Many images on the news on various media such as the Internet and TV deal with events, incidents, and the countermeasures. On top of such images, photographic images of war and disaster are added, making the contemporaries know events that they should not know or be affected directly and indirectly by the reality in which they are situated. The images that deal with special circumstances that differ from ordinary life possess their own components that can persuade audiences on a global level. At the same time, they also reveal the characteristics of certain region, time, nationality, ethnicity around specific incidents. Such photographs are images that can shock their viewers, yet they are ‘meaningless’ images to those who are not related to such incidents. Ha Tae-Bum develops his work by appropriating images that convey such reality.
Ha’s work did not start from images discovered via media. As Ha mentions in his artist’s note, he tried to express the momentary scenes he encounters in his daily life and the experiences he goes through from such encounters. His 2007 series 'Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst' is a major example through which he conveys his view towards the external world while addressing concerns about his inner world. He realizes that the images provided by media are scenes of other ordinary lives that one can indirectly experience while they are visually shocking. He is surprised by himself who is indifferent, insensitive, and unsympathetic to them.
Thus, the artist has come to present the WHITE series from 2008 where he makes every object white, attempting to scrape images and objectify their meaning. In specific, he produced subjects of his photography and sculptural works in the form of paper model that barely present material using thin paper. As the critic Lee Eun-joo notes, they do not intend to draw any kind of reality from an image as ‘an external symbol.’ As soon as the viewers recognize it, images draw a sense of futility that is tactile, perceptual, and visual.
Ha’s criteria of selecting images are thus not from the content of events and incidents but from how he can express the space within the images through his photography and sculpture. After the selecting process, the artist eliminates unnecessary elements from the original images and recreates them as images that are optimized for his work. Since what matters is how he can identically present the impression of the space in the images and they are images that rely upon his figurative thinking, whether there are human figures in his work or not does not matter. Ha produces a new kind of typecasted images by using sampled images that are manufactured by the mass media. In other words, new images emerge as the original images as their social, political, historical, and local conditions as well as their tragic qualities are removed and recreated. As a result, Ha’s work goes beyond the superficial meanings such as the tragedy of the war and damage from a disaster. His work symbolizes the absence of meaning, the dispossession of periodical division, the oblivion of the cause, and furthermore, the death by the absence of life.
Regardless of different strategies that artists take for the sake of differentiating their work from the others’ creations by exercising their unique creativity, the reality that the artists face is similar. Since the source of their work is similar, it is possible that the results show a similar trend. A style from certain period is produced as trends are concentrated in a specific period. In this sense, there are many artists that are influenced by images produced by the press. Among them, Ha Tae-Bum is an artist that does not insist on working in a singular genre but create works in diverse genres including installation, sculpture, photography, animation, performance, etc. Though there is an occasional emphasis on the playful aspect of his work from his paper model pieces and the fact that he employs different genres, Ha shows that the departure point of his work is only from within himself. The models he creates are presented through fragments, stressing the trace of his hands. In addition, the white space where one cannot feel the sense of space, color, and atmosphere gives a surreal sentiment than the reality of images, which leads to the conclusion that the artistic imagination is a matter of gravity in Ha’s work.
As he realized the role of an artist as a creator, the artist changes his ideas on humans that are both contributors and victims of wars and disasters, which are the source of his work. Hence, different from his previous works, the performances titled 'Dance on the City' and 'Playing war Games' involve direct intervention, candidly showing the process of war and destruction as an enormous play and the human instinct and pleasure that come from such process. While Ha’s perspective has been directed towards the external world for a certain period, he now shows a turning point where humans are directly involved in his work. By generating situations where life intervenes his works that have previously been filled with inanimate objects, the artist draws new experience and interpretation. From this point, it would be fruitful to review Ha’s work and anticipate what will come next.
