Yuri An

The milieu of poetry: Yuri An’s ‘The Unharvested Sea’ and ‘Sailing Words’

Adeena Mey (University of Lausanne)

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For the past couple of years South Korean artist Yuri An has been producing a compelling body of work which closely relates poetry, moving (and to a lesser extent still) images, and a series of self-published books which feature her writing. In 2015 she was a recipient of the Seoul Museum of Art award for Emerging Artists (the latter label only making her work even more remarkable for the consistency of its formal efforts and of its literary ruminations), a program which supports early career artists in South Korea with the organisation of a solo exhibition, a workshop, and a matching session with critics and curators to nurture discussion around the work.

Yuri An’s show took place at Pool, a non-profit space run by artists, curators, and theorists. Pool is located in the neighbourhood of Gugi-dong, which slightly sets it apart from nearby Tongui-dong, home to some of Seoul’s most noted alternative contemporary art spaces including Gallery Factory, Audio Visual Pavilion, and The Book Society. Positioning itself as the inheritor of the region’s historical avant-garde ethos and aiming at articulating a critique of the ‘art system, a revisionist analysis of history’ and the production of ‘counter publics’,[1]it is fair to say that its relative off-centeredness materialises this aesthetic, discursive, and institutional agenda, although ventures such as underground galleries always function as a kind of urban pharmakon, offering temporary cures for a poisonous process of gentrification they themselves feed. This process is particularly impressive in Seoul, which Franco Berardi has called the ‘perfectly recombinant city’.[2]

 

Most commentators have emphasised the use of language, of the written word and poetry, in Yuri An’s artistic practice, often drawing the conclusion that she is essentially a writer and a poet. In her catalogue essay Pool curator Jaeeun Jung describes Yuri An’s exhibition both as an ‘epic poem embracing a long journey’ and ‘a lyrical poem embodying the longing and sympathy of this journey’s every moment’.[3] Taking Jung’s remark in its most primary sense one might then want to interrogate (following debates regarding the exhibition as medium or meta-artwork) whether we can locate poetry not only within the continuum created by the artist’s protean production made of projected images (digital film, slides) and writing (poetry books and installations) but also as part of these relationships as a whole which constitute the exhibition.

 

Entering the main gallery at Pool one first encounters two films by Yuri An: Floating Land Drifting Heart: From Texel to Jeju (2015) and The Unharvested Sea (2015), the former also being the title of a slide projection made in 2014 and exhibited in the adjacent room. This process of rematerialisation and remediation through which a work, its material and semiotic components, (re)constitutes itself across media traverses Yuri An’s oeuvre.[4] For instance this is also the case of the fourth piece shown in the The Unharvested Sea, titled Sailing Words: A Dialogue with the poet Huh Sukyung (2015), a text installation made of hanging panels reproducing the artist’s correspondence with poet and archaeologist Huh Sukyung about the nature of writing in its relationship to the experience of exile. As part of a subsequent eponymous solo show Sailing Words was remade as a three-channel video installation, the text superimposed over sequences of quiet wavelets shot at night.[5] Yuri An seems less interested in a form of modernist critique or reflexive stance vis-à-vis the filmic apparatus and writing on the other (such as in the diverse strands of ‘cinepoetry’) than in creating a milieu[6] in which writing accommodates itself within a diversity of media apparatuses.

 

The transmedia environments created by Yuri An unfold as interfaces where her narratives are written, which develop in a process weaving autobiographical elements, fiction, and historical investigation, haunted by the two interrelated issues of linguistic and geographical displacement and of the origin of language. Floating Land Drifting Heart: From Texel to Jejuis composed of alternating sequences of blank black screens with an English voice-over and Korean subtitles,[7] also including coloured scenes of an empty beach and black and white images shot at sea. The film intertwines two actual journeys (of Yuri An herself and of the 17th century Dutch mariner Hendrick Hamel) into a meditation on language and the absence of a mother tongue, the quest for its origin being projected onto her own personal history. Displacement results in such a search in which the hiccup – believed to have resulted from the human amphibian past and the need to adapt to new milieus – echoes Yuri An’s breathing techniques for the acquisition of language which she inherited from her grandmother:

 

I was raised by her words

Her words

Gathered from where water meets land

Slowly, travelled from her mouth to my mouth

 

This belief in the transmission of words was shared by the French poet Edmond Jabès, which he considered to be the ‘mission of the writer’: ‘she interrogates the words which interrogates her, she accompanies the words which accompany her’.[8] In Yuri An’s films words become quasi-physical entities, part of a nexus where the boundaries between signifying language and the sonic realm are questioned through her use of speech and sound, enmeshed and circulating between feminine entities (her grandmother, the sea, the land, the moon). The beach and sea sequences never quite represent deep waters but rather the liminal space and the threshold between shifting sands and shallow waters. Also, through this amphibious phenomenology unfolds a complex network of references.

 

Mouth to Mouth (1975) is the title of a video by the American-Korean artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; it addresses Korean language and its loss through a basic physiological action (the video consists of close-ups on the artist’s mouth closing and opening, forming an ‘O’) in her exploration of exile. Yuri An’s own experience as a migrant living in Holland reverberates with Hamel’s history recounted in his An Account of the Shipwreck of a Dutch Vessel on the Coast of the Isle of Quelpaert Together with the Description of the Kingdom of Corea. His journey with the Dutch East India Company from Texel to Jeju (which left him stranded in Korea from 1653-1666) is the exact reverse of the artist’s, who started the project after a visit to the Dutch island.

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In her cogent analysis of the intertwinements of cinema and language loss and of linguistic disturbances as a vexed ontological factor in filmic thought, Tijana Mamula cites novelist Hector Bianciotti, for whom ‘geography […] is only the apparent, purely superficial, form of exile’. Mamula continues, stating that ‘language, and its inevitable disturbances, is instead its deepest and most intimate’.[9] In Yuri An’s work both geography and language are profoundly entwined. As if consciously willing to work outside of any totalising nationalistic spheres (in this case South Korea and the Netherlands) from which language’s sovereignty equates that of the state, her experience of geographic and linguistic deracination is of a differential nature, taking place between two islands. Jeju and Texel function as allegories for the possibility of poetry. To the same extent one could contend that while being transnational her geopoetics of islands and alienation is inscribed outside of the realm of the discourse of ‘global art’ and its recoding of multiplicity into undifferentiated singularities and the telos of art history. Yuri An’s art remains fundamentally exploratory and open to contingency.

