, one connected to the rising death counts from COVID, increasing environmental devastation, and the growing hatred in our contemporary moment. Who will pay the piper?
Untitled 4 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 3 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 111.8 cm (55 x 44 inches)
Untitled 10 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 139.7 x 203.2 cm (55 x 80 inches)
Regeneration 1 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 45.7 x 57.2 cm; mat border: 7.6 cm on three sides plus 8.9 cm on bottom (18 x 22.5 inches; mat border: 3 inches on three sides plus 3.5 inches on bottom)
Regeneration 2 (Long Time So Long), 2022, inkjet print, 45.7 x 57.2 cm; mat border: 7.6 cm on three sides plus 8.9 cm on bottom (18 x 22.5 inches; mat border: 3 inches on three sides plus 3.5 inches on bottom)