rite of passage

my grandfather passed away on tuesday. i received news about his condition at night and booked a flight to fly immediately the next morning. unfortunately, before my mother and i got on the plane, he passed away.
korean funerals usually last 3 days: friends and extended family come to pay their visits to him, saying bye, and the more immediate family greets the visitors all day long for every single one of those days until they bury the body or cremate.
as a national figure, my grandfather's funeral lasted 5 days. we buried him this morning at a beautiful, sunny spot in Seoul.
i lost my only grandfather, the person who stood in for my missing father, the person who, aside from lifting a nation out of poverty after WWII, setting up various foundations and scholarship programs for brilliant students, national and international, was also a loving father and grandfather. he loved everyone of his children and his grandchildren.
i miss his laughter, his smart jokes, his asking me about when i'm going to get married, the way we used to sit together, communicating in silence.
it's strange how this private, personal loss is turned into a public spectacle for the media; the press devoured our tragedy during those days, visits from politicians were strategic moves.
but there were many who truly mourned his death, people who were not family, maybe not even personal friends of his, but who genuinely loved him for what he had done for the nation during his lifetime. big corporate names came by, but people, who had put on their very best, but also sock that were torn from years of wear, came and cried in front of my grandfather's portrait.
my grandfather was a great man.
i miss you so much, i love you, and you will always be with me.

r.i.p. steel king
1927-2011

overdue

Candy Koh. Untitled, 2011. oil pastel on paper.

Dear Mr. Critic--

            Years ago, when you looked at my coffin, my baby, my soul, you said it was self-indulgent and sensationalist at best.

            Did it remind you of the newest trend in Chinese art flooding the New York scene? Was it too blunt for your refined taste in subtleties?

            I take self-indulgence to mean that you find it over the top and excessive, but still boring because you don’t identify with it.

            You don’t identify with it because you spend your hours sitting with piles of theory, sifting through Adorno, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and surrounded by crumples of cheap copy paper discarded by you, those forsaken words that didn’t make it into the neatly organized file cabinets of your ideologies. You split your hours between obsessively honing your precious theories and making the gallery rounds, to sort through the latest displays of creative labor that hang in the thousand white boxes of New York City, awaiting their fates: to be discovered, seen, bought, sold, to make it in the art world. Hands behind your back, you circle through each space; your narrowed eyes scan the latest products, searching for ones that are worthy of your time and gaze. Most of it’s shit, you say. You only come across two or three good shows out of the hundreds that you see every month.

            You call my art self-indulgent because at least back then I spent most of my waking moments in the studio. I loved the screeching of rusting hinges and the faint echo of my cautious footsteps moving over the cement floor as I quiety slipped through the heavy door to spend another night with the smell of resin, paint, burning metal fumes. I loved every minute of carefully pouring just the right amount of water over the powdery hill of plaster, churning the milky contents with my chapped hand until it reached the perfect degree of creaminess. If it weren’t for the dizzy spells from the heat behind that mask or my hands slipping inside the gloves because of the sweat, I could spend the entire night without food, without a cigarette, without a moment of rest, just listening to the sizzles made by the beads of perspiration dripping and coming in contact with heated steel plates. I loved every bit of clay, wax, paint, and even the holes that made it onto my clothes better than sitting over coffee with chattering people; every scar from a burn, a scratch, cut, was a source of my pride. I even loved the black stains left on the tissues after I blew my nose or coughed from breathing in ground steel dust. My hands were rougher than any respectable construction worker’s; sometimes I would refuse to put on lotion even at the insistence of my book-and-computer-handling friends because I had what they did not have, and you will never have.

            Or maybe it’s just because I am a woman and you are a man.

            And is it so bad that I loved it so much and it showed in my work? Does that make me a petty hobbyist who simply likes making things and not a serious artist who deals with greater issues like the future of humanity?

            I don’t claim to know art. You tell me you don’t know either, but I know that you think you do.

            This is not a frivolous competition about who understands art better, the detached theorist or the immersed practitioner. No, this is a simple request for dialogue, for you to think outside of the criteria that you have established to make yourself the authority who always has the final word.

            After three years, I finally state my response to you: Let’s talk.

            Since back then I was naïve enough to think that you were right because you read more, I left my studio for three years to enlighten myself with the words you worship so much.

