The Chronicle of the Page
– From the time of the side to records alive
Wonjin Kim
From the time I happened to know that my parents had kept all my journals and letters from my childhood, I have made a habit of getting rid of my writings and the books I have read, which originated from my sense of embarrassment aroused from re-reading. This habitual experience revealed thoughts on the attributes of memory, through visible and touchable materials. With the passage of time, memories which were thought to be obviously recorded at the time are modified and disappear as if they are living by themselves. However, these flowing moments do not fade; instead, they repeatedly become transparent and re-appear, emerging solidly as a crystal with flow and pattern in our minds. For this, I expressed them through drawings of the layering of moments, on papers or in the space.
In my early works, discarded books from the library and recorded stories such as diaries were mainly used, or the ‘process of recording’ of the things could not be recorded and eventually disappeared, became work itself. Considering myself as a librarian of oblivion, I collected processes of erasing and pieced them together as linking their time by creating ‘a lump with layers’, which then became my library.
In 2019, when working on <The Land of the Glitches, 2019> as an observer somewhat distant from the record, I accidentally discovered a part of someone's letter while cutting (which I considered equivalent as drilling strata) discarded books. This piece of record, not even known to whom it was for, raised questions about whether the recipient of the letter inadvertently left it in the book and forgot, or it was a letter that one could not send because of worry. The works about being destroyed or layered were an attempt to show the "disappeared space" itself; after that, I became interested in the stories that were newly growing in the lost place where some clues remained. And several physical separations including death and breakups that I personally experienced during this period made me want to reopen the page from the surface of the book that I had kept closed. Escaping from the early works that began with the habit of concealing records, this period served as an opportunity to accept that the pages I tried to cover with shame were shining as ‘incomplete chronicles’ in themselves.
Among the books collected so far, classical literature novels took the largest part among the books discarded from the library, mainly due to their physical deterioration. In this respect, the question of whether the similar narrative structures that make up our memories were influenced by classical novels we had encountered in childhood led to the work Melting Strata, 2020. In 2021, I have expressed the idea regarding another question; how come ‘You and I’ crossed over each other and just passed by, even in the same memory structure?' as an installation work in which words including gaps between them flow in the noise by using a timing belt from automobile parts.
Previously, clues from literary records whose authors no longer existed in the same time and space as me became the very beginning of my works. Then, through the citizen participation project planned and conducted during 2020-2021, I had an opportunity to work using the emotional records of 200 citizens as sketches. From this work, I came to feel, perhaps a natural truth, that our lives are shining in time like a short novel and that all those records make up a confession enabling people to endure time. This made the way of working change from ‘collection’ to ‘reply,’ and it ended up mapping out works on 'our chronology' by sharing between 'I and You.'
And in recent years, where physical face-to-face encountering has become uneasy, choosing letters as the mean of translating people's present moment into sculptures, the work The Chronicle between You and Me, 2021 about living and disappearing in the passage of time has been under progress.
I focus on interpreting the afterimage of incomplete memories and moments in a literary structure and recording them once again as physical sculptures in space within the relationship of 'You and I.' In this process of record, I would like to play the instant 'moments', where ‘we’ are occasionally placed in the middle of a colossal narrative, or one happens to face some of the hidden, intimate records, once again in the 'present'. In the process of work, I think of revealing that record is a 'living' sculpture which discloses people's emotions, just like a material with thickness. This sculptural translation of living records and the process of drawing in the space are my work and the result of daily contemplation.