[Epilogue] Sadness Ontology

Eunha Chang: It's been a few months since the exhibition ended. Now I feel somewhat detached from its theme. It's as if I've been holding onto a boiling-hot subject on my hands and that's grown cold, only to finally let it go. When I think about the exhibition or its theme now, it feels like all questions have been exhausted—there's nothing left to ask. Or perhaps I've grown fearful of asking. Yet I also sense that I won't be able to completely escape this theme. That's why I wanted to start this conversation—to revisit and discuss the process of making the exhibition, the exhibition itself, and where to go from here. I'd prefer to call this a conversation rather than an interview.

Eunsoon Yoo: That's how it usually begins. It might feel like you've seen it all, like you're going in circles, but there's often more lurking beneath the surface of a theme. Perhaps there are questions we haven't yet asked. Let's take another look, slowly. This exhibition seems to touch upon a personal narrative. What made you think you could turn such personal emotions into an exhibition?

Eunha Chang: That was actually an ongoing question for me. All my previous exhibitions had to fit within certain frameworks. For instance, Portal, Teleportation (2021) had to be curated around the specific theme of Korean-Turkish cultural exchange. Autophagy: Eating in Its Destructive and Creative Nature (2022-2023) was a commissioned exhibition. And Beings Swimming Backstroke Towards the Waterfall (2023-2024), which ended this February, was part of a long-term curatorial project focusing specifically on 'queer ecology.' There wasn't much room to express my emotions or personal narratives in those shows. But this exhibition was different—it was the first time I could work without such constraints, allowing me to address personal emotions and narratives directly. I really emphasized the personal and emotional aspects, particularly dealing with the emotion of sadness head-on.

Eunsoon Yoo: Were you confident from the start about making personal emotions your subject matter?

Eunha Chang: Rather than confidence, it was more like a theme that kept orbiting around me. I felt that if I didn't do this exhibition this year, I wouldn't be able to do it at all. I saw it as something that could only be created at a certain point in one's life cycle. In this exhibition, I wanted to reveal emotions as they were, rather than hide them. Yet, I kept questioning whether I was, in some way, reshaping those emotions to fit within the structure of an exhibition. Still, I constantly worried whether I was forcing these emotions to conform to the exhibition format. Typically, curators create exhibitions around more public issues, social or political contexts. This exhibition, in contrast, was deeply personal and emotional. I kept questioning whether it was possible to turn sadness into an exhibition, and if that was even appropriate. It's unusual for curators to display emotions this openly.

Around the time I was first conceptualizing the exhibition, I was reading books like "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" and Melissa Broder's "So Sad Today." "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows" uses a dictionary format to define emotions we feel but struggle to articulate, organizing various forms of ambiguous sadness. Melissa Broder's "So Sad Today" also struck me powerfully. The emotions were so honest and genuine that they came across almost violently in their intensity. I felt it was important to embrace that intensity when sadness approaches us so directly. That's what I wanted to capture in this exhibition. I decided to push forward while that intensity was still fresh.

Could I really show such deeply personal emotions to the public? As curators, we rarely expose ourselves in this way. We usually or simply maintain distance and let the artists' works speak for themselves, maintaining an objective stance. But here, I couldn't help worrying whether I was reducing art to a mere vehicle for expressing my emotions. As you mentioned, wasn't I possibly forcing artists' works to serve something other than their own purposes?

I knew that I wasn't going to create the kind of grand politically or socially significant exhibition that's often expected in contemporary curation. Instead, it was a highly emotional exhibition reflecting my sadness intertwined with art and space. While curators are always told to be socially aware and politically sensitive, what about being emotionally vulnerable? That might be my fundamental question through this exhibition.

Eunsoon Yoo: You're exploring very delicate territory here. You're right. Emotional vulnerability in exhibition curation usually isn't revealed like this. There's a tendency to either hide it or package it in theoretical frameworks. How did you present this idea during the funding review process? Did you disclose that it was based on personal emotions like sadness?

Eunha Chang: Yes, I did. I didn't try to mask or obscure the theme of sadness with social issues or political narratives. I was clear that this was about sadness. But during the review process, it seemed like the jury wanted to categorize that sadness. They seemed to want me to transform my emotional experience into something socially digestible, like "sadness about public tragedy" or "sadness caused by systems." But my sadness was messy and unfiltered. It was just... sadness. Sadness doesn't fit neatly into defined boxes. So I was honest about that. I didn't try to 'reduce' sadness to political or social issues. I wanted to deal with sadness itself. I still remember one jury’s question about what kind of sadness it was: "Is this personal sadness? Or sadness about social tragedy?" I found that question strange and unnecessary. Sadness is just sadness. It remains unnamed, unexplained, just confused and unorganized emotion. To me, sadness can't be defined in a single language; it exists on a spectrum. We can talk about a 'point' on that spectrum, but we can't perfectly explain or categorize that emotion.

I remember telling the jury about a video I randomly encountered on YouTube through the algorithm. It was titled To All Those Who Want to Leave, just a low-quality video of a bird in the blue sky. There was nothing special about it, but countless people were leaving comments sharing their deep sadness and loneliness. Mostly people who were thinking of leaving this world, or those missing someone who had left. That left a strong impression on me, and in this exhibition, I wanted to create a space where emotions could simply exist without needing to be resolved just like that.

Eunsoon Yoo: So this exhibition wasn't an attempt to resolve sadness, but rather a process of accepting the existence of that emotion?

Eunha Chang: Yes, exactly. Through the exhibition, I believed that sadness as an emotion didn't need to be perfectly categorized or reduced to explanations. I wanted to create a space where that emotion could exist as it is. And the artworks reflected that emotional incompleteness.

