I. A British envoy and his crew are shipwrecked on the coast of Corea. They notice
native women and children hiding behind a bush. They chase the women and children
to a village. Enterprising and true to their purpose, they spread throughout the village.
To understand the natives, an index is created. Words like “No” are aligned to what is
assumed to be their phonetic equivalent. The “Corean” words are not Corean or English
but are in a transitional space, in which 2 cultures encounter one another. In this
transitional space, things are lost and fantasies projected. Through this exchange the
village is silenced. The index does not document the discovery of a new language.
Instead, the index reveals the process of colonial logic: to locate, extract, collect, and
project. The envoy brings the index back to the British Empire. The silence of the village
extends beyond the colonial encounter. It lingers.
II. For 2 years, I looked for underground sex spaces for men in Seoul and in New York.
The spaces are commercial enterprises, hidden behind facades of acceptable
commercial identities. I was drawn to how these spaces mediate sexuality through a
commercial logic. I soon realized I could not engage my interest in these spaces without
agitating the histories and discourses that were tightly coiled around them. I mapped
these spaces to visualize some of the histories and discourses in question. I also took
objects from the spaces and photographed drawings that I found there, on walls and
doors. I photographed a black ink drawing of a figure, a house made of chewing gum,
and a light blue star.
III. In the past 2 years, I have found myself drawn to demolition sites in Seoul, where
homes, rapidly erected in the early 1980’s, were systematically destroyed. Their
inhabitants were bought or pushed out. The state of physical ruin was overwhelming.
Walking through a child’s room, family albums were littered on the floor, laundry left on
a hanger to dry, a half packed suitcase left on a moldy bed. I encountered an array of
butterfly stickers on a wall; a hand’s oily residue impressed on the soft wallpaper, still
visible around the outer rim of a light blue butterfly. I took the butterfly stickers from the
wall. Here the corporate entity deploys a meticulous process: removing inhabitants,
gutting homes, and leveling the land. As if reading my thoughts, the corporation
constructed pastel colored barriers to hide the destruction from public view.
IV. I am taking objects from hastily-abandoned ruins, and photographing drawings in
underground sex spaces because they reference more than their owners/authors’
personal histories or institutional aims. They embody a larger cultural, social, economic,
ideological and colonial history, one populated by the shipwrecked British envoy and the
formation of his index. With my project, I have been digitally animating the black ink
drawing of the figure found in the underground space. My animation intends to reclaim
the “Corean” words from the index created by the British envoy and his crew. I ask: how
does the index exceed and is bound by the colonial moment?