 

In The Unharvested Sea (2015), the second film on view at Pool and a sequel to Floating Land Drifting Heart, a new place (Jindo) is added to the journey between Texel and Jeju. The work extends the artist’s quest for the place of birth of poetry and intersperses it with actual tragic events she encountered, most notably the sinking of the Sewol Ferry in 2014, when more than 300 teenagers lost their lives drowning off South Korea’s southwest coast. The event provoked public outcry and criticism towards president Geun-hye Park and her government’s mismanagement, pointing to deeper dysfunctions in Korean politics. The Unharvested Sea weaves sequences of the peregrinations of people looking for traces and remains of their lost ones, of shamanistic rituals for the deceased and of superimposed slow motion shots of water and smoke. Here the literary, the aural, and visual embrace the process through which the living mourn the dead as much as it enacts it. It is more a document of this event than a monument for those who passed away, producing an active tension between the event and its recalling, between memory and the many presents of unfolding within the gallery space. As far as its documentary dimension and its (oblique) engagement with politics is concerned The Unharvested Sea participates in what media theorist Jihoon Kim has identified as a ‘post-vérité turn of experimental documentary’, under which falls a hybrid body of work between documentary, experimental cinema, and contemporary art. These works have broken from the participatory mode of documentary film, exploring a whole range of other formal experimentation, including ‘poetic observation’.[10] Everything in The Unharvested Sea – the work of mourning, politics, the worlds of the living and the dead, the crossover between nature and culture (the sea and the ferry) – converges towards the following words: ‘[t]hey said if you enter the sea / You can return to the place where your words were born’.[11]

 

‘體’(tǐ) is the space that cannot be expressed through language and letters.

‘用’(yòng), the wave created in that space. Perhaps, from the beginning,

this book was made for the departure of words.[12]

 

Islands and words. Islands as the milieux of words. Yuri An draws a continuum between the environment, geography, the imaginary, and the symbolic. This is a nexus reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic and ecological thinking about islands. For Deleuze the essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible, further probing this potentiality of islands, suggesting to ‘get back to the movement of the imagination that makes the deserted island a model, a prototype of the collective soul’.[13] If we also understand the island as a milieu, namely the product of a co-determination between a physical environment and the symbolic and representational spheres, and the milieu literally as a medium (what is in between), one might say that Yuri An’s exhibition probed these notions anew, the island acting both as figure and motif as well as model to think about the post-medium paradigm.

 

References

Berardi, F. Heroes: Mass murder and suicide. New York-London: Verso, 2015.

Canguilhem, G. ‘The living and its Milieu’, translated by J. Savage, Grey Room, No. 3, 2001: 6-31.

Deleuze, G. Desert islands and other texts: 1953-1974. Los Angeles-New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Hui, Y. and Mey, A. ‘L’exposition comme médium. Quelques observations sur la cybernétisation de l’institution et de l’exposition’, Appareil, No. 17, forthcoming in 2016.

Jabès, E. Le livre des questions I. Paris: Gallimard/Coll. L’imaginaire, 2006.

Jung, J. ‘A poem dispatched to a sea of submerged words’ in Yuri An: The unharvested sea, exhibition catalog. Seoul: Art Space Pool/Seoul Museum of Art, 2015.

Kim, J. ‘Factory Complex. The Post-Vérité Turn of Korean Experimental Documentary’, Millennium Film Journal, No. 62, Fall 2015: 11-12.

Levi, P. Cinema by other means. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Mamula, T. Cinema and language loss: Displacement, visuality and the filmic image. New York-London: Routledge, 2013.

Oh, J. ‘Hybrid of Poetic Spirit and “Cultural Film”: Theory and Practice of “Cinepoem” (1964-1967) in South Korea’, presentation at EXIS Festival, Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 24 August 2015.

Park, G. ‘The Language of Yuri An’, exhibition text. Cheongju: Cheongju Art Studio/Cheongju Museum of Art, 2015.

Wall-Romana, C. Cinepoetry: Imaginary cinemas in French poetry. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

 

[1] As mentioned in their mission statement: http://www.altpool.org/_v3/en/about/mission.asp.

[2] Berardi 2015, pp. 191-192.

[3] Jung 2015, p. 10.

[4] I borrow the term ‘rematerialisation’ from Pavle Levi and his analysis of the processes through which ‘cinema’ unfolds in the form of multiple materialities and apparatuses, using as case studies a range of Yugoslavian avant-garde works such as the ‘written films’ of the Hypnist and Zenitist movements active in the 1920s, or the 1970s experiments with the physicality of film. See Levi 2012.

[5] Sailing Words, 3-13 December 2015, Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju South Korea. Curator Gahee Park considers both solo shows as chapters of the same exhibition, the second being a reiterated attempt (by way of a search for equivalence between text and image) at affirming the status of poetry in the field of contemporary art. Park 2015.

[6] In a seminal chapter of Knowlegdge of Life, Georges Canguilhem traced the genealogy of the notion of ‘milieu’, sometimes translated into ‘medium’. Drawing on Canguilhem’s formulation, along with Yuk Hui, I have formulated a non-substantialist account of the ‘exhibition as medium’ understood as ‘modulation’. See Canguilhem 2001; Hui & Mey 2016.

[7] The original version made in 2014 as part of the artist’s graduation work at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam has no Korean subtitles. The 2015 version was re-edited for the exhibition at Pool.

[8] Jabès 2006, p. 64 (my translation). This reference was discussed by Yuri An throughout our numerous exchanges, including a public discussion as part of the film program Body Languages curated by Maxa Zoller for the World Script Institute at Cine Code/Art Sonje, Seoul, 22 October 2015.

[9] Mamula 2013, p. 6.

[10] Kim 2015.

[11] The Unharvested Sea, single-channel video, 2015, 09:00.

[12] Sailing Words, exhibition booklet, Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju Museum of Art, 2015.

[13] Deleuze 2004, pp. 12-13.

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July 11, 2016, Necsus

 

 

 

 

안유리의 언어  

박가희 (서울시립미술관 큐레이터)

 

 

4년 남짓의 시간 동안 작가로서 안유리가 고민하고 작품을 통해 주목한 것은 자리와 흔적이다. 이는 존재하다가 사라진 것의 자리와 흔적, 이를 남긴 이들을 향한 연민과 애도, 또는 이에 자신을 투사하는 동질감에서 오는 관심이다. 이는 작가의 작위적인 노력이라기보다는 자신에게 깊이 내재된 일종의 지향과도 같은데, 중심에 있지 않고 주변부로 한걸음 물러나 어느 정도 거리를 두고 사라져 간 것들의 자리와 흔적을 관망하는 태도이다. 주로 망명자들에게 나타나는 외재성의 그것과 닮았다. 안유리는 사라져간 것/이들의 자리와 흔적에서 ‘시’가 태어나고, 이를 더듬고 보듬어 ‘지금’으로 불러내는 것이 예술가의 역할이라 믿는다. 그렇기에 안유리는 흔적들을 ‘시’의 자리로 불러들이고자 행위 그 자체, ‘예술하기’에 주목하면서 작가로서 자신의 자리를 찾고자 여전히 항해 중에 있다.

