볼 수 있는 만큼

볼 수 있는 만큼, 2025
site specific work, paint on wall, 165 x 1000 cm

볼 수 있는 만큼 turns a boundary into a speaking position. Across a single ten-metre white field on the inward face of a sixty-metre concrete wall, six black Hangul syllable blocks say, approximately, “as much as can be seen” or “as far as one can see.” The sentence opens a horizon; the wall cuts one off. From the first encounter, language and architecture pull in opposite directions: the wall says here, the phrase says beyond.

Within the boundary lie the artist’s home and principal working ground near Berlin, a shared territory inhabited by the artist and his horses; directly beyond it lies a football field with its high protective net. The wall is opaque, the net porous. One blocks bodies and sight; the other catches trajectories while allowing vision through. Players, neighbours, passers-by, animals and the artist enter and leave this field of vision without ever sharing the same view. The inscription faces inward, yet it is never simply private. Its publicness is lateral and intermittent, produced through fragments, oblique angles and chance encounters.

The sentence did not exist first and then find a surface. It arose from this wall, this property and the sightlines crossing them. Its meaning is not sealed inside the words but distributed across script, architecture, terrain, memory and the position of whoever encounters it. Here, semantic externalism becomes spatial fact. Change side, distance or reader—or let another body enter the view—and the sense of the sentence shifts with them.

Korean is not an interchangeable code chosen to make the work opaque. It enters through the artist’s biography: a language made intimate through decades of friendships, conversation and desire, while remaining irreducibly other. The phrase leaves its subject unspoken. Who sees: I, you, we, someone on the football field, someone behind the wall, the wall itself? The omitted subject allows these positions to migrate. Whoever looks is also exposed to being seen; private ground becomes another person’s scenery, while the apparent object of vision begins to occupy a subject-position of its own.

The black Hangul blocks are writing, but at this scale they also become drawing. Their compact geometries—uprights, circles, joints and openings—form a measured yet bodily sequence across the long white field. As elsewhere in Estermann’s work, script does not caption an image or deliver a message from outside it. It becomes line, interval, rhythm and placement. Reading is stretched into walking; the spaces between syllables become part of the syntax. For a viewer who does not read Korean, the sentence remains fully visible while withholding its linguistic sense.

The inscription acts like a half-silvered mirror. It returns no likeness, but returns each viewer to the position from which looking takes place. At the same time, the wall ceases to be merely a support and begins to act: it separates, protects, conceals, addresses and exposes. Language does not sit on architecture; together they produce an interlocutor. The work looks back without possessing eyes.

In this sense, 볼 수 있는 만큼 is an extracorporeal self-portrait. The artist appears nowhere as an image, yet is distributed across a script bound to his biography, a lived boundary, the animals and people crossing its sightlines, and the wall that both shelters and displays his existence. “As far as one can see” names no stable distance. Its measure is remade with every body, every angle and every act of looking.