brunch

You can make anything
by writing

C.S.Lewis

by 장은하 Nov 09. 2024

[Prologue] Sad Captions

I started conceiving this exhibition 'n' years ago, very slowly. It began not as a curatorial practice, but rather as a diary. Opening the Google documents filled with densely written dates and reading through those times, I found my diary-self consumed by sadness and anger. That sadness and anger had no direction, and almost all the anecdotes are too ineffable to put to paper. Back then, standing before an indifferent world, I would become exhausted by these incorporeal feelings of sadness and anger that permeated my days. In some gaps where I wasn't completely drained, I struggled to write something. I wanted to understand these emotions, to trace them to their source. So I began writing and gathering pieces of work, much like a vague, hopeless idealist who believes that magnifying innumerable threads of sadness and anger might somehow reveal their essence.

Throughout the exhibition's preparation, many people spoke to me. Some said to erase 'I,' while others said to fully reveal 'I.' There were suggestions to eliminate the personal in favor of the exhibition's public nature and 'universal' values, or conversely, that I needed to create a transition from the deeply personal to the public by fully unfetter myself. I was even advised that good writing practice demands the erasure and avoidance of 'I.' Yet, whether in exhibitions, writing, or any other modality, I found myself unable to completely erase 'I' - the very thought of writing without it felt unbearable.

I often questioned myself: Why do I speak only about and to myself? Nothing I wrote alluded to their advice or conventions. Finally, I thought, "Well, what does it matter? Let's just do what feels right." This ineffable feeling led me to begin with my story, starting from Brisbane, Australia, 1999 - the time-space where I first encountered racial discrimination. And then, I remembered the SeMA bunker they discovered in 2005, reportedly knee-deep in water, and wrote, "Everything has been washed away, and I can't write any word after 'sad'..." This became the exhibition's subtitle.

The 'I' that survived - clearly and fortuitously - in the exhibition title became the word I approached most cautiously. I contemplated the distance between the manifold 'I's in the exhibition and myself. Yet in trying to maintain this distance, I often failed to separate myself from these 'I's. The gap didn’t seem to close easily. I tried to maintain perspective when dealing with others' experiences that I could only assimilate secondhand, attempting to view their idiosyncratic nature from multiple angles and distances. I wanted to avoid what someone had warned against - creating an exhibition that appropriated others' pain as my own. Instead, I tried to spread these experiences out widely, examining how these 'different circumstances of sadness' function in their own contexts and in society, while keeping my own language at a distance. My hope was that visitors wouldn't subsume their relationship with these 'I's into a single, homogeneous concept or explanation, but rather that each person would perceive these various sadnesses in detail, experiencing the unique narratives and sensuousness of the works through their own distinct linguistic frameworks. Yet even as I write this, that distance refuses to grow, and so, acknowledging my own inadequacy, I turn to a poem that serves as both my reflexive excuse, my indicator, my manifesto:

…

or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

to escape writing of the worst thing of all—

not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

— Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

April 25, 2024

Seoul, Korea