As part of the London Korean Film Festival 2022, LUX presented the solo exhibition by Yun Choi, titled ‘Running at the Speed of Light, the Body Becomes a Turtle’, running from 9 November – 10 December 2022. During the exhibition, we hosted Sarah Shin in conversation with Choi, discussing her two films featured in the exhibition: ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’ and ‘Viral Lingua’. As we edited the recorded interview, Choi’s shapeshifting practice started to evolve again, influencing her responses to Shin’s questions.
We’re excited to finally release the conversation between Choi and Shin a year after the conversation took place. This release includes a recorded interview and an interactive transcript with sound clips and commentary videos centred around the poems included in ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’, which were conceived during the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (21 September – 19 November 2023).
[TRANSCRIPT] In Conversation: Yun Choi and Sarah Shin
Sarah Shin: Hi Yun, Thank you very much for being in conversation with me. And thank you to Sun and LUX for having us. Today we’re going to be talking about Yun’s exhibition at LUX called Running at the Speed of Light, the Body Becomes a Turtle. I wanted to start by asking you about this title because it derives from your new film work ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’ [featured in the exhibition]. Perhaps we might begin by inviting you to introduce the idea of shapeshifting. For example, the human body becoming a turtle, but also in terms of how shapeshifting enables us to imagine different ways of thinking about the world. And would you be able to say a little bit about your engagement with animist worldviews?
Yun Choi: Thank you, Sarah, for opening up the conversation. And thank you, Sun and LUX, for inviting me to have this wonderful solo show. Yes, the title of the show is from the video, and it came out while discussing the exhibition title with Sun. It was one of her suggestions. And perhaps it would be nice if I briefly introduce the context of the work. ‘Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection’ is composed of five poems that I wrote for my solo show that opened in Seoul in 2020. The exhibition space where the installation is shown in the video is [where] that show [took place]. Before, during and right after the exhibition, the time when there were no audiences but only the works, I had chances to access the space and to film them. Based on this footage, and by adding new scenes in the storage space, ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’ came out.
[The exhibition] ‘Running at the Speed of Light, the Body Becomes a Turtle’ continues the question, “why would the floor slide?” in Korean (“바닥이 어디 미끄러지나”). It refers to the series I made in 2019 titled, ‘Footer (mobile operator)’. I have a story behind this work: it is very easy to find mobile phone stores in South Korea, as many as real estates and 24/7 convenience stores. There was a period when many mobile phone stores pasted printed ads on the street floor to target pedestrians who walked while looking down at their phones. When it rained and [the printed ads] were stepped on by pedestrians, these catchphrases promoting the high-speed internet became abstract drawings on the floor. And this moment triggered me to an emotional collapse and to think about the dislocation–out of step. If the time has joints, [it is an] out-of-joints situation. There is a compound word I made up, which is ‘affective precarity’. For me, this [moment] is ‘affective precarity’ from the overlapping time lags. And also it’s like when you are holding the tears for a very long period but suddenly you start to cry. These moments open up the possibilities of shapeshifting.
If I may go back to the title, many people, including me, are suffering from turtle neck syndrome. What if we all turn into turtles after all? When we say “if”, another branch of the story begins. Above all, the moment I believe that you can tell and talk to things, the dead and nonliving, has given me comfort, relief and liberation. I’ve always felt that there is a window, a screen, or a wall surrounding me and the society to which I belong. And in my work, I try to crash, break, escape, and jump by making holes, faking windows and shifting positions.
Because I tend to believe all living beings and objects are not dead, they can make changes to our environments and society, rather than looking at it from an angle that they possess a spirit. The animist worldview inspires me a lot, but the point is more about the vibrant environment and connections surrounding me.
~(partition)~ Poetry Commentary 1 ~HEART~
SS: Thank you so much. I love the phrase ‘affective precarity’. And that seems to be a hallmark of the hyper materialist society to which both works, ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’ and the other film ‘Viral Lingua’, offer a sort of disorientating mirror. And the hypermaterialist society, in that I’m not entirely sure how much room there is for a continuation of an animist worldview. I think it’s quite well known now that South Korea underwent very rapid industrialisation and in many ways that paved over older traditions, as well as mass trauma. I was wondering if you could tell us what the idea of a nation which we also see through the character of Nara in ‘Viral Lingua’. What does that mean to you, and is it possible or even necessary to connect with ancestral knowledge such as animism?