 

2015년 한해 안유리는 두 번의 첫 개인전을 열었고,[1] 두 전시에서 작가에게 ‘예술하기’의 중심을 이루는 것은 말과 이미지라는 것을 알 수 있다. 이 글은 그에게 말과 이미지가 무엇인지 질문하는 것으로 시작하여, 지난 일 년간 나눈 수많은 대화와 두 번의 전시를 통해 감지한 안유리의 이동을 살펴보는 변화의 기록이다.

 

첫 번째 개인전 ≪추수할 수 없는 바다≫에서 나는 그가 언어를, 더 정확히 이야기하면 분절된 말과 은유로 가득한 독백과 대화로 이뤄진 시어를 생산하는 것에 더 집중하고 있다고 느꼈다. 예를 들어, 평행하는 영상 속 이미지와 목소리, 그리고 시인과 나눈 대화를 재구성한 설치작 속 말은 의미를 분절하고 파편화하면서 이미지를 보충하고 이어주기보다는 오히려 미끄러지고 어긋나며 길항했다. 이처럼 전시에 등장한 작품들은 ‘시’의 언어를 바탕으로 하고 있으며, 이를 다시 시각화하려는 시도의 결과로 보였다. 그렇기에 말은 이미지를 보조하는 역할이라기보다 적어도 이미지와 동등한 위계, 어쩌면 그보다 우위에 존재하는 듯했다. 하지만 안유리의 의도는 문학의 한 형식으로서의 시가 아닌, ‘예술하기’의 형식으로 시를 구사하는 것이었으며, 이는 다시 ‘시의 자리’로 나아가기 위함이었다. 하지만 결과적으로 봤을 때, 첫 번째 개인전에서 보인 그의 작품과 전시의 전체적인 구성은 작가의 의도와는 조금 다른 방향으로 전개되어 다음과 같은 질문들을 자아냈다. 과연 ‘예술하기’에서 시의 형식을 취하는 것이 말 그대로 은유로 가득 찬 시어를 생산하는 것과 같은 것인가? 그리고 안유리가 생산하고 취한 언어로서의 말은 이미지와 어떤 관계에 있는가? 길항하지는 않는가? 이 둘은 서로를 밀어내고 추동하며 그가 믿는 예술의 자리로 나아갈 힘을 지녔는가?

 

조심스러운 질문을 품은 채, 얼마 지나지 않아 안유리의 두 번째 개인전 ≪항해하는 말들≫을 마주했다. 나는 이 전시에서, 특히 두 전시에 다른 형식으로 등장한 작품 <항해하는 말들>(2015)에서 작가의 언어를 대하는 태도와 구사하는 방식의 변화를 감지했다. 이 작업은 작가가 2011년부터 허수경 시인과 나눈 대화와 서신에서 발췌한 내용을 재구성한 것이다. 앞선 전시에서는 이 작업을 종이에 인쇄하여 숲처럼 설치했고, 후자는 같은 텍스트를 조용히 일렁이는 검은 바다 영상 위에 일종의 빛처럼 등장했다 사라지기를 반복하는 방식으로 투사했다.

 

내가 <항해하는 말들>에서 주목하는 것은 표현된 형식의 차이 그 자체가 아니다. 그보다는 안유리가 다른 표현 방식을 끌어내면서 언어를 대하는 태도의 변화이다. 굉장히 손쉬운 대응과 단순한 비유일 수 있으나, 나는 첫 번째 형식의 <항해하는 말들>이 조금 더 시의 언어에 가깝다면, 후자의 경우는 번역의 언어에 가깝다고 읽었다. 이러한 구분은 발터 벤야민이 「번역가의 과제」에서 언급한 시와 번역의 상이한 특징에서 빌렸다. 그에 따르면, 번역은 기본적으로 원전을 메아리치게 하는 배후의 내포된 의미와 여기서 파생되는 영향을 살피는 것이다. 그렇기에 시인의 언어는 근본적이며 자발적인데 반해, 번역은 중심이 아닌 가장자리에 서서 어떤 한 지점, 메아리가 울릴 수 있는 한 점을 겨누어 번역어로 외치는 것이다. 이 과정에서 원저는 끊임없이 새롭고 풍부해지며 성숙해 가는 과정을 겪을 수 있다. 그리하여 번역은 두 개의 언어 사이에 평행선을 긋는 것이 아닌 “원천 언어의 성숙과정과 그 자신의 탄생의 아픔을 지켜보는” 것이다. [2] 

 

숲을 이룬 <항해하는 말들>에서 작가는 자신의 언어로서 시어를 생산하고 구사하는 것 자체에 초점을 더 맞췄다. 도달하고자 하는 시의 자리와 이를 위한 예술하기의 맥락에서 설치된 언어의 숲은 사유의 시각화라기보다는 그저 원저자, 즉 화자로서 안유리가 발설하고 싶은, 오랜 시간 담아 두었던 자신의 심상을 표현하고 싶은 근본적이고 자발적인 동기가 크게 작동한 것으로 보인다. 이는 작가가 시의 형식을 빌려 시의 자리를 그리거나 보듬기보다는 자신이 그 자리를 차지하고자 하는 모순적인 욕구로 드러나는 지점이기도 하다. 반면, 후자의 <항해하는 말들>은 시인의 위치에서 물러나 작가가 삶의 자리에서 반복적으로 마주하고 고민했던 일시적이고 사라지는 존재를 불러내고자 하는 행위를, 영상 매체의 속성인 빛을 통해 소멸한 것을 소생시키는 파생의 언어로 번역했다. 이 과정에서 안유리는 자신이 주체적으로 언어를 생성하고 표현하겠다는 태도보다는 가장자리에 서서 시어를 이미지와 빛이라는 다른 차원의 언어로 성숙해 가는 과정으로 파생시켜서 의미를 확장하겠다는 의지를 보인다. 이는 자신이 다루는 원저를 충분히 이해하고 이를 시각언어화하는 과정에서 시의 언어에서 번역의 언어를 사용하는 것으로 나아갔음을 볼 수 있다. 이 두 축의 움직임을 단순히 매체에서 매체로의 이동이나 대체로 보기보다는 말의 흔적이 이미지가 되고, 이미지의 흔적이 다시 말로 소생되는 순환 구조로 끊임없는 번역을 통해 성숙해가는 과정을 겪었다고 읽었다.

