Beyond the Skin
Mijung Kim
I. Between Your Bones
Woong Yong Kim
“A nothing in relation to the infinite, a whole in relation to nothingness, a midpoint between nothing and everything, infinitely removed from grasping either extreme. The ends of things and their origins remain hidden from him within an impenetrable mystery.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Léon Brunschvicg, fragment 72.
1
There is a blue porcelain cup with a broken base. No longer able to hold water or coffee, it has lost its practical function and become, to some, little more than a useless object taking up space. Yet they did not keep the cup simply because it seemed wasteful to throw away. It was inexpensive and of a common design. More importantly, many years ago, during a difficult period in their life, it had been given to them, filled with coffee, by a friend who was going through hardships of their own. The friend had said something they never fully understood: that they had placed their own flaw within the cup. That friend died, and when the cup broke, memories of their first meeting came rushing back, along with the warmth of that moment, its quiet simplicity, the aroma of coffee, and the sensation lingering at their fingertips—a world at once joyful and fleeting. The broken cup was no longer merely a vessel for drinking tea; it had become a part of the friend. When they blew air through the opening in the cup, a sound resonated as though the friend were answering.
2
Far from the surface, it is only when the cup can no longer fulfill its prescribed function that one reaches the edge of this world and stands at the threshold of another, deeper world just beginning to emerge. The vast inner world rarely reveals itself without a particular catalyst. For this reason, our glimpses of the flow between ending and origin, between the worlds of surface and interior, depend upon an appropriate medium, much as we cannot see our own backs with the naked eye and must instead rely on a mirror. Even then, we can perceive only a faint and indistinct image of what lies beyond this world. Even if we manage to catch sight of our backs, we cannot fully recover the form of that neglected moment as it once was. We long to look directly at that form, yet it always turns away.
3
There is a dried flower in a blue porcelain pot. Its colors have faded, and on yellowing leaves, visited no longer by butterflies but by flies, decay slowly sets in amid nutrients that are at once fresh and strangely fitting. At that moment, a voice seems to linger among the roots stretching beneath the surface: “Perhaps what binds us together is not the convincingly constructed image presented on a smooth surface, but the wounds left within it—joined to other wounds, pain to pain, weakness to weakness.” The voice slips through the crack in the broken porcelain pot and burrows into some part of their body. Then it emerges once again from their mouth: “If a strange voice from the past suddenly enters the present and wanders among the bones searching for its place, can we really say it is meaningless simply because we cannot understand its abrupt arrival?” Before they can tell where the questions carried by that voice begin or end, they hatch and awaken within the body, living on as actors in a film.
4
In the film, an actor cast in an inconspicuous role wanders. “Why do you try to become something else when you are already a world unto yourself?” Fragments of information drifting around then accumulate within their dreams, unsettling their convictions. As the scene changes, the actor collapses to the ground. “I believe that small miracles are happening all around us.” They struggle forward in search of their place, crawling step by step across the split back of the past, over the ruins of a house of cards, through the interior of an expression from which words have vanished, across the emptiness left behind by departure, between words sealed away in a drawer, and over the waters of a dim dawn. Though they can no longer make a sound, they still exist within the history of this film as a world of their own, and they will live again.
5
Why must the voices of this world—from within one another, from between bone and bone—continue to alienate one another endlessly even as they long so desperately for something? What lies concealed behind words, the broken cup, the flower, the wind, the miracle, the sun, opens its mouth. They set out in search of these hidden things. A force vibrates between then and now, between the object and the self, between the spine and the skull. The force that binds us, rising upon our bones, is not merely flesh composed of proteins and nerves.
Ⅱ. Beneath Closed Eyes
Mijung Kim
Light
When told, “Look toward the light, ” one turns in anticipation of finding something there, yet regrettably it offers little clue as to what that something might be. The same is true of a voice that is heard, or one that seems to be approaching. Even the temporal distance, point of view, and scene toward which the voice is directed all feel different. In the end, it becomes impossible to determine exactly whose voice it is, or what or where it is speaking of. Voices from different eras intersect around a single photograph documenting a past event (Wake, 2019). Messages that seem to arrive from the far reaches of memory are read aloud without end (Into the 206 Bones, 2025). Past and present narratives resonate around places that are disappearing, have been lost, or are yet to be lost (Gray Matter, 2023). Ultimately, for these narratives to reach the body, the eyes must first be closed.
