view25 September 2026
Spending so much time alone with Yenah's grandmother's house while working. Each day I've been getting up early, having my morning coffee, and sitting down to work at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte environment in which highlights and edges are dulled—a dreamlike effect.
Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows open to outside air, and green tree leaves cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of light in abundance outside surrounding the house. Plants seem to grow well on the windowsills too.
My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to delivery sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched voices (some screams) as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some school bells intermittently throughout the day as well, and some days there is singing—groups of children singing.
Another thing about the mornings: magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've pulled back the living room curtain to see them jockey for position on a persimmon tree. They're pretty brutal, hip-checking each other off of branches. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfall sounds and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so once or twice a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed probably upwards of thirty of them in the last month).
The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing her baby. Similar to the stream a few blocks away from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.
view23 September 2026
“The Open Window”
By Tomas Tranströmer
From the collection Mörkseende (1970)
Translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane
I stood shaving one morning
in front of the open window
on the second floor.
Switched on the razor.
It started to purr.
It whirred louder and louder.
Grew into a roar.
Grew into a helicopter
and a voice—the pilot’s—pierced
through the noise, shouting:
“Keep your eyes open!
You’re seeing this for the last time.”
We lifted off.
Flew low over the summer.
So much that I loved, does it have any weight?
So many dialects of green.
And above all, the red walls of the wooden houses.
The beetles glistened in the dung, in the sun.
Cellars being pulled up by the roots
wafted through the air.
Activity.
The printing presses crawled along.
At that instant, the people
were the only ones who kept still.
They held a minute of silence.
And above all, the dead in the country graveyard
were still
like those who posed for a photo in the camera’s youth.
Fly low!
I didn’t know which way
to turn my head—
with my visual field divided
like a horse.
view21 September 2026
Muyeong Kim: Pig at Art Sonje Center: nice show. As the press release details, most of the wall-bound work (archival pigment prints hand-colored with pastels on paper) addresses “four kinds of subjects: renovations of Seodaemun Prison (used by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea), a cricket cage discovered in China, South Jeolla Province’s Sorok Hospital (used in the past to isolate Hansen’s disease patients), and a Japanese woman. The four subjects all represent 'places' where different forms of segregation and violence operated in the course of history.”
I didn't learn the context of the imagery until after seeing the show, and I personally didn't need it. For me, the work activated the theater space it was installed in and around with fresh, complex, self-regenerating energy independent of its sociopolitical underpinnings. The rooms blossomed and became destabilized.
His touch is considered, boldly intervening but light. Even on a large scale; my favorite pieces were Bedridden, a miniature pet cricket cage scaled up to a size that could hold a human (yet it appears to float despite its implied weight), and an untitled piece for which he motorized six of the theater's chairs so that they slowly move from folded to open in a seating-ready position over time (longer than my visit).
Both are out of one's initial view when entering the theater, and both suspend sensorial logics in a way that charges the space with possibility—at one point I found myself backstage staring at what appeared to be a spare theater chair turned around to face a dark corner. And later, in a hall just outside the door, I spent a while in front of a large framed blank off-white sheet of paper. Was a great feeling wondering where I had missed both on the checklist.
view19 September 2026
“The Day” (2012)
by Lila Matsumoto
Not
the sinking-stone worry
But the free memory of the day!
The pedal I push
is my foothold on morning,
beating the cannon, the creep
of a benign and faceless blank.
The words I mean to say
are running beside me rushing into the gutter. Others
have taken holiday to make villages
in the sand.
Come
Back. Words come back.
I want to intend,
to cleave the air with sure-foot.
Surely, wherever there is light,
people are growing their meanings.
view17 September 2026
Image inventory: two incense coils stacked with a gap in between, a faded visual description of a buildable castle for children on the side of a blue cardboard box, the afterimage of an X-shaped fluorescent light, mosquito net over a bed in a red room, a stone wall with a few stones punched out, three pieces of flat wood against a garage, a knotted pile of rope sliding down a mountain, a helicopter pad before a vast landscape, leftover tape in a square shape on a public subway locker, objects in the corner of a Seoul food market draped in a mustard-colored cloth and secured with yellow rope, a blue/green/red shed on the top of a mountain in front of a vast landscape (Daejeon), a comb spanning two folds of a bedsheet in morning light.
view15 September 2026
Recent packaged words:
Millennium leisure
Certainly not
Do you read me
Take a big swing
Limiting beliefs
Your sky went away
Failing light
His majesty's prison
Diamond in the dental pod
Sewing thoughts
Winner's kingdom
view13 September 2026
“Dinner”
Pulled apart then chosen
all green and in line
living raw bodies met
by the new border crossing.
Two one-time friends
recognized each other
again and decided to plan
an old memory.
It arrived some weeks later,
one greeted the other,
meal made blind by fear
of a recipe practiced
twice before. Only once
was sugar left out,
and it happened when
they came together
view11 September 2026
At the plaza area just outside of Yeonsinnae station: a university age girl weaving around passersby on a longboard with her camera set up on a tripod at ground level, a man walking around erratically with one wired headphone in (jerking gait, occasional sudden violent steps forward), a middle-aged man calmly walking the circumference of the plaza in a circle—every time he passed in front of us it felt like a glitch, a man kneeling before a bench on which stuff from an emptied backpack was spread out—bits of printed material, wadded up food wrappers, small trinkets—he never stood up the entire time we were there.
Also saw a large white billboard/sign of the letters “SMK” in block capitals; it's discolored by weather and time such that the letters look embossed, and apparently it's advertising a smoking cafe. At the dead end of an alley we wandered down not far from there, found a pointed structure with a taut scrim pulled over it like a carnival tent. But at its tips, the material seemed to be pulled upwards, as if by fishing wire from the sky.
view9 September 2026
Phenomena at Yena's grandmother's house: a sort of misty aura spiraling around the light outside her grandmother's old room, deep organ sounds in the middle of the night coming from the same room (I thought of deep navy blues and royal velvet purples), six magpies fighting for persimmons from the tree outside Yena's bedroom window, intermittent construction sounds throughout the day in the distance (as Yena observed, they're only destruction sounds, not building), in the evenings—a father and a toddler winding down with a book while their cat does the same on its tree, pleasing end-of-cycle chimes from both the laundry machine and the microwave, spiral-shaped incense that makes mosquitos panic, when in bed at night—a ray from that same light outside Yena's grandmother's room shooting into the bedroom where we sleep (in an outwardly-expanding ring pattern, like the light bulb is blowing luminous yellow smoke rings).
view7 September 2026
From where I'm sitting on a grassy hill at Olympic Park in Seoul: the knotty bare trunks of four old pine trees, each supported by splints at points of imbalance where limbs have grown too heavy to hold themselves up. Just to the right of these trees, one younger pine bursting with fresh green needles standing on its own (no splints).