 

두 번째 첫 개인전을 마무리하며 나눈 대화 속에서 작가는 그리스 신화에 등장하는 이올리언의 하프를 언급했었다. 이 하프는 연주자와 악보가 아닌 불어오는 바람의 움직임에 따라 선율을 만들어 낸다. 이는 작가가 시의 자리를 찾아 예술하기를 끊임없이 시도하는 태도와 닮았다. 바람이 부는 대로 만들어지는 선율, 원저자가 사라진 자리를 잇는 번역가의 언어, 사라진 이들을 대신하여 내는 목소리, 그것들이 안유리가 구사하고자 하는 시의 언어이고 도달하고자 하는 예술의 자리일 것이다. 나는 안유리가 이 자리에서 서서 닻을 내리고 불어오는 어떤 바람에도 자유자재로 몸을 맡겨 그만이 만들 수 있는 아름다운 선율을 만들어 낼 수 있기를 응원한다.

 

[1] 두 번의 전시를 모두 첫 개인전이라 부르는 것에는 두 가지 이유가 있다. 단순히 두 개인전의 출품작이 같았던 것이 가장 큰 이유이고, 두 번의 전시가 나는 개인적으로 다른 전시였다기 보다는 다음 장으로 넘어가기 위한 하나의 챕터로 보였기 때문이다.

[2] 발터 벤야민, 『발터 벤야민의 문예이론』, 1983, 반성완 옮김, 민음사, p.352-353

​

2016년 1월 15일, 작가 워크숍, 청주미술창작스튜디오

 

 

 

 

The Language of Yuri An

Gahee Park (Curator, Seoul Museum of Art)

 

 

What Yuri An has agonized and noticed through her work for about 4 years as an artist is places and traces. That is places and traces that have existed and disappeared, condolences and sympathy toward those who leave them, and interests coming from empathy of projecting itself.

This is like a kind of orientation buried deep in herself rather than the artist’s contrived effort, and is an attitude that watches the places and traces of things that have disappeared, not by standing in the center but stepping back to the periphery and putting some distance. It resembles that of exteriority which is normally found among exiles. Yuri An believes that ‘poem’ is born from things that have disappeared/their places and traces, and the role of artists is to polish, refine, and shape a poem into what it is ‘now’. So, Yuri An is still sailing to search her place as an artist while focusing on the action itself that aims to bring traces to the place of ‘poem’, or ‘artistic activity’.   

 

Yuri An opened her first two solo exhibitions for the past year 2015,[1] and to the artist, ‘artistic activity’ in two exhibitions is mainly comprised of words and images. This writing starts with a question “What do words and images mean to her?”, and it’s a record of change to look at Yuri An’s movement perceived by lots of conversation and two exhibitions for the last year.

 

In Yuri An’s first solo exhibition ≪The Unharvested Sea≫, I felt she was putting more focus on creating language, more specifically poetic language consisting of monologue and dialogue filled with segmented words and metaphors. For example, the image and voice in a parallel video and the words in an installation work that reproduces conversation with a poet doesn’t complement and connect the image by segmenting and fragmenting the meaning but rather struggle by sliding and falling out. The works in the exhibitions are based on the language of ‘poem’

and seem to be the result of the attempts to visualize it again. Therefore, the words seem to have the equal status as images at least, or gain the ascendency rather than a role in assisting images. But, Yuri An’s intention was to show a poem not as a sort of literature but a sort of ‘artistic activity’, and this is to advance into ‘the place of poem’ again. But, her works of the first exhibition and overall composition of the exhibition

were a little bit different from the artist’s intention, thereby raising the following questions. Is taking the form of poems literally same as producing metaphorically-rich poetic language in terms of ‘artistic activity’? And, how is the language Yuri An crates and takes as a language related to images? Don’t they compete? Do the two have the power to play a role of art she believes while pushing each other and driving?    

 

Having some questions in a controlled manner, I faced Yuri An’s second solo exhibition ≪Sailing Words≫ in a short time.

In this exhibition, especially <Sailing Words>(2015) that appears taking a different type in the two exhibitions, I felt the change in the artist’s attitude about dealing with a language and way to speak it. This work reorganizes a part of conversation and letters the artist has had with poet Huh Sukyung since 2011. In the former exhibition, this work was printed on the paper and installed like the forest, and in the latter, the same text was projected to calmly appear and disappear on choppy black waters like a kind of light.

 

What I notice from <Sailing Words> is not the difference of the expressed form itself but rather the change of Yuri An’s attitude about a language while drawing the different way to express. That might be very easy correspondence and simple comparison, but I read that <Sailing Words> of the first form is more like a poetic language, whereas the latter is like a translational language. I followed this classification from different characteristics between the poem mentioned in Walter Benjamin’s 「The Task of the Translator」and translation. According to him, translation is basically to look at the hidden meaning behind which is making the original book echo as well as the subsequent effects. So, a poet’s language is fundamental and voluntary, whereas translation stands not at the middle but the edge of a certain point that can echo to cry with a translational language.

During this process, the original book can undergo the ceaselessly new, rich, and mature process. So, “translation is to look at the maturation process of the source language and the pain of its own birth, not drawing a parallel line between two languages.” [2]

 

In <Sailing Words> forming the forest, the artist focuses on producing and speaking a poetic language in her own language. The forest of language installed in the context of the place of poems to reach and subsequent artistic activities seems to be fundamentally and voluntarily motivated to express her imagery Yuri An has long cherished to express as an author or a speaker, rather than visualizing thought. This is the point that shows her contradictory desire to take the place instead of drawing or polishing the place of poems by borrowing the format of poems.

On the other hand, the latter <Sailing Words> interpreted the action that aims to bring the temporary and disappearing existence, which the artist has faced and agonized repeatedly in her life, stepping back to the poet’s position, in a derivative language that revives dead things through the light, a characteristic of visual media. During this process, Yuri An shows her will to develop a poetic language into a process of maturing a language to another dimension of image and light and expand the meaning by standing at the peripheral, instead of having an attitude to create and express a language on her own. This shows that she fully understands the original book and advances into the use of a translational language from a poetic language during the process of forming a visual language. I read that the movement of the two axes is not a mere shift from media to media or a substitution, but it has undergone the maturation process through ceaseless translation in a cycle where the trace of language becomes image, and vice versa.

