「Testimony of Parrhesia: Desire for Belief or Suspension of Disbelief」





First, there is Salsigne, an abandoned mine once hailed as the gold mine of the century. Not far from it, there are residents still living in the mining village of Villardonnel. Then there are words from these residents—testimonies from the past and oral traditions passed down from their ancestors into the present. Present-day residents participate in the current testimony; their predecessors participated in history. Then there is an abandoned village named Courbefy, in an area of western France that has remained in ruins since World War II. A Korean photographer with the surname Yoo, who went by the art name “AHAE,” purchased the entire village, which has remained abandoned since his death. The village, while aesthetically beautiful, is swept by a wind of lifelessness blowing through its streets. Its human owners have disappeared, leaving only the scenery to bear witness to its layers of time. Finally, there is a village in Jeollabuk-do Province, Korea, believed to be protected from fire. Despite an article in the papers about a child dying in a fire, and despite stories of a man who burned to death after seizing a dog for food in front of the sotdae dangsan (sacred village pole), villagers still view the Jimdae Hanassi Rock—believed in oral tradition to prevent fires—as a symbol and mascot of their village.

Artist Ko Youngchan is a self-proclaimed “self-taught investigator” who explores specific places and creates works based on his research and investigation of these locations. The stories in my introduction were discovered by Ko and adapted into works of art: The Spy from Heaven (2017), on the abandoned village of Courbefy; Sim Solel (2018), based on testimonies from residents of a former mining village; and DORORI (2022), which investigates the truth about stolen cultural heritage. These highlights in the artist’s body of work begin by exploring, in the present, a place where an event or history existed in the past. Ko has constructed a methodology based on the idea of a “history of below,” incorporating oral history and microhistory. This approach may make Ko seem like a historian—an individual who observes events and places and then documents such observations. However, while Ko performs the task of tracing facts within the internal relationships constructed between individuals and communities, he is more accurately described as an explorer who approaches events and places with the stance of an artist: discovering events and stories in more private settings, collecting testimonies and evidence as clues for uncovering the truth, and enjoying the unexpected developments in the story as well as the magical realism revealed within the narrative in the process.

The artist, who directs the reproduction of the narrative and images, adds fantasy to the story established on the foundation of non-fiction through subjective interpretation and the exploration of yet-unrevealed truths. Magic realism—which mixes causal relationships of the real world to drive unpredictable story developments or deconstruct traditional realism—suggests that unrealistic narratives are not mere fantasies, but images of desire: creative expressions that describe reality. For example, in The Spy from Heaven, the artist arrives in Courbefy looking for traces of the photographer AHAE, but instead finds an abandoned, empty, and bleak landscape, which shifts the focus from AHAE’s narrative to the eerie beauty of the surroundings. Similarly, in Sim Solel, the image of a bleeding chunk of meat comes precariously into view only when a headlight is cast into a pitch-black mine shaft. The ambiguity of fiction is also evident in DORORI, where the artist travels to the spot where the missing stone duck statue was purported to have been found, only to see a lone Hodori statue instead of clues to the mystery. He recites a spell to summon Hodori1), who may have witnessed it all. The paradox of testimony is often embedded in his work: mise-en-scène derives from the artist’s contemplation of points plucked from a character’s testimony, unclear images dull information while emphasizing symbolism, and aesthetic consideration of light and unique imagery drives the sequence of events. This is why Ko Youngchan creates images of seemingly fabricated reality and fantastic narratives grounded in documentary-making techniques and oral history.

Consider that multiple truths can be inherent in a single fact. It is true that the event took place, but it is testimony that verbalizes the fact, and the testimony lays claim to the truth. Conflicting statements from different witnesses about a single event result in the diversification of truth, which in turn allows multiple truths to exist. In other words, this implies that the “statement” takes precedence over facts in oral history built on testimony. Ko Youngchan’s work reflects the principle of uncertainty in modern documentary: the verisimilitude and objectivity of reality as depicted in video cannot be fully evaluated. As Hito Steyerl wrote on the philosophy of interviews in modern documentaries, while witness testimony, expert interviews, or participant interviews are among the most universally deployed means to justify a documentary’s claim to the reproduction of truth, we also harbor a measure of distrust toward witnesses, for the plain fact that they can lie just as easily as they tell the truth.2) As Steyerl puts it, testimony is questionable but impossible to forgo. The artist trims his raw materials, working from the foundation of documentary while simultaneously placing the documentary methodology outside the frame, introducing ambiguous images and fictional imaginations instead. Following the artist’s woven gaze that illuminates events and places, moving back and forth between fiction and non-fiction to the end, only the audience remains to reserve judgment.