YC: This fixed idea of a homogeneous country including too much emphasis on being a one-race country that the society has been forced to believe in, and the culture and the media that create a strong feeling of national pride, patriotism and unity: all of these are, of course, the ideology that I want to fight against. The experiences my generation had to get through, such as saluting the national flag every morning or singing the national anthem once a week in school, that did really influence me, but also made me question. That early experience with this nationalism later met with the social atmosphere of calling out and criticising the country as Hell, which created the desire for escape, deep despair and hatred toward the country. It’s been two sides of a coin, like love and hatred, peace and war. So I focus on the in-between.
The nation, the character of 나라 (Nara, meaning a nation or country) is the complex, multiple emotions of this love – hatred itself. I guess I want to draw a route for these contaminated feelings. At the same time, the nation, Nara is the character to whom I can say, “Let’s break up”. This brings me to fictional states meaning that there is flexibility in attaching and detaching this feeling toward the nation. I believe it became possible after the feeling has travelled through generations and has been diversified, creating some distance and space in between. And I think this space is for the imagination related to your questions about ancestral knowledge. It reminded me of the notes I made in 2014, about a root. If you let me read it a bit, “Instead of a root, there is hair that grows all the time.” Even if you shave your face, there are hairs in your body. I thought about the [Korean] idiom until ‘black hair becomes the roots of spring onion’. [it] means endless love, the love without end, but also a long period. And in the world of fake beards for drama [TV series], and hair removal creams for beauty, if I am asked to think about a root, I would rather think about the hair.” Connecting ancestral knowledge is looking at unrooted trees in that sense.
~(partition)~ Poetry Commentary 2 ~POST~
SS: Thank you for this. I was thinking that with the notion of ancestors and roots, the main protagonists of ‘Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’ are characters who you call grandmothers. But to me, they were reminiscent of creation, which are Korean ghosts, spirits that haunt what Ursula Le Guin would call the dead world of matter. And this is the world of alienation that we see in a kind of kaleidoscopic fashion throughout the film work. And with these characters with the grandmothers, the ghostly grandmothers, and also with some of the figures who appear as monstrous in ‘Viral Lingua’, I feel that you’re drawing on a particularly recognisably Korean tradition of horror and ghost stories. Is that so? And if so, could you possibly elaborate on that specific tradition for those who might not be familiar? And would you also say that these ghosts are related to societal repression, whether in modernity or before and then finally, I was wondering if you could introduce the grandmothers a bit more about each of the characters.
YC: A couple of days ago, I was telling my friend that it is difficult to hear the sound of Gwishin (ghost) in Amsterdam that I used to hear in Korea. So where did all the Gwishin go? And I thought the place where we live is always accompanied by Gwishin. Now I can’t live in a place where I thought I could finally live, because there is no Gwishin. And I can’t tell who is human and who is Gwishin anymore. I really like that you said 귀신 (Gwishin) in Korean, rather than using the word ghost. With my work, I can think of not only Gwishin but also goblins or mountain spirits. The spirits that are transformed, for example, to become an object, animal or nature. All these undefined or unidentified odds and ends of ghosts, in Korean, can become unidentified odds and ends of gods in Korean.
I found that the word ‘haunt’ also has the meaning of ‘frequent’ and ‘continue to affect’. And this is the point that I’d like to relate to the social repression and suppression. For example, I focused on this repression that comes as quotidian symptoms like daily symptoms of disillusionment that accompany shattered beliefs and fantasies. So Gwishin is something that seems to be a costume but manifests itself in strange forms and keeps coming back. They make me look back at these things that are hovering around us, and I wonder about their stories. They are not that special but hardly comprehensible, hardly ignorable and keep appearing, and I just cannot take my eyes off of them. In fact, I’m more interested in all these things in this society which leave traces in my mind or my heart like emotional aftermath or affect.