 

In the conversation, completing the first latter exhibition, the artist mentioned Aeolian harp in Greek mythology. This harp makes a melody following the movement of the wind, not a player or music. This resembles the artist’s attitude about continuously trying to do art in search of the place of poems. The melody made following the wind, a translator’s language replacing the place where the original author has disappeared, and voice replacing those who disappear, and all of them are a poetic language Yuri An wants to speak and the place of art to reach.

I hope that Yuri An can make her own beautiful melody by standing at this place, dropping anchor, and going with the flow of the wind.  

 

[1] The reason why I call two exhibitions the first exhibition is due to two reasons. The biggest reason is the works of the two solo exhibitions were same, and then I felt the two exhibitions were not different but one was for the next chapter.

[2] Walter Benjamin, 『 Walter Benjamin’s Literary Art Theory 』, 1983, Translated by Seongwan Ban, Minumsa, p.352-353

​

January 15, 2016, Artist Workshop at Cheongju Art Studio

 

 

 

마침내 시(詩)가 된 말들

정은영 (작가)

 

꽤 오랫동안 안유리는 내 기억 속에서 언제나 시를, 혹은 문장을, 무수한 낱말들을, 어쩌면 그저 음절들을 썼다. 어쨌거나 쉬지 않고 썼다. 그의 글은 내게 종종 시가 가진 어떤 것, 그러니까 시적인 무엇, 혹은 이미 시였던 무엇이었다. 말 대신에, 하루에도 수십 차례씩 들락거리는 변덕스러운 그의 표정, 자주 방향을 잃는 부산스러운 대화 위에도 묵묵히 내려앉는 그의 비범한 눈빛, 전생에 웬수라도 진 것처럼 마주 서서 지겹게 뿜어내던 우리의 담배 연기에조차 그는 시어들을 실었다. 그러나 그의 고백에 따르면 나의 기억은 너무 과장되었거나 틀렸다. 그의 기억은 일종의 ‘문맹’인 상태에서 시작된다.

 

 

어릴 때 내 방도 없었지만 책이 꽂혀있는 책장도 없었다.

조금 컸을 때는 책 보라는 소리를 귓등으로 듣고

조악한 단어들을 섞어 쓰느라 입이 걸어져 버렸다.

그 버릇을 한동안 못 고쳐, 하고 싶은 말이 있어도

쓰고 싶은 말이 있어도 아는 단어가 없었다.

 

내 손에는 텅 빈 사전이 쥐어져 있다고

오랫동안 남 탓하며 살았다.

내 몸 밖으로, 부모 밖으로, 대문 밖으로,

세상 밖으로 도망치면

그 끝에 다다르면 나도 잘 익은 말 하나,

생각 하나를 가질 수 있을 거라 기대했다.

— 『깍』의 서문 중, 2011

 

 

땅의 끝, 바다의 끝, 하늘의 끝을 수차례 마주하며 도망 다니던 그가 어느 날 그의 첫 책 『깍』을 내밀었다. 고해집 같기도, 에세이집 같기도, 또 시집 같기도, 아티스트북 같기도 한 이 작은 책은 입이 아닌 손으로 발음한 그의 ‘말들’로 지난 시간을 빼곡히 채우고 있었다. 이것은 그의 ‘텅 빈 사전’이 말, 노래, 기억, 손의 춤, 장소의 감각으로, 또한 비로소 세상과 타인을 향한 화해와 사랑의 단어들로 채워져 가고 있다는 최초의 고백이었다.

 

그는 여러 차례, 여러 장소의 가장자리에서, 여러 여자들을 떠올렸다. 할머니, 엄마, 친구들, 그리고 이름으로 남지 않았던 어떤 여자들, 또한 시인들. 그 여자들은 모두 그에게 ‘말’을 전하고 가르친 이들이다. 감각으로만 남은 순간들, 혀 위에서 달그락거리던 사연들, 말이 되지 못했던 노래들, 남겨진 말에는 차마 다 담아낼 수 없는 고통들, 이해 불가의 부당한 세계에 쏟아지는 질문들, 너무 오래 묵혀 속을 알 수 없는 딱딱한 비명들, 그런 것들이 언제나 그의 마음에 침범해 들어왔다. 그런 식으로 그는 다른 여자들로부터 말을, 시를 배웠다. 그렇다고 그의 ‘문맹’이 단숨에 문장이 되거나 문학이 되어갈 필요는 없었던 것 같다. 그의 이야기가 비로소 말이 되는 순간, 그 말에 힘을 담아 그의 구강을 통해 발음되는 순간, 그 말들이 그의 뭉뚝하고 재주 없는 손을 통해 꾹꾹 눌려 쓰여지는 순간, 그 말들이 그가 본 것들 틈을 가로지르며 세상의 먼 풍경들과 오버랩 되는 그 순간에, 그는 문맹의 기억 위에 ‘자신의 말’을 써내려갔다. 문맹과 문자가 겹쳐지는 두께— 나는 그것이 그의 시어들일 것이라 생각했다.

 

그의 시어를 읽으며 “유리 너는 정말 ‘시적’이야”라고 말했던 그의 지도교수의 말에 부아가 난 적이 있었다고, 그는 말한다. 그의 시어들은 순결한 낭만성이나 시적인 정취로부터 시작된 것이 아니기 때문에, 그 스스로 시적인 인물이고 싶지 않았기 때문에 그는 화가 치밀었을 것이다. 그의 시어는 아이러니컬하게도 시어의 정서를 거절하는 시어이고, 시어의 세속적 정의로부터 멀어지고자 하는 시어이기 때문에 그랬을 것이다. 그의 시어는 소음들 속에 자욱하게 가려져 잘 드러나지 않는 개인의 삶의 경험과 세상의 풍경들이 함께 직조되어 있으므로 그렇게 쉽게 정의되어서는 안 되는 것이기 때문에, 그리고 무엇보다 그의 말들은 ‘시적’이기 보다는 이미 ‘시’인 것을 원하고 있었기 때문에 그랬을 것이다. 그는 내게 자신의 작업에 관해 이야기하기 전에 서경식의 『시의 힘』을 함께 읽을 것을 제안했다. 그리고 그는 아래의 문단에 따옴표를 쳐 내게 보내주었다.

 

 

“시란 무엇인가? 서정시 형태의 정치적 태도 결정이란 무엇인가? 지금도 나는 ‘안다’고는 할 수 없지만 다음과 같이 생각하고 있다. 길이 그곳으로 뻗어 있다는 것을 알고 있어서 걷는 것이 아니라 아무 데로도 통하지 않을지도 모르지만 걷는다는 것. 그것은 다시 말하자면 승산이 없으면 싸우지 않는다는 태도가 아니다. 효율이라든가 유효성이라든가 하는 것과도 무관하다. 이 길을 걸으면 빨리 목적지에 닿을 테니 이 길을 간다는 이야기도 아니다. 요컨대 이것은 승산의 유무나 유효성, 효율성과 같은 원리들과는 전혀 다른 원리에 관한 이야기라는 것이다. 그것은 시인의 언어이며 그것이 서정시다.

