Interview by S and G

S: You have lived and worked in Hagen, Seoul, Paris, Maastricht, and a number of other cities and artists' residencies. Do you think that makes you global artists? 

Is the term meaningful?

G: Nayoungim and me feel a mixture between excecutive delegated managers of an international corporation yetting around the globe mixed with chinese travelling working in his bunk.

S: Do you think of contemporary art as another mass medium, neighbor to TV, internet, cinema, radio?

If you could choose your own neighbors from these media, who would you pick?

Is mimesis, or imitation, an important concept for you? (Imitation, as

in: "art imitates nature", the classical idea that imitation is crucial

for artmaking.) If it is, what are your models?

(My own idea here being, that mimesis and anti-mimesis somehow shape our

experience, combined in a field of tangible and abstract models -

naturalistic and formalistic zones, combined like the black and white on

a chessboard; or like the dark and the lighted windows in a huge

high-rise appartment building. I know this formulation is still very

intuitive, I will have to work on it to express it in a more meaningful

way.)

Do you hope that your work somehow relates the celebration of life as it

is to a sense of queasiness, or unease? (To coin a slogan: is it about

"The gloriousness of mayonnaise"?)

Do you have a favourite material?

Which things do you avoid in your art?

How do you decide when a work is finished?

G: Metabolism of the human being, living cell, Abfallprodukte.

The human being has a metabolism with is producing shit.

Let´s try to imagine a living thing without a metabolism the human being would possibly not be creative at all.

Working in art is like shitting so to say, there are these pieces coming out and it stops steered by peristaltic.

S: Do you feel that your work has a central theme to which you return time and again?

Entertainment, No, Tautology, Sex, Success, Beauty.

Please discard any questions you find dull, flat, overworked, and so on.

You are also welcome to treat any passage from my "Warped Flow Gadget"

text as a question to be commented upon...

G: So let´s talk about how I feel like a brain surgeon trapped in the body of an artist.

Even though it is absolutely desolate down here except for the occasional shrimp or anemone who´s strayed from his hydrothermal vent, I am really enjoying tooling around in the submersible. I know you are not crazy about me taking you to the Mariana Trench, some 320 kilometers southeast of Guam. But it is the only way I thought I´d be able to get enough peace and quiet and enough distance from the whole art scene to be able to complete the next shows I´m under contract for. The place is pretty swanky considering that it has to withstand about 16,000 pounds per square inch.

....

Absolute entertainment:

It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is to induce joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, &c. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by expressions like "He really pushed my buttons"). Filmed Autopsies and cholesterol-concious cooking shows on finally arrived HDTV are so violently unpleasing to look at that the viewer doesn´t bother to expend the thumb muscle energy to required to zap or surf away from anything on the screen. ...

S: You stepped down from studying philosophy at the Sorbonne IV in Paris after only 2 years and then stepped down from your elaborate computer simulation of machines build with frozen DNA cubes only after eight months. 

Do you think that it exhibits an immature restlessness and inability to honor long-term commitments or do you think that it exhibits a wonderful kind of boundless, nomadic intelligence and creativity that can´t and shouldn´t be constrained by a single vocation?

G:"The latter."

THE HOUSE OF KIMCHI

S: Are you interested in Metaphysics? and do you believe in Near-death accounts?

G: I recently had this incredible experience of floating above the bed in an IC unit in a hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida, I was about to be declared legally deceased, and I have this incredible experience of floating above the bed and being imersed in what I describe as a "sitz bath of radiant white light," and then I felt myself being thrown into the trunk of a car with diplomatic plates, but the trunk is suffused with this warm effulgence that makes me feel more at peace than I have ever felt before, and soon I was at this whitewashed ivy-draped villa where I was given a polygraph test ...- and then I hear this seraphic voice which says: "Go to the House of Kimchi," so I go to the House of Kimchi, which is this very opulent edifice, sort of like Versailles except that it´s completely constructed out of kimchi, those very pungent Korean pickles, and when I arrive there´s tremendous commotion going on and I see this woman sprawled out on the lawn in her bra and jeans. So I rush back into the House of Kimchi and begin to inhale air freshener, which is like this beautiful aerosol iridescence, and I describe it as "inhaling the sparkling light until there is no distinction between the radiance of the air freshener and myself - we were one."

Isn´t that incredible?

S: Indeed!