If I go back to your question and also the expedition, I think about the exhibition space, the museum where they have the keepers and I thought that there must be a very, very, very, very, very old keeper who has been there as the spirit of the exhibition space and that’s how I created the grandmothers. The grandmothers are time travellers, so each character that I portrayed in my two videos relies on a more contemporary hybrid myth like all these [quotidian] symptoms I said earlier. The affections that keeps on coming back and all these situations and social atmospheres, the odd costumes. According to that, I created these characters. Rather than introducing each character, I found some interesting notes [I made] when I was making ‘Viral Lingua’. In ‘Viral Lingua’ each chapter or the character I wrote is described as a genre; ‘Dear Nara’ is the national anthem and ‘Wildflower’ is hyper-heavy metal, I don’t know if that even exists. ‘From mouth to mouth’ is ASMR SF. And ‘Living with Ah and Uh’ is like self development survival and ‘Heartburn’ is education. I was thinking of medical or scientific education, and ‘Do not Trust Laughing and Crying Future’ is a fantasy children’s song. I think these were my characters.
~(partition)~ Poetry Commentary 3 ~HORROR~
SS: It’s incredible that this is how you created the characterisation. Because there are just so many visual and narrative, and musical cues across both film works. And as you mentioned, some of them include retro, popular, Korean, very emotional songs, and legends like the Dangun myth. So I was interested to hear more about your intentions and your influences for creating such hybrid worlds. For one thing is what sort of tone were you interested in conveying? And why? Because I’m thinking that there are camp elements, and I wondered if camp played a role in your thinking. And then there’s a very serious undertone in many ways. Going back to the ghosts and the hauntings. I was reminded of the epigraph to a book by Grace Cho, the Korean American sociologist who has studied the afterlives of the trauma of women who were sex workers in both the Japanese and American military infrastructures. And the epigraph to her book is by two psychoanalysts called Abraham and Torok as their names and the quote is, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. So that was a little detour, but there is a serious undertone. And then it’s also quite funny. Here’s melodrama and then there’s also something which is the culturally specific, apparently, emotional Han which is this negative constellation of emotions which are meant to be particularly Korean, although that’s disputed. And then I was also thinking what is the purpose of recreating or re-mixing mythologies with the contemporary vernaculars and histories that you glean and put together.
YC: First of all, the intentions and the influences for creating this hybrid world are confusion, conflicts and crashes. For me, they are vibrant betrayals. For me, these shockingly bizarre concoctions are all present. I like to bring up lines from ‘Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection’. There is this line: “the sounds of the avant-garde horror ghosts crossing the tradition and the future, the sound of a popular erotic country song by the highway rest stop diva, the sounds of cyber techno spell of the Heart Sutra by the faceless” It describes what I encountered in the street or on the internet, on YouTube. And I would like to bring up another quote that I wrote in 2010, which follows, the news about loudspeakers installed in the broader area, the border area of South and North Korea. And in 2020 I saw woofer speakers at shopping malls, made for responding to noise between floors. For me, this hybrid society that I face has become the material of the work and influenced me. The intentions are to dissolve the boundaries by eliciting feelings of disorientation and to explore the blurring of reality through energetic engagement. And also to deny conventions and expectations by transcending, travelling and dancing between crazily complicated worlds and societies. And if I think about inviting sincere superstitions, that I like to say a lot, I think it is a complex hybrid belief.
The tone that I am interested in conveying is “sad but hilarious, funny but scary, panic but strange, weird but cute, pretty but sad.” It starts with sad and ends with sad. Recently, someone asked me about the reason why East Asian people, regardless of age, and gender, like Hello Kitty. He was a person who had spent some time in an East Asian country. And this was one of his mysteries. I answered that there’s no reason not to like it. Too cute. And it reminded me of the series I made some years ago titled ‘Yellow Cuteness’. It was about older characters who incidentally, neutralise all the sharpness with fatal cuteness. And these characters kept appearing outrageously transformed. So there’s the fatal cuteness of the character. And then there is a transformed, bizarre, weird character. What is this extremely contrasting dual states? made me wonder. And it made me think about a group or society that has only two options, which are being cute or being funny.