나는 그렇게 이해하고 있다.”

— 서경식, 『시의 힘』, 현암사, 2015

 

 

그의 시어는 힘의 논리를 바꾸어 놓을 때 의미 있는 것이다. 서경식 선생이 이해한 것처럼, 혹은 그에 대해 안유리가 동의했던 것처럼 시어는 승산 없는 싸움을 하고 있지만, 가장 위태로운 한계지점에서 힘을 발휘한다. 목적도 효용도 없이 발휘되는 힘, 그러나 세속적 ‘힘’이라고 말해지기 힘든 또 다른 ‘힘’. 그 끄트머리(깍), 그리고 그 끄트머리에서의 미미한 외침(깍)과 같은 힘. 그의 첫 책의 제목이 무엇 보다도 ‘깍’[1]이어야 했던 이유다. 이후 이국의 언어들 틈에서 자신의 자리를 부단히 닦고 다듬으며 그는 이렇게 쓴다.

 

 

나는 소음을 견디지 못해 문을 단단히 잠그고 다시 사전 속으로 뛰어들어 갔다.

셀 수 있는 단어들 사이에 셀 수 없는 의미들이 살고 있었다.

하나의 단어 앞에 서서 문을 두드리며 누군가를 만나길 기다리고 또 기다렸다.

소리 없는 자, 소리 낼 수 없는 자, 어쩌면 죽은자들의 음성이 귓가에 울릴 때

나는 머뭇거리지 않고 써 내려갔다. 그러면서 생각했다.

나는 쓰고 있다, 나는 살아있다, 라고.

— 세 평짜리 숲, 『세 평짜리 숲』, 2012

 

 

그는 다시 사전을 펼친다. 그의 텅 빈 사전은 이제 제법 쓸만한 단어들로 채워져 있다. 그러나 그 단어들을 잡아두는 의미의 지층들 사이를 그는 헤맨다. 그가 알고 있는 힘이 아닌, 어떤 다른 패권들 사이, 그 의미의 정치 속에서 길을 잃는다. 무수한 세속의 의미들을 비자발적으로 미끄러져 돌아다녀야만 할 때, 그는 또다시 그의 말을 찾는다, ‘깍’하고 짧은 비명을 지른다. 이제 그의 시어들은 자신의 언어를 가지지 못한 이들에게만 오직 유효한 말 없는 말, 문자 아닌 문자, 힘이 아닌 힘, 시가 아닌 시, 그런 모순이고 모반이다. 이 세계에서 이방인의 말은 침묵에 가깝다. 그러나 그는 그 침묵이야말로 그의 말이라고 생각한다. 그는 그 침묵의 말들마저 이국의 언어로 쓰고 또 썼다. 발음하기 어려운 낯선 단어들, 번뜩 알아차릴 수 없는 외국어의 뉘앙스들 속에서, 무뎌지는 감각들을 안타까워하면서도 시어가 되어야 할 말들을 끝내 붙잡고 있다.

 

 

이제 벽은 잠자리에 들 시간이다. 사람들의 숨으로 얼룩진 벽의 피부.

나는 아직 끝내지 못한 일들을 써 내려간다.

눈을 껌뻑일 때마다 한 줄이 생겨났다 다시 한 줄이 사라진다.

해가 뜰 때까지 수천 개의 문장이 쓰여졌으나 단 하나의 문장만 살아남았다

 나는 너에게 닿고 싶다.

— Brushing Hearts, 『세 평짜리 숲』, 2012

 

 

말들은 쓰여지면서 투쟁한다. 하나의 마음으로, 의미로, 중대함으로 남기 위해. 그것은 말들의 뽐내기가 아니며, 어떤 말이 의미의 패권을 갖는가의 문제가 아니다. 그것은 말들이 비로소 자신의 ‘자리’를 갖는 일이다. 그것은 우리의 시대, 마땅한 자리를 가지지 못한 이들에게 닥친 가장 눈물겹고 치열한 투쟁이다. 시대가 삭제해버린 존재를 살려내는 투쟁. 존재를 잊지 않고 남기려는 언어. 존재의 고통을 폭로하는 비명. 우리는 타인에게 닿고 싶다. 이 엄연한 존재를 알리고 싶다.

 

 

일례, 너 내 타이밍[2] 가져갔지? 아침에 보니까 주머니에 하나밖에 없던데, 네가 가져갔지?

분명 두 개 넣어뒀단 말이야. 그래 이년아, 내가 가져갔다. 나도 좀 먹어보자. 너처럼 이거 먹고 정신 뿅 가면 잠 안 잘 수 있다매. 나도 좀 살아보자. 야간 좀 뛰어봐야지. 독한 년, 어휴, 독한 년. 다시리에 네가 서울 가서 독한 년 됐다고 소문 다 났디야. 하하.

— 타이밍, 타임리스, 『깍』, 2011

 

 

평생 악다구니를 쓰며 일했던 엄마와 할머니, 그리고 그 자신의 존재. 엄마의 힘겨운 청춘과 할머니의 질곡 어린 삶은 그 자신의 것이기도 하다. 그는 또한 당연히 그것을 말한다, 그것을 쓴다. 시대의 포악함을, 노동의 슬픔을, 시간을 앗아간 과거를, 사무쳐 말할 수 없었던 상처가 드러나는 현재를. 그러나 어느새 노래가 된 그 곁의 상처들을. 그 노래의 힘을. 그 엄연함을.

 

 

언제까지나 언제까지나 헤어지지 말자고

맹세를 하고 다짐을 하던 너와 내가 아니냐

세월이 가고 너도 또다시 만날 길이 없다면

(가고 나만 혼자 외로이) 그때 그 시절

그리운 시절 못 잊어 내가 운다

— 할머니가 부른 <해운대 엘레지> 가사 중.

<너의 기억이 사라진 시간만큼 나는 죽어있었다>, 비디오 설치, 2011

 

 

꾹 다문 입술이 못내 달싹거릴 때, 우리는 무엇을 말하고자 했던 것일까. 참고 참았던 고요가, 과묵한 말들이 마침내 드러나고자 할 때, 그리고 그것이 묵독 되지 않고 낭독될 때, 심지어 그것이 노래로 불리울때, 사라지기 쉬운 말들이 고집을 부리며 그렇게 기억되기를 바랄 때, 비천함의 그늘에서 자신을 긍정하고자 할 때, 그 허약한 말들은 이제 시가 되었을까. 그 시는 힘을 가졌을까. 나는 문득, 헤르타 뮐러의 말을 떠올린다.