Once again—look toward the light.
Sleep
“A sound heard long ago, and yet I heard it as the same sound... that tinkling was always there within me, and between it and the present moment there lay all that infinitely overspread past which I did not know I was carrying within myself.”
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Historical events serve as a catalyst for the artist’s work, yet the way those events unfold within the work is not tied to clear explanations grounded in archival materials or documentary evidence. Even when such materials are used, the artist avoids treating them as definitive proof or as direct clues to the event itself. As a result, the histories and stories that emerge in the work gradually drift away from the narratives that have been publicly recorded, evaluated, and accepted. Rather than foregrounding the contentious aspects of an event, the work follows the smaller, more intimate questions raised by the “strange voices” that were entangled within it yet remained obscured, unsettling histories that once appeared complete. The way these voices emerge, and the way the artist speaks of history, can seem to move back and forth between sleep and dream. Realized only after the eyes are closed, dreams reflect past and present simultaneously, generate images, and leave vivid sensations lingering in the body even after waking. Dreams wander between illusion and reality, between language and what lies beyond language. Even so, the people that appear in the works begin to tell their stories only after closing their eyes.
In Wavelength (2021), a man lies down. His eyes are closed. In Gray Matter, a man lies down. His eyes are closed. He recalls the death of his grandfather. The man in Gray Matter, who says, “When I fall asleep, things that have disappeared come back to me,” repeatedly closes his eyes as he speaks of his grandfather, the dog he once raised, and his home. These are things that no longer exist. Again, in Wavelength, the man is asleep. He forces his eyes open, trying not to fall asleep, or perhaps trying not to return to a particular moment, but in the end his eyes close. Something thick and sticky pours over his face and hands. Unable, or unwilling, to open his eyes, he remains bound by the media that cling to his body, carrying and dispersing records and memories. In Wake, too, the only moment in which the figures are together is when they lie side by side with their eyes closed, as if under hypnosis. Voices that had been erased or diminished are summoned with clarity only after the eyes are closed. Memories that have accumulated in different forms flash briefly across consciousness, repeatedly reaching toward the body in the present. In this way, beneath closed eyes, sleep, hypnosis, and death run parallel to one another, becoming points of departure through which connections can be made. There already exist polished languages that define the relationships between “that day” and those bound to it, whether the Gwangju Uprising, the Yonsei University Incident, the Mok-dong anti-eviction struggle, or the experiences of migrant workers. Yet the words buried deep within the body can emerge only when one refuses to trust solely what has already been articulated. This is powerfully borne out by the artist’s own experience: the sudden sting of tear gas encountered while visiting their mother at Severance Hospital as a child, and the dissonance between the songs of dreams and love taught at school and the reality they came to know. When confronted with records of an event and their material traces—beer bottles and Molotov cocktails, fireworks and camera flashes, or fragmented scenes repeatedly replayed through the media—one is suddenly struck by the collision between the shape of the world one knows today and something altogether different. The documentation of an event may be complete, yet beneath the closed eyes of those who continue to recognize and endure the cycle of that violent time, every scene spins endlessly like a Möbius strip. Once again, a voice is heard: “Can I open my eyes now?”
Voice
In Wavelength, a man is asleep, yet the voice presumed to be narrating his dream belongs to a woman. For this reason, voice in the artist’s work does not function as a guide that faithfully explains a given situation. Instead, these voices overlap, interfere with one another, and attempt multiple layers of speech. They often act as though they are holding objects that are not actually there, while sounds are played in sync with their gestures. Though neither the appearance nor the voice truly belongs to a man or woman, they stand before us with complete composure, as if possessed by another presence.
Gray Matter begins with a voice that feels distinctly out of place. An appeal written by a representative of displaced residents during the 1986 Mok-dong anti-eviction struggle, a text expressing the anguish of losing one’s home, is read aloud in the voice of a Filipino migrant worker. From the moment the text is delivered slowly and haltingly in uncertain Korean pronunciation, it becomes clear that the original owner of those words is not present.