However, I don’t mind being ridiculous. I will make reckless attempts to somehow reverse the orders. So this is my story of the tone in my work and the reason for it. And the last question, I guess I want to make many variations with questions about stories, images and words that have been injected and stuck in my mind. I had this image of molting. I need to peel off this skin, or the image or the words and the stories from my education, which I heard a million times. Sometimes it’s the common sense that we share. For example, the Dangun mythology is the story we learned in school. It’s the story of the origin of Korea. It’s the story of a tiger and a bear who wants to be reincarnated in a human form by eating garlic and wormwood. I knew this story, it just plays automatically in my head. I question this in this poem, titled ‘Animal; in Where the Heart goes_Poetry Collection’: did the bear and tiger really want to turn into a human?
~(partition)~ Poetry Commentary 4 ~FLOOR~
SS: I was struck by this image of ‘moulting’. I was imagining in my head as a sort of burning off, like this kind of alchemical transformation. And there’s a quote that I really like from a psychedelic prophet called Terence McKenna, in which he says that the interesting thing about the Yin Yang symbol is not the Yin or the Yang, but it’s the ‘s’ shaped river that flows in between. hat ‘s’ shape is a river of alchemical mercury. That also makes me think of the Korean flag and the state of being stuck in a binary mode as you put it earlier, patriotism versus hell, or cute or funny. There’s the binary mode which is very entrapping. I was thinking that in some parts of your script, there’s poetry and writing that has this very word salad-like quality, which jumbles this binary logic. And the word salad like nature, brings in and invokes the fragile, chaotic quality, which is quite essential. It underlines horror a little bit, the fact that there’s something about madness or senselessness, that could break into normal or rational language, which tends to be cerebral or intellectual, but I was reading in the exhibition notes that your films are about exploring language as an embodied experience or a bodily experience and that you write in a process of embodied writing. So, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about this process? And how does it inform your filmmaking?
YC: I love the word ‘word salad’. It sticks in my mind. I also recently came across the word 배설가 (baesulga) in Korean. In English, excreter. Whether they are words, images or things, they keep excreting. The language is encountered with all senses. And language is excreted as it’s eaten. A built-in way of speaking is surrounded by too much information and too much speed. Inversion of the attached values we have for words, images and objects by obliterating, mimicking and propagating is what I’m interested in and what I’m trying to do with my work. I definitely like to play with the multiplicity, or ambiguity unique to the Korean language.
The process of making my work usually starts with looking at the image in my head, or with my eyes on the screen. I just speak to myself. I write it down or record it right away. And let the sound comes first and the text comes as I write down how it sounds. In a way I try to imagine what the image says. I try to become a medium for the language, for that the language already has embraced. But it is not a romantic situation since I can’t be sure where the words are flowing from, through the mouth. So I often try to capture the unrest of strange emotions provoked by distorting the habits that have permeated our daily lives through brainwashing. ‘Breaking up with Nara (the nation)’ was one example. Most of the time I start my work by writing this way, and I also found this word that I said in the other interview, I would like to bring it up again. “If you pick up the sounds thrown from various directions, you will get lost. And when you accept the wondering, a series of processes, in which strange branches appear, will emerge”.
~(partition)~ Poetry Commentary 5 ~ANIMAL~
SS: Strange branches, I love that as the things that you can hold on to. The unrest of strange emotions, as you put it and the faculty of language to make something graspable is something that I’ve been obsessed with for quite some time. I think that’s what I was trying to get at with the earlier image of the ‘s’ shaped river, that it is a language that has the mercurial quality of bringing over. When you said you start with the images and channel the words from somewhere, and yet, it’s in words, that something comes into consciousness and it crosses over from the unconscious, or some other source into consciousness. But that aside, we have time for I think one more question. I was curious to ask you, whether you think of this particular historical moment that we’re living in as a time of epochal change. Maybe thinking about when one world is constituted by a certain worldview, which we have seen in your film work, is that ending and is another one needing to be born? I sense that there will necessarily be a hybridity in having to think about this as in multiple worlds exist at the same time, all the time. In such times, what is the role of images and culture? And speaking earlier as well about the residue or the trace of the external world on emotions, what does residue mean in this context?
