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).

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.

“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.

“The Double Bell of Heat” From Actual Air (1999) by David Berman

Midway down Walnut Street a yellow sign says Slow Deaf Child, with the silhouette of a running boy

painted over the bent and dented surface. Just the post, rusted to black, gives the story away.

The child must have grown up and left the neighborhood a long time ago.

And now there's this sign.

You can imagine his parents going to the city clerk's office.

The paperwork is strange and complex, languishing in office out-bins, drifting through council meetings.

One spring morning the boy sees two city workers get out of a truck and set the bright sign in the patch of grass between the sidewalk and street.

He watches it out the window, knowing what it is, watching it gather the world around it like a mountain in the Bible.

Cars heed the sign, many drivers scanning to the left and right hoping to catch sight of the deaf boy playing.

Some drivers imagine hitting him and slow down even more. They play out the scene, what they would say, how their lives would change.

And the years pass, even for the little deaf boy.

He gets married, has kids. Maybe moves to a village in New England with stone walls and candle makers.

You can imagine him returning to the old neighborhood. Driving down on a fall afternoon into the quiet center of things, gently breaking before his old streetsign.

He would do that, he would go back. As if it had been written twice.

Sat on the lawn at the MMCA in Seoul today from about 4-6pm. Around 5pm, an aproned chef cradling something in his arms walked out of a nearby restaurant and over to a wall, topped with black 기와 tiles, running along the street bordering the museum. It turned out he was holding food—he stood on his toes and reached up to neatly place eight single pieces of bread in a row on the tiles. When he was done he double checked his work for a brief moment, then quickly walked away without looking back. Maybe ten minutes later, a magpie flew down from a tree onto the wall and grabbed a piece of bread. Then another came down, then another.

National Gallery with Toby today, so many nice moments. But perhaps none more satisfying than standing with him in front of Degas's Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study (1886). He re-oriented my view on the work (and Degas more generally).

For some reason, I suppose based on the selected reading I've done and my relatively limited knowledge of his oeuvre, I've always had it in my head that Degas was the prettier and more accessible one in relation to Manet. And for some works that still holds true. But Toby is quite attuned to his idiosyncrasies, the formal painterly challenges setup within each of his works, and the often confounding logic of his choices. Some blips I remember: “incidents and accidents” around recording, resistance to decoding while observing, the work's relationship to provisionality.

It's a strange painting, askew and loose. The physical encounter with it is a floaty, sensuous, disorienting experience. Framings abound, (the edge of the red silk wall-hanging, the glass case containing Egyptian statues, the back of the chair, the literal frame around Corot’s Castel dell’Ovo in Naples), and they all collapse and compress into flatness despite suggesting a network of distinct and different spatial planes. The glass case in particular becomes a portal, like an open door to a hallway that piereces through the left side of the composition. The eye travels like a fly trying to escape a room. And those precarious, gummed up stacks of paper at the bottom left resting on a maroon blob of a surface-table-floor. Simply a pile of color. Green-blue-gray-orange-yellow-pink held together by a few suggestions of edge; the incident. Perhaps not unlike the disheveled spread at the bottom left of Le Déjeuner, actually.

Yenah Kim—장마비를 기다리며 (2026)

막 내리기 시작한 비는 눈으로 잡기 어렵다. 그럴 때면 나는, 빗방울이 세상의 어느 존재와 표면이 만나는 지점을 바라본다. 물웅덩이라던가, 고개 숙인 나무의 잎가지라던가, 할머니 집의 파란 지붕이라던가. 만나는 지점을 바라볼 때, 더 선명해지는 것들이 있다. 나의 비가 내려앉는 세상의 것은 어디일지 생각하며, 7월의 장마를 기다린다.

Thought of M.C. Escher's woodcut print Puddle (1952).

“Adorno describes the aspiration of art as 'saying nothing eloquently,' which is the opposite of the contemporary status of art. Every work is so concerned with what it is saying that there is no room for eloquence, a constantly enforced neurotic search for formal meaning that impedes the development of refined expression. By establishing a rhetorical content that distances the viewing subject from the art object, we become alienated from the artwork's actual potential to trigger an experience through an engagement with the materially existing qualities of the work. Art is not about something, it is something.” —Sean Tatol via The Manhattan Art Review, 2020.

Ruba brought a copy of Turner's Last Sketchbook (published by Yale University Press London in 2024, a roughly 7x4.5 inch “facsimile of the last known intact sketchbook by J. M. W. Turner”) to coffee. Perfect before my upcoming travels. Amidst the mental clutter that has formed while getting ready to uproot everything again, here was the simple, powerful fact of a practice. On the move with only water and a few colors at hand, his eye hones relationships; between colors, forms and space, forms and material. All with a thinness of application that serves as a constant reminder to revere.

People continue to ask me for directions on the street. One today, six this month, and I would say upwards of thirty across this whole year. Is that an uncommon amount? Feels like it. Especially because I'm definitely not the person to ask.

Skee Mask—Resort (2024)