The artist was born in this neighborhood, yet no longer calls it home after everything they once knew there disappeared. Instead, he turns to conversations about home and belonging with Filipino migrant workers he met at a migrant support center established on the site of what once stood there. Their voices, reflecting on and dreaming of family deaths and the homes of their hometowns, become entangled with one another. “I dreamed about the bamboo house where we used to live, the one that was swept away by the river...” “My skin turned into fish scales...” “My uncle will find me and eat me.” / “Then will you become your uncle?” / “No, I’ll live inside his body.” It is significant that this strange exchange, unfolding in a context seemingly unrelated to an earlier account of gathering the remaining materials after a bamboo house collapsed in a flood, arrives at the idea of “living inside.” Not becoming, but living within. This contradictory condition generates a complex web of relations, at times overlapping and at times diverging, between the historical experience of forced eviction during redevelopment in the 1980s and the question of home and belonging for migrant workers living in Korean society today. In Gray Matter, voices reading the appeal and recalling home join together fractured trajectories tied to a particular place. Meanwhile, the “strange voices” in Wake and Wavelength drift through space, continually colliding with images.
Particularly in Wake, the voices drift among photographs, screens, and light (or fire), moving through coughing, hypnosis, and bodies stretched thin as skin, against the backdrop of a series of events that unfolded in 1996. The differing situations and positions occupied by these voices deflect any attempt to interpret the events in a singular or partial way. In doing so, they fragment the images of official history and construct layered strata of memory. Moving between bodies and speaking through one another, these voices reveal obscured points within the events while simultaneously slipping away from any fixed meaning. This recalls the uncanny collisions generated by temporal disjunctions in the artist’s earlier works, Night and Fog (2018) and Avoided Names Under the Hard Skin (2014), where voices from films of the past are made to inhabit bodies in the present. In Avoided Names Under the Hard Skin, the voices of ghosts from 1970s films are overlaid onto the bodies of performers. The audience watches the performers repeatedly deliver borrowed voices while continually shifting their gaze between the screen and the two stages that remain before them. Although everything unfolds in real time, only the camera’s selective gaze is transmitted to the screen. The audience knows that every scene is taking place simultaneously within the same time and space, directly before their eyes. Yet as bodies and narratives from fundamentally different dimensions press against one another and reflect one another, the narrative is delayed and destabilized. Any mode of speech organized through linear time is thoroughly ruptured. At the same time, the transferred voice passes through the body in search of words that still remain, unsettling the continuity of time alongside fragments of events that were left unspoken in their own moment. This is why, even when the woman at the end of Wake looks directly at the audience and says, “Now I truly believe it,” everything nevertheless feels as though it has returned to its point of origin once again.
Beyond the superimposed voice, another voice that left a strong impression appears in Gray Matter. As Filipino migrant workers spend time together in lively conversation, someone begins singing a Korean ballad at the top of their voice. Though the song resonates through the microphone, mournful, impassioned, and long having faded from popular memory, it is drowned out by the surrounding chatter. A sense of unease emerges as the familiar language and song seem unable to find their place within that setting, and the voice is eventually pushed to the margins. Unheard by anyone, it gradually fades away. But was that song truly nothing at all? The artist’s decision to include the lyrics as English subtitles may itself be an answer to that question.
Again,
I listened to Into the 206 Bones in a dimly lit studio. As in Wake, lights accompanied by objects moved like theatrical lighting, though this time they surrounded a performer rather than appearing on a screen. Yet I found myself wanting to close my eyes. The music and narration, whose references I did not recognize, remained at once distant and strangely close, like a dream. Even so, traces of light seeped through my eyelids, and the performer’s voice prompted me to imagine things I had forgotten or never known. Among them was a vivid story about a grandfather. Then, suddenly, the final line, “I never met him while he was alive,” brought me back to reality. I think of the countless images that have always been beside me, though I had never seen them before remembering them. I recall the artist’s response to questions about history: memory’s wavelengths, action and reaction, and the paradox of the “memory-image,” concealed and circulated, yet continually remade between record and memory. And I think of those who have not returned, suspended between memories, records, and images so deeply embedded in the body that they cannot be shaken off, each pushing against the others across time. Is there truly a place in this vast world for those voices?
Mijung Kim (Curator)
Mijung Kim has organized exhibitions and programs at Art Space Pool, ARKO Art Center, and Insa Art Space. She makes the frictions and gaps that emerge between the curator's role and the structures, institutions, and systems of the art world the driving force behind her curatorial work.
