Kim Chun-su tried to figure out what was inside the state of enlightenment of words, but he ended up experiencing the reification of language, which involves the death and ideation of language. The poet recognized that an effort to make an outside wor...
Kim Chun-su tried to figure out what was inside the state of enlightenment of words, but he ended up experiencing the reification of language, which involves the death and ideation of language. The poet recognized that an effort to make an outside world(things) his own represented division and severance. He experienced the violence of history and ideology in the situations of his times. After living the times whose goal was the establishment of identity by the subject of ruling, he started to search for a path to true freedom from anthropocentric and violent language. As a poet, he contemplated over how to begin a poem in his relationships with the outside or others instead of colonizing the world with his internal self-expression. This study thus set out to analyze relations between the subject and others(the world) in his poems with a focus on the "encounter" issue, trying to change the old viewpoint that his poetry moved toward the death of a subject for post-history and post-ideology. In his poetry, subjects are accepting and manifested in relations, and their relations with others become "subjective-subjective relations." The thinking behind an "encounter" are to deny history and ideology that has become violence and, at the same time, accept the reality actively in one's own way rather than escaping from it.
Kim Chun-su underwent a stepwise process of a poetic experiment to open up a non-objective world through the restriction of consciousness, regarding a language in which a human idea intervened as violence. He converted from his early metaphysical ideas to image-led descriptive poems. Descriptive images represent his attempt at discovering the vivid "state of mind" of the world by excluding the ascription of human significance and depicting things as they were with a phenomenological view. Realistic depictions, however, still made him keep a distance from objects, which was why the poet proposed new descriptive images in which images became objects. The descriptive images that he made an attempt at embody an "encounter," in which the subject and the object are "born together" based on the simultaneous operation of logic and free association and in which those who are watching are in mutual coexistence with those who are being watched. Descriptive images appear as the effects of blank space and are created as physical descriptions of the outside get to have psychological(ontological) shadow. That is, the mutual correspondence of blank space, at which the poet made an attempt, forms a space elevated through the relational operation in which the state of silence(suggestion) created by a return back to nothingness and what are made of language meet together. It is manifested in his poems where the visible world of things is in harmony with the invisible world of internal sensitivity inside. Since then, Instead of locking the world up inside images, the poet embraced in a unified manner the "manifestation(apparaîre) itself" of the world that was constantly being created and moving through the rhythms in a moving and flowing form. The poet attempted ontological communication between a subject and the world by moving forward to a moment of sensation in which there was no boundary between a subject and the world(the outside). That represents a dimension of "rhythms" that unifies sensational natural facts living in various forms at a moment of encountering the world or logic of sensation not subjected to consciousness. Kim Chun-su focused on a phenomenological world derived from relations rather than the existence of images or things, thus discovering poetry as a structure of bringing about an "encounter." In other words, his poetic course started at internal poems in a form of self-completion and moved to a world of mutual encounters(relationship) with the outside(others).
As he tried to move toward the expression of mutual relationship between the outside and a subject, he developed an ambiguous attitude. In his poems, the ambiguous gaze represents a relational gaze beyond the modern gaze of checking the identity of subjects. In his poems, he created a scene in which the inside and the outside lived together, stimulating each other, with a poetic moment of "being watched while watching and being watched while watching." The intertwining of what is watching and what is being watched reveals "what is invisible" living and breathing behind "what is visible" in a visual manner, asking and answering the existence of things. It suggests that the entirety of a thing will not be revealed when there is only an operation of watching and that the existence of a thing may be visible in the space of darkness. The poet thus sought after poems in which mutual relations were manifested through the complex nature of light(consciousness) and darkness(reality) instead of orientation of existence based on light or nothingness only with darkness. He pursued equal mutual relationship, abstaining from dichotomous distinction and choice between two things. Poetry or art could not be a writer's intention itself or the existence of the outside itself to the poet, who was thus oriented toward a new direction(prose poetry) that was a mix of realism and anti-realism or the physical world and the mental world. Even though he refused the complete disappearance of an internal boundary, the resulting identification with the external reality and society, he tried to transcend a boundary through an encounter. As far as he was concerned, poetry stood between a boundary and openness. There is the coexistence of two opposite concepts, deconstruction and creation, in poems of an open encounter with clearly different and yet equal elements. Poet's ambivalence about history stemmed from the coexistence of creation and deconstruction. This means that history(fiction) and non-history(reality) is in the process of continuously cyclical repetition and movement between creation and deconstruction. It was important to him to turn the violence of history into a practice mode of encounter, and it can be made possible with passive and yet active expressions. The new kind of reason that he tried to reach was, therefore, the logic of accepting others as much as possible and establishing oneself or the open reason of moving forward while accepting the outside. The conclusion of his nonsense poetry was a path toward building a whole by banding together with the world based on the synthesis of "nothingness"(accepting the outside in a state of inattention) and "existence"(constructing the meanings of a poet to the outside) and realizing oneself in it.