The Chronicle of the Page: Prologue
From the Fore-edge of Time to Living Records
Wonjin Kim
After I learned, sometime in my teens, that my parents had kept all my childhood journals and letters, I made a habit of discarding my own writings. Perhaps it came from the bewilderment, or the embarrassment, of finding them strange each time I reread them. Through this habit, I came to face the nature of memory in records I could see and hold. Over time, memories that once seemed clearly recorded change and disappear, as if they had lives of their own. Yet these flowing moments do not simply fade. They turn transparent and reappear again and again, re-emerging in our minds as solid as crystals, with their own flow and pattern. I have unfolded this through “A Chronicle of the Moment,” drawings that layer moments on paper and in space.
In my early works, I mainly used books discarded from libraries and recorded stories such as diaries. At other times, the very process of recording what could not be recorded, and was bound to disappear, became the work itself. Thinking of myself as a librarian of oblivion, I collected processes of erasure and wove their time into masses with strata. These became my library.
In 2019, I worked on “The Land of the Glitches” as an observer somewhat distant from the record. While cutting through discarded books, as if drilling into strata, I came across part of someone’s letter. I could not even tell whom it was to/from. Had the recipient left it in the book and forgotten it, or was it a letter its writer had hesitated to send and never sent? My works of dismantling and layering until then had tried to show the space of disappearance itself. After that, I was drawn to the stories that grow anew in places of loss where some clues remain. Several partings I went through during this period made me want to reopen the pages I had kept closed. Moving away from my early works, which grew out of a habit of concealing records, I came to accept that the pages I had tried to cover out of shame were shining in themselves as incomplete chronicles.
Over the years of my work, most of the books that came to me from libraries were classic novels, discarded because they had physically worn out. A question arose from this: when we weave our memories and tell them in similar narrative structures, is it the influence of the classic novels we read as children? That question became “Melting Strata” (2020). In 2021, I turned to another question: why do you and I keep missing each other and simply pass each other by, even within the same structure of memory? It became an installation where words, and the gaps between them, keep circulating on a timing belt taken from car parts.
Earlier, clues from literary records whose authors no longer shared my time and space were the starting point of my work. Then, through a citizen participation project I planned and carried out in 2020-2021, I had the chance to work with the emotional records of 200 citizens as sketches. Through this work, I came to see that our lives shine in time like short novels, and that all these records become confessions that help people endure time. From then on, my way of working shifted from collecting to replying, leading to works on a chronicle we share, between you and me.
During the pandemic, when meeting face to face became difficult, I chose letters as a way of translating people’s present moments into sculpture. This became “The Chronicle between You and Me” (2021), a work about living and disappearing over time.
I have focused on interpreting the afterimages of incomplete memories and moments through a literary structure, and on recording them once again as physical sculptures within the relationship of you and me. Through this process, I want to replay, once again in the present, the moments when we happen upon a vast narrative, or upon hidden, intimate records between you and me. Can I show that a record is a living sculpture, one that reveals people’s emotions like a material with thickness? Translating living records into sculpture and drawing them: this is my work, and what I leave in space each day.