note (24.04.26)
The space I had been searching for was a ruin—not merely a dilapidated structure, but a living ruin, existing solely as a ruin. It was a place that had never been anything but a ruin, an absence of paradise that persists in its contradictory state of being and non-being. It’s as if it has been erased from any record, unwelcome even as a topic of conversation. You recall the time left on the mattress, made perhaps forty years ago, and the forgotten remnants in this dead space. You ponder the tragic echoes that faintly resonate in the distance. Abandoning the fleeting notion of “stillness,” you fidget with a crushed caramel wrapper in your pocket, lost in futile contemplation: What ripples does an empty, hovering body create on desert-colored water? What ripples can a collection of photographs, gathered over time, produce?
No matter how many times you view it, there’s an inherent innocence to photography. It feels overly fluffy, self-contained, and perpetually fresh. Despite capturing moments that have long passed, it continuously beckons us to the tense immediacy of the present. Like the illusion of permanence suggested by terms such as "archival," it immerses us in an endless digital cloud—a "now" that seems destined to last forever. The flat photographs I took seemed to succumb to this same fate. Printed on fine paper as skin, they appear innocent, sometimes elegant, and other times enigmatic, akin to leather tanned and oiled to perfection. The notion that these images, with their flatness and lack of volume, will remain permanently unblemished seems almost mythical. Will the ink particles on the paper, precisely where they belong, outlast my own existence? Is everything actually incorruptible and eternal? This illusion of eternity extends beyond digital images, representing an unattainable romance—a faded romance, unresolved and preserved like mummies in their grand tombs, or lofty landscapes that never find their end.
Even hope decays...*
Even hope decays. The ashes that drift down after doomsday won't reveal that they were part of the hope. Everything decays to the relentless march of time. As all hope does.
The ocean, with its ceaseless tides and ebbs, is in constant motion, sweeping everything away. Waves and sunlight bathe tiny insects, while photographs, crawling and settling momentarily, accumulate into a powdery heap as if the waves have absorbed all the information they sought to gather. The scene, with its fishy scent, resides in the space of an old dormitory building in Doksan-dong as if it has always been there.
No longer recounting history or individuals, the inverted and transferred photographs (finally) rewind a certain time in silence. Tiny particles, once organic or inorganic matter from hundreds of millions of years ago, settled on the photographs and now inhabit the exhibition space in Doksan-dong. The formerly damp shells have dried into crisp, thick dust. As a breeze through the open window stirs the particles, they briefly sparkle in the sunlight, as if they’ve been waiting for this moment. They will drift away again, and like rags washed ashore, they will eventually settle into a corner, floating in this space indefinitely.
In some of my past work—a result of concealing rather than revealing—I meticulously cleaned dusty film scans of collapsed or broken spaces, structurally recorded. It was a battle against dust and moisture, both analog and digital. It is a trophy victory, achieved while I was buried in mud and stained with dirt, desperately safeguarding my smartphone, camera, and film. "Alas, you have won," I concede, but what are you doing? Do you truly believe in your endeavor? Are you serving a compromised faith? As I’ve written before, what happens is simply what happens, "nonchalantly and thoroughly." It resembles an eternal human tragedy, a mistake we recognize yet continue to repeat, seemingly eroding the world in some quiet corner. Nothing in this world can be saved or redeemed by it. And yet, I find myself endlessly agonizing over this futile pursuit, until it all corrodes away like hope.
(translated by Malpigg)