YC: The emotions and feelings that I’ve encountered residual feelings. These feelings are triggered by looking at things like Gwishins (ghosts), or the yellow cuteness that I experienced. I’d like to speak about caring about these residues of emotion that as a result of trying to get over it. All the conversations that we had so far, like the river, the language, the branches, and the hair–the entangled hairs– are the things that focus on. I don’t know what I can say about the role of the image and the culture in such a time, but I attempt to break down rooted conventions or their habits or these brainwashed thoughts to open up the perspective.
I like to think of the world or the society as a body. I believe the world has pores and wrinkles. And each pores and wrinkles are portals to the different timelines. Each vibration of a moment is a burst of an epochal moment. I always think of a sunset that makes everything romantic but right at that moment, right before the darkness, when we start to fear that the sun will never rise again, or the sun actually will get eaten by others. At that moment, we are faced with multiple suns. Multiple suns, as pores and wrinkles. But of course, it happens to create lags and infections that accompany corrosions, lumps, and excrements, not only physically but also psychically.
Affection and attachment are inevitable. Horror and captivation come together. Throughout this process of metabolism, the residue is something that remains while transforming. Residue is also transgressive. It is a hidden consequence of its sequences.
Through the accumulation of sequences, we can face the past participle, and reassemble them to make more pores, wrinkles, stains, and tales. And I presume that this is what current images and cultures can/should do.
(There is no residue in ancestral time meaning that everything is residue.)
SS: Thank you, I was thinking with regard to the affect of residues. I’m not going to be able to quote this directly. But the sentiment is from Audrey Lorde, who says that there are no new ideas, there are only new ways of making them felt. And whether or not you agree with that, I definitely think that there’s something about the ways in which images that arise and words that come through are primarily symbolic, and they have an influence which is in the realm of the feeling and the affective realm. And in many ways that seems to be the carrier for ideas about how we might see the world as either a hypermaterial world of dead matter to use the Le Guinean phrase again, or one in which everything is alive and you are liberated to speak to anything and they will speak back to you. So on that note, I think that’s it from me. Thank you so much for talking with me.
YC: Thank you.
IMAGE CREDIT:
(INTERVIEW VIDEO)
00:00
Christopher Kirubi, Yun Choi, voice clip from sonic and reading performance
01:54
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection, 2022. Film still.
(Commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2021). Courtesy of the artist.
02:29 – 05:48
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Cheolki Hong. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
06:15
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection, 2022. Film still.
(Commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2021). Courtesy of the artist.
07:44 -10:43
Minhwi Lee, Yun Choi, Viral Lingua, 2019. Installation view. Photo: Cheolki Hong.
(Commissioned by Busan Biennale 2018). Courtesy of Arko Art Center
00:11:19:24
Minhwi Lee, Yun Choi, Viral Lingua, 2018. Film still. Commissioned by Busan Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.
13:12 -17:27
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2021. Drawing. Courtesy of the artist.
18:10 – 19:20
Yun Choi, Viral Lingua, 2018. Drawing. Courtesy of the artist.
21:34 – 24:40
Minhwi Lee, Yun Choi, Viral Lingua, 2018. Film still. Commissioned by Busan Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.
25:25 – 29:19
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection, 2022. Film still.
(Commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2021). Courtesy of the artist.
32:02 – 35:20
Yun Choi, Viral Lingua, 2018. Storyboard. Courtesy of the artist.
37:41
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Baufoto. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
37:55 – 38:52
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Cheolki Hong. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
39:07
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Baufoto. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
39:21 – 39:36
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Cheolki Hong. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
39:48
Yun Choi, Where the Heart Goes, 2020. Installation view. Photo: Baufoto. Courtesy of Doosan Art Center
(COMMENTARY VIDEO)
#1, 5 Photo: Cheolki Hong, Baufoto.
#2, 3, 4 Photo: Cheolki Hong,
English subtitle supervision: Seonjoo Park