 

 

“상황은 처참했다. 문자는 아름다웠다.

나는 비극은 시의 옷을 입어야 한다고 생각했다.

그 처참함을 고발하기 위해서는 그래도 비극은

시의 옷을 입어야 한다는 것, 그것이 내 문학의 명예였다.”

— 『숨그네』 (문학동네, 2010)에 부친 저자의 말 중.

 

 

안유리의 말들이 다시 먼 길을 떠났다가 돌아왔다. 이제 돌아온 그의 말들은 휘어진 시간의 구석구석을 그러모으고, 공간을 켜켜이 중첩한다. 그의 말들은 더 이상 그토록 타인에게 닿고자 했던 혼잣말이 아니다. 오히려 무수한 타인과의 대화로부터 터져 나온 시간과 공간과 개인의 좌표들을 연결해 입체화한다. 숱한 타인의 이야기들이 정박하거나 출항하는 한 이름없는 끄트머리 항구에 그의 말들이 닻을 내린다. 그의 말은 그렇게 또 다른 방식으로 시어를 만든다. 타인의 말을 듣기 위해 자신을 잠시 멈추고 침묵하는 것. 애초에 그의 말들이 시작된 문맹의 기억으로 돌아가는 것. 그리고 바로 그 자리에서 타인의 말들을 만나는 일 말이다. 나는 미술이야말로 문맹의 자리에서 이루어진 사건이 아닌가 늘 생각했다. 논리와 효율과 쓰임이 사라진 자리. 말을 버리고 다른 말들을 빚어내는 자리. 그의 말들이 그래서 미술의 장소에 모습을 드러내는 일은 당연해 보인다. 문맹의 문장, 문장 아닌 문장이 시작된 곳, 그곳이 그의 시어들이 태어난 ‘집’은 아니었을까. 그 집으로 돌아오기 위해 그의 말들은 언제나 말들의 바깥으로 떠날 준비를 하고 있던 것은 아니었을까.

 

 

집을 찾기 위해 집을 떠나간 말들은 돌아서지 못한 몸들에 집을 짓고

아직 출발하지 못한 말들은 누군가 떠나간 자리에 이름을 내렸다.

바다는 눈을 떠 불을 밝힌다.

멀리서, 노래는 항해를 마치고 돌아오고 있다.

— ‘추수할 수 없는 바다’, 단채널 비디오, 2015

 

[1] 깍은 제주 방언으로 ‘끝’을 가리키는 접미사이다.

[2] 수면 억제제

​

2015년 8월, 안유리 개인전 <추수할 수 없는 바다> 도록

 

 

 

Words that finally became a poem

siren eun young jung (artist)

 

 

In my memory, Yuri An has been unceasingly writing poetry, sentences, countless words, or perhaps just syllables for quite some time. She has never stopped writing. To me, her writings were often something that a poem possesses, and thus they were something poetic, or something that was already poetry to begin with. Instead of using words, she injected poetic dictions to her ever-changing expressions that shifted countless times; to her piercing eyes that lowered even amid bustling conversations that frequently meandered in direction; and even to the cigarette smoke that drifted upward from our endless smoking while we squared off in conversation, as if we had been enemies in our former lives. However, given her confession, it seems my memory is faulty or overly exaggerated. Her memory begins in the context of a certain “illiteracy.”

 

 

When I was young, I did not have my own room,

and I did not have shelves stuffed with books.

When I grew a little older, I turned a deaf ear to the people

who told me to read, and as I started to add coarse words to my vocabulary,

my language became that of a sailor.

I did not break that habit for a long time

and when I had something that I wanted to say

or something that I wanted to write, I could not find the words to express it.

 

I held an empty dictionary in my hand— for a long time I blamed others.

If only I could escape out of my body, away from my parents,

out the door, away from the world— if I could escape,

I believed that there would be some words, some thoughts, that were just for me.

— Preface, 『Writing on the Edge』, 2011

 

 

Yuri An had encountered the end of the land, the end of the sea, and the end of the sky on multiple occasions—and yet kept running away—when she handed me her first book, 『Writing on the Edge』. This small book, much like a confessional text, a book of essays, an artist’s book, or a collection of poems, filled in the time that had elapsed with “words” pronounced not using her mouth, but using her hands. It was her first confession that her “empty dictionary” is being filled with words, songs, memories, the dance of hands, a sense of space, and, at last, words of reconciliation and love directed toward the world and others.

 

On various occasions she recalled various women at the fringes of various places. Her grandmother, her mother, friends of hers, certain women whose names no longer remain, and, lastly, poets: these are all women who conveyed and taught her “words.” The moments that only remained as sensations; the stories that clattered over her tongue; the songs that could not become words; the pain that she could not bear to include in the words remaining; the inexplicable questions poured out to an unreasonable world; the hardened screams whose meanings we cannot decipher as she harbored them too long—these perpetually intruded into her heart. In this manner, she learned words and poetry from the other women. This is not to say that her “illiteracy” had to turn into sentences, or had to become literature, in a single burst. The moment when her story transforms into words; the moment when words filled with strength are formed with her mouth; the moment when the words are firmly written down with her clumsy and ungifted hands; the moment when the words overlap with distant landscapes of the world, traversing the gaps of what she witnessed: An, who found the ability to write sentences, wrote down her own words on top of her memories of illiteracy. The thickness where her illiteracy and words overlapped—I thought this was her poetic language.

 

An states that she became exasperated with the words of an academic adviser who told her, “Yuri, you are very ‘poetic.’” I believe that she became upset with his words because her poetic language does not originate in pure romanticism and poetic taste, and because she herself did not want to be a poetic individual. I understood An’s reaction because her poetic diction is, ironically, something that rejects the sentiment of poetic language, and because her poetic diction is one that distances itself from the secular definition of poetic language. I believe this is because her poetic words are woven together with individual life experiences and world landscapes that are not easily grasped because they are densely obscured with noise, such that they cannot be easily defined, and, above all, because her words themselves already desire to be “poetry,” rather than to simply be “poetic.” She requested that I read Suh Kyung-sik’s 『The Power of Poetry』 prior to talking to her about her work. And she sent me the sentences below with double quotation marks:

 

 

“What is poetry? What is the ‘determination of the political stance of lyric form?’ I still cannot say that I ‘know,’ but I have an idea, as follows. If you walk a road, but you don’t know whether the road goes the right way, you walk even though there is a possibility that it does not lead anywhere. In other words, it is not a stance of not fighting if there is no chance of winning. Also, it has nothing to do with efficiency and validity. It doesn’t mean that you choose this way because you will quickly get to the destination. In short, it is about something other than the principle of whether or not there is a chance of success, of validity, and of efficiency. It is the language of a poet, and it is a lyric poem. I understand it this way.”