Eunsoon Yoo: Was the exhibition space design related to this concept as well?

Eunha Chang: Yes, I wanted to express that emotional incompleteness and instability in the spatial arrangement too. When I first saw the SeMA Bunker, I kept imagining water rising to knee level, with objects either submerged or floating away. I wanted to capture that feeling in the exhibition space. I wanted the artworks to appear as if they were floating on water. I tried to convey that instability, that sense that things could drift away at any moment. Even in the poster design, we expressed that submerged feeling through an image of a wet handkerchief hanging on a metal structure. I wanted to visually express that instability of floating away underwater.

Eunsoon Yoo: Those emotions seem to be reflected in the works themselves. Some pieces felt somewhat 'tacky' or 'unfinished' – it seems those emotions manifested in the works too.

Eunha Chang: While I'm not sure if those are the right terms, there were indeed works that weren't perfectly polished or complete. I think that aspect was crucial to this exhibition—the aesthetic created by these bursts of intensity. Isn't that what a production close to sadness would be like? And thinking about life cycles again, if artists my age are at a certain point in their artistic life cycle, I thought it showed well the transitional state of work striving toward perfection. And perhaps that connects to why I vaguely felt this exhibition couldn't be made at any other time.

Here, I'm talking about works that aren't 'finished' in the traditional sense. They're not finished in that traditional sense, yet they're perfectly complete for this exhibition. It seemed to reflect my own emotional state—an unresolved, ongoing process. Many works weren't polished or 'complete' in the traditional sense, but that's exactly what moved me. Sadness isn’t clean. It cannot be reduced to something crystal clear and neatly cut out. It persists, lingers somewhere for a long time, remains unresolved, and never really disappears. In other words, this 'unfinished completion' wasn't a flaw but a reflection of that incompleteness. I chose works with this aesthetic because I didn't want perfection. That would have felt false to my curatorial experience. The works themselves embodied sadness as an unfinished state, fluid and sometimes awkwardly combined. It was that raw quality that allowed the exhibition to stay true to the emotion.

Eunsoon Yoo: It reminds me of what you said earlier, about how sadness is always inherent within you. You mentioned not seeing sadness as negative or something that "needs to be overcome."

Eunha Chang: Yes, that's right. Sadness is like a default setting for me. It's an emotion that's always there in the background. People often view sadness negatively, talking about it as something to overcome, something that should transform into joy or something productive. But why? I don't view sadness negatively. It's just an emotion that exists. Something that's always there. That feels natural to me. That's why the exhibition didn't try to resolve that emotion. I just let it be in that state. When joy comes, it never feels completely pure. There's always a bit of sadness mixed in. But that's okay. That's just how it is.

Eunsoon Yoo: So in a way, the exhibition becomes an ontological exploration. It goes beyond merely exhibiting emotions - it shows emotions as something fundamental that all beings possess. You created a space not to resolve sadness but to let sadness exist.

Eunha Chang: Yes, that's why I didn't feel the need to impose a narrative on the audience. It wasn't an exhibition meant to tell viewers what to feel or how to interpret. It was open-ended, like how sadness is always in the background. It wasn't a process with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Just as I was discovering my relationship with sadness through the curatorial process, I left it to the audience to discover how they wanted to engage with the works.

Eunsoon Yoo: How did audiences respond? I imagine you weren't too concerned about the audience's reactions.

Eunha Chang: I didn't expect much. I didn't care how audiences would view it, whether they understood it or not. In a way, it was a selfish exhibition. I just needed to express this emotion in some form. Whether people understood or didn't understand wasn't particularly important to me. I just wanted to create a space where these emotions—my emotions—could exist without being forced into something neat or consistent. People seemed to respond to that. We had more visitors than I expected. They might not have fully understood, but I think they connected with the naturalness of sadness itself, its unresolved nature.

Eunsoon Yoo: It seems this wasn't just an exhibition about sadness, but about inexpressible emotions, about leaving things unspoken and unfinished.

Eunha Chang: Yes, that's why the works were curated as they were. Rough, incomplete, and sometimes awkward. They were works that reflected my own uncertain emotions and my refusal to define sadness in a single way. I didn't want polished, overly refined works that felt distant from real emotion. The way things were placed in the space—objects appearing to float or barely hanging on—was intentional too. It reflected my thoughts about emotions: unfixed, drifting, always changing.

Eunsoon Yoo: Based on what you've described, sadness exists in the exhibition like a shadow that follows everything but never takes a fixed form - something that cannot be grasped or defined.

Eunha Chang: I think so too. Sadness isn't something that can be fully expressed. We can try to express it, but it always remains in an ambiguous state. That's why in this exhibition, I didn't try to explain anything. I just let sadness be, in all its messiness.

Eunsoon Yoo: So where do you go from here? After curating such a personal exhibition, do you feel you've said everything you needed to say, or is it still an unresolved assignment?

Eunha Chang: It's still unresolved, and I'm okay with that. I don't think sadness ever gets completely resolved. The exhibition didn't answer all questions or resolve everything. But it helped me express something that had been inside me for a long time. I don't think I need to reach any conclusions. I just needed to create something honest.

Eunsoon Yoo: That seems to be the strength of it. Not resolving sadness but existing within it. Not the resolution of sadness but the existence of sadness—that seems like the ontological core of this exhibition.

* This conversation was recorded and edited as part of 'Emerging Artists and Curators' by the Seoul Museum of Art on September 19, 2024, between New York and Seoul via Zoom.

* This interview was part of exhibition, [Emerging Artists & Curators 2024] Sad Captions: Everything Has Been Washed Away; I Can Only Write ‘Sad’... (2024, SeMA Bunker).