In the inevitable operation of the paradox of testimony, the artist’s subversion of his own methodology in DORORI can be seen as a process of trial and error that naturally ensues. Jimdae Hanassi, the central motif of DORORI, refers to the stone duck statue placed on top of the jimdae (pole) at the Dongmunan Dangsan Shrine of the ancient Buan town wall.3) According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, Dangsanje rituals—to prevent bad luck by twisting rope around the pole—have been held on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month each year since the Dangsan Shrine pole was erected around the 17th century. For the production of DORORI, the artist traces the story unfolding over 18 years, of the folk cultural asset Jimdae Hanassi disappearing from the village, being found, and returned. However, testimonies from officials at Buan County Office, the Cultural Heritage Administration, Sejung Old Stone Museum, and experts on beoksu (jangseung) heritage contradict each other regarding the sequence of events revealed in the investigation: that Jimdae Hanassi had “disappeared,” was “exhibited,” “discovered,” and “returned.” Did the “facts” change? Or has the “truth” inherent in the facts changed?

The processes by which truth and discourse are repeatedly added, excluded, multiplied, and subtracted by the testifier come into play in every testimony. As Michel Foucault wrote in a discussion of the politics of truth, more important than determining the veracity of a statement by holding it against a standard for distinguishing truth from untruth is understanding who is telling the truth and how they tell it. In other words, knowing whether an actor is capable of truth depends more on the actor’s ability to convey the truth in front of others than on their ability to reason it accurately. This concerns the ethical relationship that the subject has with the truth: the obligation to tell the truth, the ethical structure inherent in telling the truth, and the relationship that imposes this obligation. Rather than merely collecting and listening to the stories of villagers to infer truth or falsehood, the artist experiences situations or mental states in which he comes to suspect the testifiers. In doing so, he intuits the ethical relationship between the actor and the truth, and ultimately, the testimony of parrhesia4)—parrhesia, which should act as the <#witness> and <#messenger>, becomes a <#traitor>, suspected of not telling the substantial truth. Thus, instead of making the witness or testifier a character in the narrative, the artist explores the place on which the testimony5) is based and searches for evidence within it, building a new cinematic narrative that conversely utilizes this suspicion against the witnesses. In this way, he leads the testimonies—which breed and exclude truth and discourse—back to the place itself, creating ambiguous, uncertain, and obscured situations. As a result, parrhesia transforms from a character to a place in the artist’s work. Similarly, parrhesia was a place rather than a character in The Spy from Heaven as well.

In DORORI’s seventh channel, <#traitor>, the frame following the caption “The answer is in Geumdong Daehyangro” shifts from a blurry, indecipherable image to a zoomed-in and clearly focused shot of Geumdong Daehyangro. Under the phoenix, there are five musicians, five peaks, five birds that appear to be geese, and a person who comments that casts doubt on the story of the stone duck. The narrative flits between seven channels, beginning with folk beliefs, moving to a mysterious disappearance, and then attempting a magical return to folk belief. However, what actually occurs is tantamount to evasion, opening a narrative sequence derived from a subject matter that cannot be pinned down to reality. The dubious and uncertain images in this seven-channel narrative are less like sorcery than a desire for faith, or a suspension of disbelief. Alternatively, sorcery may be a form of collective hypnosis for the prosperity of the community rather than a religious faith. The narrative of DORORI is spread across seven channels, taking on a non-linear structure that dismantles the classic linear narrative understood through causal relationships or temporal sequences. Ko Youngchan’s approach, based on the paradox of testimony and the concept of place as witness, gains freedom and utility in the sequences by establishing paradoxical narratives that imply the dissolution of temporality. The work convincingly breaks away from traditional narrative, as its story does not exist as a complete whole composed of scenes, and the fantasy of the images in these shots enables an unrealistic narrative structure. In this way, Ko Youngchan’s magic realism—composed of multiple paradoxes, such as the unrealistic narratives of folk tales, the mixture of fiction and non-fiction, the politics of testimonies, and place as witness—provides insight into the structure of desire hidden within the narrative: the desire for belief and the suspension of disbelief. It also metaphorizes the testimony of parrhesia within the format and stance of documentaries.




1) The phrase “Yalli yalli yallasyung” is a spell used to summon Hodori in the comic series Run Hodori (1989, Geumseong Publishing Co., Ltd.).
2) In the book The Color of Truth: Documentarism in the Artistic Field (2019, Workroom Press), Steyerl writes about the chronically controversial uncertainty of documentaries. Testimony can be distorted or falsely reproduced by documentary forms, and she asks whether testimony is fundamentally opaque, subjectively colored, influenced by personal interests, tempted by the imagery of language, and trapped in an attitude that believes in its exclusive claim to rightfulness.
3) According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, Buan-eup is shaped like a sailing ship, and the Jimdae pole with the stone duck on top was erected to add weight, preventing the ship from capsizing. A village resident interviewed by the artist says, “There are no fires in the village because the tail of the duck fans out the flames.” The relationship between the stone duck statue and fire is also mentioned in DORORI.
4) Parrhesia, which means “to speak candidly (franc parler)” or “the freedom of speech (liberté de parole),” can be understood as the practice of speaking rather than the content or skill of speech.
5)  The artist once said in an interview: “The scenery is akin to a witness, most closely observing the things that happened, are happening, and may happen in a place. I explore such places and question witnesses to uncover the marginalized, forgotten, local, and personal stories therein.” — Interview with Ko Youngchan, Corée & Art Online Exhibition, Korean Cultural Center France, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Public Diplomacy Capacity Project, 2020.