— Suh Kyung-sik, 『The Power of Poetry』, Hyeonamsa, 2015

 

 

Yuri An’s poetic language is meaningful when it changes the logic of power. Just as Suh understands, or, as An agrees with him, poetic language, although it may be fighting with no chance of winning, exerts its power at the edge of an impasse. This power is demonstrated without any specific goal or use, but it is a “power” that cannot be defined as secular power: the edge (kkak) and the power like a weak shriek (kkak-onomatopoeia) that resonate from the edge—these explain why the title of her first book should be “Kkak.”[1] Unceasingly finding and refining her own place within the gaps of foreign languages, she writes as follows:

 

 

I was unable to withstand the noise and closed the doors, jumped into the dictionary again.

Countless meanings lived between countable words.

Standing in front of one word, I knocked on the door.

I waited and waited to meet someone.

When the voices of wordless and speechless or perhaps dead people echoed in my ears,

I wrote them down without hesitation.

Then I thought. I am writing, I am alive.

— A Forest Three Meters Squared, 『A Forest Three Meters Squared』, 2012

 

 

She unfurls the dictionary again. Her dictionary, previously empty, is now filled with perfectly serviceable words. But she wanders about the layers of meanings that contain those words. Then she loses her way amid the politics of meanings among hegemonies that are different from the power that she knows. When she has no choice but to involuntarily slip on and meander around myriad secular meanings, she looks for her own words again. She lets out a terse shriek, “kkak”. Now her poetic language is nothing but language with without effective language, a character that is not a character, power that is not power, poetry that is not poetry—these and other contradictions and insurrections that come only to those who lack their own language. In this world, the words of strangers approach silence. However, Yuri An thinks that this very silence is her language. She wrote and wrote the words of the silence in an alien tongue. Amidst unfamiliar words that she hardly pronounces and the nuances of a foreign language that she cannot instantly grasp, though apprehensive of her senses becoming blunt, she never releases the words that should become poetic words.

 

 

Now it is time for the wall to go to sleep.

The skin of the wall is stained with people’s breaths. I start writing yet unfinished work.

I blink my eyes once, a sentence appears. I blink once again, one disappears.

Until sunrise, thousands of sentences are written, only one survives.

I want to reach into your heart.

— Brushing Hearts, 『A Forest Three Meters Squared』, 2012

 

 

The words being written struggle to remain as one heart, one meaning, one importance. It is not an issue of flaunting words, nor is it a matter of what kind of words holds the supremacy of meaning. It is about words having, at long last, their own “place.” In our era, it is the most painstaking and fierce struggle confronted by those who could not find their suitable place. The struggle to give life to the existence that the era eliminated; the language that does not forget this existence and bequeaths it; and the scream that exposes the pain of existence. We want to reach others. We want to communicate this stark existence.

 

 

Il-rye, did you take my “Timing?”[2] There was only one left in my pocket when I checked in the morning. You took it, didn’t you? I’m sure I put two there. Yes, you hag, I took it. I want it too! Like you said, I can get high on it and go without sleep. I also want to live like the others. I’m going to do night shifts and earn some money. You vicious hag, my god you are tough. There’s already word going around our village that you’ve become a tough bitch after moving to Seoul.

— Timing, Timeless, 『Writing on the Edge』, 2011

 

 

And then An’s mother and grandmother, who worked very hard with acrimony their entire lives, and An’s own existence. Her mother’s painful youth and her grandmother’s arduous life are also a part of An’s life. Naturally, she talks about it and writes it down: the tyranny of the time; the sadness of labor; the past snatching away time; the present where the wounds that pierced their hearts, causing their inability to speak, are revealed; the wounds becoming a song, before we know it; and the power of the song and its undeniable permanence.

 

 

Let’s not separate for good

You and I swore and promised

As time goes by and you pass me by,

if I have no chance to meet you again

(you go and I am left lonely) I cannot forget those times, those days I long for, so I cry

— Excerpt from the lyrics of the Haewoondae Elegy sung by An’s grandmother

‘I was dead as much as your memories were gone’, video installation, 2011

 

 

When our clenched lips moved ever slightly, what were we trying to say? When enduring and enduring silence, reticent words want to be exposed at long last; when they are not read silently to oneself but read aloud; even more when they are sung as a song; when words that easily vanish become unduly stubborn, saying they want to be remembered; and when they affirm themselves in the shadow of humility: I wonder if those delicate words now become a poem. I wonder if this poem has power. The words of Herta Müller suddenly come to mind.

 

 

“The situation was terrible. But the words were beautiful.

I thought that tragedy should wear the clothes of poetry.

To expose its disastrousness, again, tragedy should wear the clothes of poetry; it was the honor of my literature.”

— (From the author’s own words regarding her novel) Herta Müller, 『The Hunger Angel』, translated by Kyung-hee Park, Munhakdongne, 2010

 

 

An’s words went a great distance again and then came back. Her returned words now scrape together every bit of buckled time and stack up layers of space. Her words are no longer a monologue that desired so much to reach others. Instead, they dimensionalize time, space, and individuals, which overflow from countless conversations with others, by connecting their coordinates. Her words drop their anchor at a nameless, final harbor where the abundant stories of others are anchored and from which they set sail. Her words also create poetic language in this manner. This is to say that her words halt themselves and remain silent so as to listen to others’ words. That they return to the memory of the illiteracy where her words first began. And that it is at this exact point where they meet the words of others. I had always thought that this very art is an incident that arises in a place of illiteracy; a place where logic, efficiency, and utility vanish; a place where words are discarded and other words are brought about. In this sense, it seems natural that her words would appear in a place of art. I imagine that the place where sentences of illiteracy, sentences that are not sentences, have their beginning, might be the “home” where her poetic words are born. I wonder if her words were always preparing to depart for the exterior of words in order to come back to this home.

 

 

The words that left home in order to find home, built houses on the bodies that could not turn back.

The words that are not yet able to leave come to anchor their names on places left behind.

The sea opens its eyes and lights up.

From afar, the song is sailing home.

— ‘The Unharvested Sea’, single channel video, 2015

 

[1] “Kkak” is a suffix in the Jeju dialect with the meaning of the “end.”

[2] Sleep suppressant

 

Catalog for Yuri An solo exhibition 『The Unharvested Sea』, Art Space Pool, August of 2015​