            Now I can speak your language. Now I too have the same books in my head.

            So now let’s talk.

            Because quite frankly, I still don’t see your point.

Sincerely,

The amateur in her mid 20’s still suffering from teenage angst

night walk

before heading off to drown myself in toxic fluids last saturday (as usual), i stopped by tribeca to pay a visit to a woman with a suitcase.
that was pretty much all i knew about it--
as part of performa 11, a biennial performance art festival that usually takes place in november, someone named laurence wagner was going to carry a suitcase and walk around the block of canal, wooster, greene, and grand streets, starting at 8pm until she became too exhausted to go on.

these kinds of performances--endurance-based works that involve mundane, common enough behavior--is not entirely new; they got their upstart in the art world starting in the 60's with conceptual artists such as bruce nauman and allan kaprow, who did things like walk around a room for hours or throw mounds of rubber tires in a room.
and quite frankly, i've always been a bit skeptical about these kinds of performances. can these artists really shed some kind of interesting light on such an everyday activity?

and so i go.

then i realized i have a task to accomplish: to find this woman.
usually, when people go to see art, it's designated to a very specific location. you enter a gallery, theatre, etc., and there it is. i realized that even though (luckily) it was a smallish block, i still had to walk around to find her, after first locating the block itself.

when i arrived at the site, it was about 9pm, an hour after she started.
around and around i went, without seeing a lady with a suitcase.
and i also had an erroneous preconception that carrying a suitcase literally meant a piece of baggage suspended in the air (i imagined briefcase, actually, not full-on suitcase).
two women passed by, speaking in a language that i did not understand, and one was lugging a large suitcase behind her with the airport baggage claim tags still attached. i saw them, but assumed without doubt these must be some visitors or residents just arriving from the airport.
as i continued to walk around the block, i saw the same two women again, coming the same direction i saw them walking from before, and only then did i realize this was the performance.

and yes, how i was fooled by its mundaneness.
but it was so natural, so ordinary, she really looked like she was coming home, going somewhere with her suitcase, having just arrived. but in reality, she was going through an endless rotation around the same block.

once i confirmed that she was the artist, i joined her.
i walked around and around the block with her, sometimes talking, asking her questions, sometimes just scanning the proximities, smoking my cigarette.

then nature calls.
it struck me to ask her, what about going to the bathroom? has she needed to go yet? what is she going to do if she needs to go?
since it hadn't been too long since she started, she told me she was ok thus far, but she's not too sure what she will do if she really needs to go. maybe i'll stop briefly, she said, but i'm going to try to stick it out as long as possible without stopping.
i made it a point to go to the bathroom just before leaving the house so i would not have to go for a while during the visit.
but after only about twenty minutes, i needed to go, and had to leave her.

instead of returning to her after by business, i decided to meet up with a friend, and unfortunately was not able to check back later.
how long did she go on?
i don't remember the exact lengths of time, but i remember people telling me ten years ago that when the world trade center was destroyed, they had to walk from the financial district all the way up to their homes in washington heights or higher, because all of the transportation was shut down. but at least they could stop by somewhere to use the bathroom. maybe?
human endurance is quite remarkable; it can really push itself to the extreme when necessary.
so how long of a walk was considered necessary to this woman? how much was at stake for her?

the next day, waking late and hungover, i truly longed to get in touch with her to ask when she stopped walking. although the encounter was relatively brief, i shared twenty minutes of my saturday night walking with her.
where is she now? where did she go once she was too exhausted to continue? where is her home here?

i have to work out more of the particulars of my response to this performance, but it certainly broke my cynicism toward endurance-based performance art.

perhaps i will chew on it a bit more and post the remnants later, but for now, i feel ok in just recounting my experience.

ethics of collaging

banana milk, 2011

the wooster group, an avant-garde theater group founded in nyc (greenwich village to be exact) during the mid 70's by elizabeth le compte and some others.

they are known for their collage works-- they rework old plays, put actors as well as monitors, sound clippings on stage. the result is precisely that, a performance collage.

in 1981, they staged a work called 'route 1 & 9 (the last act)' in which all the white performers enacted a minstrel show in black face.

this is my response to seeing a clip of that piece:

Art criticism is not parasytic because it is an art form by its own right. All art—whether it be visual, performance, or literature—borrow from predecessors and each other. (Deliberate or unintentional) appropriation is not unusual, if not inevitable.

