An Incomplete Chronicle
Wonjin Kim
The records that slipped out of my past self did not match my memory. That strangeness was where my work began. Records waver and shift, and in that instant, unintended errors bloom. Rather than filling these incomplete gaps, I look at the rhythms and tremors that burst from them. I turn the vibrations of error, born where words and the body fall out of step, into landscapes that move in space.
Dancing in the Thin Air
I collect the traces of fleeting moments I had to part with, as if they were relics. A page from a diary, a button from old clothes, a dry leaf picked up on a walk become clues leading back into the past. I paint the afterimages that seep from these clues, cut them into long thin strips as if dividing time into units, then layer them again and again, each slightly offset. Like the fore-edge of a book, the surface breaks into trembling fragments up close and becomes a single landscape as one steps back.
Memories called up through language carry tremors that words cannot fully hold. I paint the vibrations echoing from moments I wished to hold on to, trying to prove that these memories were real. This labor of crossing and layering traces, again and again, is my way of revealing lost time.
This journey of reaching for what is lost resembles a pirouette in ballet, spinning quickly while balanced precariously on one foot. Repetition aimed at moments that can never be held may seem useless (無用, muyong), yet it becomes a mournful dance (舞踊, muyong), a dance in thin air. Born of error, it is a useless dance that is not useless.
A Blank Confession
Records are not a means of holding on to what has vanished, but a way of revealing vanishing itself. In “Melting Strata,” sentences of farewell found in classic literature and in my own writing are melted each day into thin sheets of wax. In “Blank on Timing,” words gathered from residents waiting to leave a redevelopment area, along with words of double meaning, wear away amid noise on a timing belt. Both works focus on the temperature and texture left by language that lives as it disappears. They trace how personal memory wears down within the structures of society, and the noisy blank it leaves behind.
A Vestigial Trace Study
“A Vestigial Trace Study” (2024) focuses on the moment language passes through the body to be spoken. The way each language tenses the articulatory muscles differently gives rise to its own rhythms and diversity. I was drawn to the dual nature of the uvula: a marker of evolution that may not be essential to speech. Copper stands for the nerves, and its oxidizing surface resembles language shifting over time. Folding from flat records toward spoken volumes yet never fully closing, the copper nets stay open, like language read differently in each context. Beneath silicone skin, vibration motors tremble, each with its own rhythm and weight. The work lets the body hidden behind smoothly recorded language stand once more, and asks whether the imperfect, and therefore more human, moments of speech can be restored as physical vibration.
still speaking through motion
This is a record, left in space, of a time when language disappeared, before its sensations could evaporate. When a sudden rupture took away sound and left me trapped in a darkness where time had been cut away, the only proof of myself was the tilted back of my hand and the pulse running across it. I record the remnants of a body that kept moving forward even in this silence. Reason trying to face fear and the body trying to push it away become a pendulum of endless hesitation, and the thin point where I stayed remains in space as a membrane. Spreading like the paths of eye movements in the dark, traces of light hold signals that never became words.
The misalignment that began in my own body now turns toward our speech. When bodies that carry different mother tongues speak, some far from the land where those tongues first sounded, I listen for the rhythms and tremors inscribed within them.