I hesitated for quite a long time before writing about Sujin Moon’s solo exhibition. I was enraptured by the delicate installation and the placement of sculptures and objects that follow a path of emotion at the exhibition space, but I am still hesitant writing about it. The found objects, the furniture that supports the book, and other objects evoke a certain emotion while simultaneously seeming to be waiting for something. The objects are for the viewers to touch, urging us to come in contact with something.
Let us take a look at Moon’s former works. As she spent her residency in a village in the United States, Sujin Moon embarked on her Living Island (2020) project. She piled up snow daily to create an island which gradually disappeared as winter changed into spring. The island, that is, the pile of snow, was nature’s time and matter piled up with an effort that would eventually melt away. Such transformations of material by chance and time were conditions that Moon had to accept, as an artist who works with matters.
As she built the island, the artist exposed herself to dangerous conditions by being on top of a lake under freezing temperatures. Being in a paradoxical situation where she was in fear of dying, worried about the ground upon the frozen lake but still being able to see the beauty of the scenery around her made her realize that even with the possibility of death, there are moments of joy and happiness. Moon said this work felt like a “metaphor of life.” ➀
A metaphor of life; this is the key that will open doors to Moon’s works. Her sculptures and performances can be understood as a faithful step into the textures of the world and life that surrounds “me.” Life and the body experienced “lived time”➁ are central to Moon’s works. Whether she sculpts, performs, or writes, the message she aims to deliver through the media remains the same: the time the body experienced, the uniqueness of a body created by time, and the sculpture reshaped as the body in the present time.
In this exhibition, 《Tactile Recall》, Sujin Moon reminisces on her childhood with her grandmother and talks about her grandmother, Jungja Lee, whom she remembers by touch. She recalls the existence of a person through the texture of her skin. To Moon, her grandmother is a person she does not know well and a person who remains only through the everyday languages and the daily altercations. Sujin Moon thus decides to start from an unknown narrative, such as her grandmother’s life story, and rely on how she realized her presence and touch.
In Her Silence: Spoken Words (2022), Moon created a drooping book meant to thumb through to show the fragments of her grandmother’s story by recording her grandmother’s words and collecting stories about her grandmother from other people. The artist also added wooden furniture to allow the viewers to take their time reading the book. The book fragments of grandmother Jungja Lee’s story were made as the artist transcribed what her grandmother could have said. By relying on her inaccurate memories, the artist creates a fragmented narrative of her grandmother based on testimonies and records of her grandmother with sentences that use “seems” and “probably.”
While it is impossible to learn anything about grandmother Jungja Lee through this work, the artist feels the way to look for her based on her life and her memories of brief encounters. Her dislike of browned apples fed by her grandmother, a story that the grandmother hinted her days of youth when her granddaughter had her first period, and her loneliness as someone’s daughter. The pages that describe the artist’s childhood of interacting with her grandmother and the words that slipped out forms an individual as an imagery. While it contains a universal language reminiscent of someone’s family, it also captures an image of a specific person, thereby portraying “Grandma Jungja Lee” with her unique shape of life.
In Sujin Moon’s work, language functions as a button that entices you to enter deep into her work and encounter it. It is not a narrative with an introduction and conclusion but an essay based on the touch the artist remembers, but it allows the viewers shape their own image and head to the moment of touch prepared by the artist. As a viewer sitting on a wooden chair, I flipped the pages and thought of my mother and grandmother and was filled with thoughts and sorrow, them.
I then experienced the moment of thought that led to the realization that I, being here, can become the agent of memory, which then led me to experience a moment when my subject of affection overlapped with that of the artist. So this empty bench becomes a seat waiting to be touched, for the moment of encounter when an experience of someone is connected to an experience of another.
Remembering an intimate presence is partial and tactile. Her Silence: Spoken Words (2022) was created by imprinting grandmother’s words on paper. As the thin paper was soaked and dried, the material became more cloth-like and fuzzy than crisp, becoming closer to the texture of skin. Because phrases such as “Eat,” “Wakeup,” and “What’s the matter, huh?” were not written but were printed and engraved on paper, touching and flipping through the piles somehow reminds us of an old person’s body accrued with time and physical memories.
