Ida Hajdari speaks to Korean Artist So- Young Cho

Ida Hajdari: Untitled text work (2009) works as well as it does partly because of the nature of the Korean language where the characters themselves and the way in which words are written seem to lend themselves so well to being seen like points of intersection in a grid. Have you considered doing a version of this work in English? Do you think this is possible at all?

So-Young Cho: There is an English translation of the work in progress (in fact I think the work could exist in any written world language). However the considerations behind an English translation or even other translations of the work are for me at the moment practical ones, as opposed to conceptual or aesthetic, since no audience in for example London or Paris would have access to it as I intended without some kind of translation or glossary. This is an interesting thing – the audience I mean.I take most things visually; and you’re right that Korean script (Hangeul) does make it easier to work in this way because of the nature of the system, and the visual aspects of the system. I was able to compact and contain lexical elements into this ‘grid’. I tried to make it compact and symmetrical like a grid or a map. Korean does allow me to do this more than say English. To an outsider (a ‘viewer’ of the work not a reader) it does appear more regulated aesthetically than it actually is at the level of the word. And this is more noticeable for them. They can’t read it, they can only look. The visual aesthetic must be raised for the non-Korean speaker and lowered, subordinated, for a Korean. I did think that anyone who came to it and could read Korean would literally read the whole thing before they would accept the whole image as ‘an image’, because they can understand the objects and know what they ‘look’ like. Obviously a non-Korean can’t do this; so they can’t read the diagrammatic aspect. Yes, it would make an interesting comparison to contrast Korean language audiences with non-Korean audiences. It is hard to imagine what a viewer might get at an interpretative level beyond or within the perceptive level if they had no idea what it was that they were looking at!So going back to the issue of translation – as a bilingual English-Korean speaker/writer I can say that the work will never really be the same, but it could still be valid. Each language has an ‘aura’; culture, politics, aesthetics, many things make it unique at a level of sense. Also I think the sound system can never be silenced; there is an inner voice. This is directly comparable to the visuality. This could be considered in parallel as the materiality or ‘music’ of an alien language in terms of audio. The pictorial elements of my first language do make this work very special I think, but everything has to be considered in the end. And as I said in the beginning, I never meant for this work to be translated, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be. Maybe it can’t be equal. It can’t be transferred. That’s the point.


I.H.: What is particularly disconcerting about the above work is the relationship between word, i.e. noun, and object, especially in the case of those objects that are represented to scale. For instance, in order to represent the wall in your room, the word ‘wall’ has been repeated, if I’m not mistaken, thirty four times. I am reminded of a statement made by George Maciunas (I think!): You can talk about a thing, but you cannot talk a thing. What you seem to have devised is a method for writing things. Was this something you had in mind when conceiving the work?


S-Y.C.: Again, this is a matter of visual perception for me. Every time I look at a word I am aware that I instantaneously see the object in my head and I do think they 'look' like each other in that way; they look to be where they belong. I wish I could find a word other than 'aura', but when I listen to the word 'book' in Korean or in English, I can draw a book, it cannot be explained. It is instinctive and visual. The diagrammatic and personal elements map my world, so they could through their specificity show a reality. But I'm not sure that is what Maciunas meant. There are two ways to analyze his thinking: one is questioning whether or not the 'word' is a thing; that is a question of its materiality or objecthood; the second is can a 'word' actually be the thing to which it refers; conceptually this seems impossible but as I say, the diagram gets quite close. It also depends on the notion of abstraction in noun forms I think. So the things in my room are much closer to their concrete form than say the notion of 'hatred' for example.Having said all this and to answer your question I don’t think I was aware of a method of ‘writing things’ when I made the work. It was very impulsive actually. But because of its physical, locational relations to ‘real life’ I think maybe it is closer to nature and reality than the most conceptual and generic of language, yes.

I.H.: Untitled text work is in a way a documentary work; you have written out and represented the entire contents of your room. In terms of the theoretical issues that the work raises it doesn’t matter at all of what variety the room that you chose to work with was. It is nonetheless interesting that you chose your bedroom. The thing about bedrooms is that they are both generic and at the same time, perhaps not simply through the nature of the objects in them but the ways in which these objects are arranged/scattered about, very telling of the person who inhabits them. I suppose my question is why this ‘exercise’ in painstakingly representing/documenting such a private space?

S-Y.C.: First of all, it was very impulsive. I did it to send to a friend back in Korea; but maybe that reason wasn’t that important; maybe I wanted to do it for myself. It was almost stating where I am; not literally physically stating where I am. But also somehow to try to figure out whereabouts I am in the world I’m living in and where I’m heading. It was a question of ‘life’ almost. I don’t know if we all want to know where we are; but for me I very much wonder where I am in my daily life. I don’t think it’s possible to work out physically where you are in the world we’re living in; even though we know all the maps and we get satellite information and so on we somehow accept that there can be multiple universes. It was putting down an answer to this question physically on a piece of paper! At that time I felt as if I was going somewhere, and I felt that I was questioning if I walk and walk and go forward would the atmosphere around me really change. I sometimes feel that I’m always running. Sometimes it occurs to me that there is no proof of our different visual worlds being the same or a similar world. And I sometimes wonder if something that I see through my eyes for that moment actually exists; which is a question of whether the outside really exists, a profound question of existence and proof. And while I was writing I was asking myself whether if that room existed only for that moment I should make evidence of it.

I.H.: The drawings in your Untitled (2009) series have a strong narrative element. Roger Orwell has argued that the possible displacement and evocation we feel when faced with these mutated bodies is a response to the departure that they represent from the body, which he reads as a possible metaphor for verbal syntactic structures overlaid with a visual syntax and grammar, and our response as an expression of our instinctive awareness of such structures. These drawings, however, form a series; so apart from the relation that the mutated body that is represented in each one of them has to the body, they also have a relation to each other and to the ‘whole’ that the series represents. Do you recognize and/or understand these two narrative threads? And furthermore do you understand them as being complementary?

S-Y.C.: Yes I do see these narratives and the structure of these anatomical works as being sublimated into something very similar to what Roger has said. I have thought about this before in fact. I see each piece as a word, as a sentence, as a story, as a series. I see each work as dependent and independent at the same time. We don’t have to listen to a story to know a story. I have taken out the ‘words’ in the ‘story’ that explain the ‘story’, if you like, and presented them in the way I’ve presented them. Before I started drawing these pictures the only thing I planned was that there should be twelve of them. The reason for this is unimportant here, but it maybe shows I was considering the discursive elements of the works. I do think there is an interrelation between the individual works. The body worked like a material for me. If you make something out of wood, that something evokes in some way all the nouns of furniture. If they have the same materiality it would at the same time present a unity. I think these works do form a poetics of the human anatomy, a poem, a message of the limits and limitlessness of the human body, of the boundaries of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’. I don’t think I clearly need to know what this is, or what it means. But the poets can reassemble language as I have the human body. Interpretation is for someone else; who can really say what literature really means; I don’t know, just as I don’t know if or when I will ever make another one of these works.