Question to The Wooster Group: Is this Okay?

Haptic illusion: A discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect through the sense of touch.

Example: You have three containers filled with water of different temperatures: warm, lukewarm, and cold.

1. Leave your hand in the warm water for a few moments, then transfer your hand to the lukewarm one. The lukewarm water will feel cold.

2. Leave your hand in the cold water for a few moments, then transfer your hand to the lukewarm one. This time the same lukewarm container will feel warm.

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black of morning, mourning,

the morning sun, the mourning son,

the morning son, the mourning sun.

I took some artistic license.

I hesitate to say this, but I identify. I identify with the color black as well as the cultural blackness.

I was watching Leonardo DiCaprio, my childhood dream boy, play the handsome man that he is in Blood Diamond. I watched people cut off other people’s hands, fire off machine guns and flash giant machetes, pile up bloody corpses in heaps, all for some little things that would become some girl’s best friend, somewhere in some nice safe place faraway from Africa. I was watching; it was dramatic, sad, atrocious, and then I started crying. I felt sorry for myself, home on a Friday night watching a movie by myself in the living room littered with empty beer cans, wondering why he had left me.

Picasso called the years 1907 to 1909 his “periode nègre” (black period) or African period. “Picasso never copied African art,” says Marilyn Martin, curator of the Iziko South African National Gallery. “He took its point of view to express his own art. […] He creates a metamorphosis in which he creates something phenomenal and new.”

Steve Jobs was an innovative genius. He did what no one had done before. He took these crazy ideas and turned them into reality. We miss you, Steve.

Hide yo kids, hide yo wife

U don have to come n confess, we lookin fo u.

We gon find u, we gon find u,

so u kin run n tell dat, run n tell dat,

run n tell dat, run n tell that,

homeboy, home, home, homeboy.

If you exist and make money in a culture that is obviously living off a third world people, you must be racist.

Optical illusion: one and the same color can perform many different roles, according to changing neighbors and changing conditions.

Example: A green piece of paper placed on a large blue background appears light green, whereas the same green paper of the same size placed on a large yellow background appears dark green.

A memory from prep school: one time after summer vacation, the guitar-playing, weed-smoking, reggae-listening white guy came to the first day of classes with dreadlocks. Everyone thought it was awesome, except for the black kids, especially the one from Jamaica. They didn’t think it was right. What would he know about Rasta?

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When I was little, there was an old man who sometimes set up outside my school to sell baby chicks from a cardboard box. After school, all of us would gather around that box full of little chirping fur balls. We always asked the man how much each one was, even though we knew exactly how much. No one ever bought any because we were told that they were sick and will die in a few days anyway, plus no one wants a dirty animal inside the house. Who’s going to feed it and clean up the mess? Whenever the chicken man came by, we would wait for our parents by watching the things squirm around and flap their undeveloped wings in the crowded container. When our parents finally came,  we spent another few minutes begging them to let us take just one home, but failed each time. We each left dejected, looking longingly behind us at the cute things we will never be able to have.

One day, as my friends watched with gaping mouths and my heart pounding, I asked the chicken man for two restless ones. He plucked them up and placed them in a small paper box, I handed over the money, and proudly seized my new prize, without permission, without having thought about where I was going to put them.

Sources:

Books/articles:

Albers, Joseph. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Meldrum, Andrew. “Stealing Beauty.” The Guardian. 14 Mar. 2006. Web. 29 Oct. 2011. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/mar/15/art>.

Shewey, Don. “Elizabeth Le Compte’s Last Stand?” donshewey.com. Web. 29 Oct. 2011. < http://donshewey.com/theater_articles/wooster_route1&9.html>.

Other:

Craig’s List ads.

Lyrics from The Gregory Brothers’ “Bed Intruder Song” made mostly from Antoine Dodson’s interview from the news.

Spin on a comment made by a classmate in a seminar.

True events.