Perhaps it was the artist’s movement toward something that made it difficult for me to approach the works in this exhibition as sculptures and narratives and to question what Moon’s works intended as I write this essay. Jean-Luc Nancy left the following quote on writing. “Writing’ means: not the monstration, the demonstration, of a signification but a gesture toward touching upon sense. A touching, a tact, like an address: a writer doesn’t touch by grasping, by taking in hand but touches by way of addressing himself, sending himself to the touch of something outside, hidden, displaced, spaced. His very touch, which is certainly his touch, is in principle withdrawn, spaced, displaced.”➂
Writing is a metaphor for Moon's work, but it becomes clearer that her artwork is also a way of writing. Despite using language, Sujin Moon attempts to convey the way of using the language from one body to another. In that sense, her writing uses tactile language that can be passed on to other bodies. By distancing Grandma Jungja Lee and sensing her unique life and existence using sparse clues, the artist once again hands over the sensory experience to her viewers.
The artist does not use conventional language that can be understood through context and signals, and just as the silence alludes to the presence of Grandma Jungja Lee, the absence and silence also becomes a part of the artist’s language. To use Nancy’s quote on writing, Sujin Moon’s work is practice of writing for contact. Just as she starts from using text yet aspires for something “non-linguistic”➃ by erasing it with her body in Breaking words: Through body (2018), her writing process begins from language but is filled with the body, aiming for a language created by touch.
Viewers, at this point, may also be reminded of the work Phone Book, which was made by creating an aluminum type of Grandma Jungja Lee’s handwriting in her phone book that can be used like a stamp and by engraving the type in the wall for the viewers to touch. The aluminum letters that embody Moon’s grandmother’s unique handwriting is also an unstamped “object waiting to be touched,” ➄ which captures the tactile moment that can happen at any time. This untouched letters and materials are open to the “sculptural moment,”➅ the moment of someone make contact with another physical memory in the future. Simply put, Moon writes in search of something sculptural and creates objects which encourages touching.
The titles of some of the works, which seem to be words addressed to Moon’s grandmother who no longer exists, hint at unresolved feelings and an understanding of “you” that Moon has gained over the years and overlap “my” time with my grandmother’s time.I foresee the time of your life that made you and the time of my body that will arrive in the distant future, telling “You and I are still young and already old” Their times resemble a solid mosquito repellent incense that lost its color; an event occurs and perishes(You and I Are Still Young and Already Old, 2022). The object, then, is a place of conversation (contact) between “you” and “I”and also a site of a “sculptural moment.”
The distant body of the grandmother comes back through “my” physical memory, and its silent presence is passed on to “I.” The artist writes about her grandmother, who can only be passed on from body to body. At the same time, “I” use my body to sculpt distances from this experience to pass this message on to another body. Sculpting is possible only when the artist repeatedly goes to and from her subject, which is her grandmother. Perhaps Sujin Moon’s repeated practice of shaping “Grandma Jungja Lee”was a process of approaching her “sculptural moment.”
Perhaps it was a metaphor for her practice of sculpting. Writing for the senses to reach the distant body was Sujin Moon’s attempt to create objects that have been touched or have the potential to be touched. Perhaps the act of reaching out to the subject of touching, only to meet silence, but endeavoring to realize the shape of “your”life as you existed using the language of the body and waiting for the sculptural moment, is Moon’s ceaseless attempt to reach the “sculpture that exists somewhere.” ➆
➀ Referred to the artist’s interview with Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, https://youtu.be/2ABrW-TUFIk
➁ Eunsoon Yoo, “Aging, Absence, Love”, Sujin Moon’s Solo Exhibition Catalogue, Parking Page press, 2023, p. 5.
➂ Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Translated by Richard A. Rand, Fordham University Press: New York, 2008, p. 17.
➃ Referred to the artist’s notes.
➄ From a conversation with Sujin Moon, January 15, 2023.
➅ According to the artist, sculpting is to exist in a certain moment. Calling it a “sculptural moment,” the artist comments that a sculpture is created through physical contact, the moments of touching matter, and through the body. The artist posits that this is why she is inspired by objects waiting to be touched and the “sculptural moments.” From a conversation with Sujin Moon, January 15, 2023.
➆ From a conversation with Sujin Moon, January 15, 2023.
