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).
view5 September 2026
A mosquito net arcs over our bed in Seoul like an airy little mountain, or like an upright wishbone. Viewed from below while lying supine, the apex of the net appears to be descending upon you for an embrace with its central webbing stretched outwards by four limbs, almost like a flying squirrel mid-glide. At night this effect is heightened—dimmed light makes the fine netting body disappear around its structure. And the pink curtains in the room, which used to belong to Yena's grandmother, throw a rosy filter over the whole scene.
At the MMCA's Korea Artist Prize show, I spent the most time in Hong Jin-hwon's room looking at a single printed image he made of what appears to be rain and condensation on a window on a gray and gloomy day. Water droplets are foregrounded, the surface acting as the window. In the distance are two dark and blurred shapes; to me they first read as oil pumpjacks, but on closer inspection, one of them looks like a large statue of a figure pointing with an extended arm, and the other looks almost like a large abstracted kinetic sculpture of some kind. On top of all of that (visually) are scattered splotches of what looks like black paint or ink. The effect is an all-over flattening, three levels of perception compressed into an intervening barrier that is inhibiting but porous nevertheless.
view3 September 2026
“Sedentario”
From Echado a perder (2007)
by Carlos Pardo
También aquí querré perpetuarme,
en la vejez: un ancla
vertebral en la orilla
a despecho del sello
rutinario del mar,
de las amputaciones de paisaje
del molino de viento.
***
“Sedentary”—English translation by Curtis Bauer
I will also want to perpetuate myself here,
in old age: a vertabral
anchor on the shore
in spite of the humdrum
stamp of the sea,
of the landscape’s amputations
of a windmill.