Personal memories/pure fabrications.

return

so much has happened as i struggled to negotiate the terms of a voyeuristic internet (blog) culture.

missed connections, school, still continuing cycle of awakening and fall, more missed connections.

and even if i believe no one will read these words, why do i project them into the void that is also public space? it may get lost in the swarm of our now inexhaustible data, but i may be hoping that someone, anyone will reach out and catch it in the midst of its fall.

i have to call myself a writer, and so i will write. that will be my excuse for what is otherwise another act of self-indulgence.

speaking of self-indulgence, i just finished a book called "bluets" by maggie nelson. that is self-indulgence done right.
now a quote by marguerite duras:
'alcohol doesn't console. all it replaces is the lack of god.'

is this supposed to justify my own problem?
quite the contrary.

.

fear conquest

solitary uprising. C. Leaf. 2011.

i saw a movie for the first time today in about 2-3 years.  i have a weird fear of theaters; mostly classified as claustrophobic/people-phobic.  the last time i went to a theater, i made it a big deal to go to see an actor i really liked, but ended up having an anxiety attack half way along the movie and had to leave.  this time i stayed for the entire movie plus the Q&A wit the director.  miracle?

the movie was 'i saw the devil' or '악마를 보았다.' the thing is, the english translation doesn't capture the nuance of the actual korean but i don't think there is a better translation for it.  anyway...

gory movie.. very gory.. but for some reason, the cannibalism scene looked.. not repulsive.  in fact, made me hungry.

don't get me wrong, i never thought of eating human flesh, but the way that the killing/hurting is done throughout the entire movie, i feel like you almost feel refreshed once someone starts eating the flesh that keep being butchered the entire time.

met the director.  the director cracked a joke during Q&A, i answered it.

Choi Min Shik.  amazing actor.  alcoholic.  so what?

blood.  what about it...

see the movie.  premiers on march 4th.  BAM.

art and academia

                                           C.Leaf, The Way Out, 2007. Steel.

Though not all, many academic institutions are bullshit.  You pretend that you have something to teach me and give me an assessment based on my "performance," which is pretty much how much you like my interpretation of your supposed teachings?

Especially Art Criticism and Fine Art.

Criticism:   Institutions claim their superior ability to think, interpret, analyze pieces of art, and that it is even teachable.  What is art?  How do you talk about art?  How can you claim that there are even answers to those questions?
And wth do the GRE's have anything to do with that??

Fine Art:   Likewise, institutions claim that there is something to teach in the way one must perceive, feel, and execute things/feelings/ideas that do not exist in the realm of verbal language and logic/rationality.  So you studied some art history.  You think what you consider the definition of art stems from a legitimate background of studying the patterns in history, but does that necessarily equal what art means now?

NOW.  THIS generation, the internet generation, defines the now.  You can observe, but don't intrude unless you are willing to be a respectful participant.  Don't impose your pretentious academia on something that cannot be taught.

rant

you know why third world countries are third world countries?  because they don't get sex ed.  they just fuck like animals and the men refuse to assume responsibility because they're not the ones dealing with hormones and another living being inside of them.

on another note.. i don't even own an unlimited metrocard anymore.  that's how bum status i am.  i need to get out of the house.  i'm getting sick.

is monogamy a practical or natural thing?  is it possible to feel such an emotion that will make you stick by just one person for the rest of your life?  or are human beings just overestimating themselves as usual?

early morning

what is it to "know"?
to know is to overestimate your own capacity for understanding something, and to underestimate the magnitude of the entirety of that something.
is there even an entirety? a chair, a cup, a house, a person..
knowledge is tainted by history and memories.  knowledge is not autonomous. we are not autonomous.

culture shock

back after 10 days consisting of:

2 snow storms
2 nights of clubbing
good food for the most part
difficult social situations
x-ray, mri

i am 5 pounds fatter and happy to be back. there seems to be a reason why certain countries are considered third world countries.

is NY really a place for exiles?  i like my fellow exiles. i can never leave this place.

that country on the other side of the world is a place for visiting dreams and fantasies.  and then i realize that those are only dreams and fantasies.  i have to wake up.  reality is too different.  i can't be high on dreams my entire life.

money, power, church, social codes. disgusting and excessively unnecessary use of excuses for the waste of human resources.
what happened to the grand tradition?  what happened to all the great people?  why is everyone's heads so shit-filled in that country?

i like my NY. i am an exile who is at home.