『SeMA Nanji Residency Criticism Workshop Collection』 (Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, 2025), pp. 229–251.
G: Who makes the text pass through, and who transports the text? Is it like a cargo ship carrying freight?
D: Yes, like a truck carrying cargo. But for me, cinema barely exists. I often say that cinema does not exist.
_ Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, 『Duras X Godard: Conversations』
This is not a piece of criticism. I have occasionally written criticism when the opportunity arose, but those texts were always about films or video works, media in which I myself continue to work creatively. I cautiously told critic Ahn Soyeon that I could not write a critique of criticism. At the same time, I also explained what I thought might still be possible.
I felt it would be worth attempting to trace and reflect on how criticism, while retaining the form of writing, might nevertheless transform itself, and on the ways a text is assembled, dismantled, and altered before or after it becomes criticism. As a result, what I was commissioned to write became a text about the writing or critical practice of Ahn Soyeon, a critic interested in “criticism as creation,” and about the medium of criticism itself.
The proposal was: “There is no predetermined scope or format.” That is why the subject “I,” which I rarely use in conventional critical writing, appears frequently here. (In fact, this was partly influenced by some of Ahn Soyeon’s own criticism. When necessary, she too does not conceal the identity of the writer but actively brings it forward.)
While considering how to structure this piece, I found myself wondering what it might have been like if I had instead been asked to make a video work. Let me write the treatment for that video. Then this is no longer criticism. It would be a documentary film about a critic who, standing before the act of “writing criticism,” turns instead toward another medium as an even more critical means than writing. What follows, then, might be a treatment describing scenes from this documentary, or the working notes of someone planning its shoot.
Ahn Soyeon has said that while working as a critic, she came to acutely feel the limitations of writing printed on paper. She believes there may be ways to “transcend/ignore” those limits, and that such an attempt could itself become critical in another sense. The ‘method’ she currently employs unfolds simultaneously both inside and outside writing. The first is, as described earlier through the phrase “criticism as creation,” to realize critical writing itself as a work. She still uses language as a tool, yet attempts another kind of writing and another structure for criticism.
The second is to perform criticism—until now confined to the form of writing—through different media. Originally trained in sculpture, Ahn sometimes makes sculpture as an act of criticism or produces video works from events that occurred while preparing to write criticism. She also seeks to preserve writing as writing while giving its outward form a new shape through exhibition or publication, thereby reconstructing the inside and outside of criticism.
I was first curious about the experiments taking place inside Ahn Soyeon’s writing itself. She has said that in writing criticism she experienced “a sense of despair toward language, and the closed nature of critical writing,” and wanted to move beyond it. Yet this raised a question for me: is critical writing truly closed? If criticism capable of transcending closedness were possible, would it not ultimately become closed again precisely because it remains criticism? If, as she says, critical writing is closed, then would it not have to cease being criticism in order not to be closed?
Could one, then, transcend the closedness of criticism by producing not criticism itself but “something critical”? To examine this, I read several of the critical essays she sent me. To state my impression from the outset: her criticism is closed. Yet this judgment follows Ahn Soyeon’s own criteria. Her criticism is bound to the fate of closedness that all writing inevitably carries, yet it ceaselessly tries to reject that fate.
That is precisely why it is so rich. One thing should be made clear: I have seen almost none of the works she discusses as objects of criticism. There are a few rare cases in which she refers to works I have seen myself, and in the case of artists whose practices I know to some degree, her descriptions sometimes enabled me to form a fairly concrete image of a particular work.
But I deliberately excluded all such memories and efforts of imagination. Criticism inevitably presupposes an object, but while reading Ahn Soyeon’s criticism I drew a curtain completely over the works being discussed and lingered instead over the writing itself. Under those conditions, the stage of criticism still felt abundant, populated solely by critical gestures and voices.
“I asked him several times about photography.” This is a sentence from the critical essay titled The Star That Burned Away Ten Thousand Years Ago. I do not know the work being discussed, but I imagine the critic repeatedly questioning the artist about it. “The enigmatic conversation between Heracles and Geryon that came to mind before the two paintings I faced with him extends into the space between the Eliot poem he quoted and the dialogue from the novel that I quoted.”
Trying not to disturb the two people exchanging enigmatic dialogue, I walk carefully through the exhibition space. The novel Ahn Soyeon cites in this essay is Anne Carson’s 『Autobiography of Red』. Based on fragments by the ancient Greek lyric poet Stesichorus (Στησίχορος), the novel reads, as Carson herself describes the source, as though someone had “written a long story, torn it to pieces, and buried those fragments in a box together with song lyrics, lecture notes, and scraps of meat.”
There is something similar in Ahn Soyeon’s criticism. Her writing generously lays out fragments of incidents she experienced while barely making her way toward the destination called criticism. These fragments are numbered, and the numbers tell us something about how they slipped out of the box. The reader may continue shaking the box.
In Ahn Soyeon’s critical essay “How Little Have I Stayed with You,” boldface words are scattered throughout. She explains that these words are fragments that remained in her memory after reading the artist’s writing, and that they function as markers distinguishing the artist’s words within her own sentences. I examine these markers. Then my attention stops at one: “head box.” “The room—he loosely filled it with objects, images, and writing, trying with concentration to see/be seen, hear, speak something, but perhaps because it had become his own head box, he kept returning to the room—walls, ceiling, floor, corners, windows, stairs, doors.” His own head box…
I suddenly think of Alberto Giacometti. That name leads to two memories. One is a conversation with Giacometti recalled by James Lord. When Lord asked whether he had ever made abstract sculpture, Giacometti replied that only once, in 1934, had he made a large Cube, and that he thought of it as a kind of head. This large Cube is known as the head of Giacometti’s father, who died in June 1933. Samuel Beckett also lost his father in June 1933.
Nathalie Léger speculates that while Giacometti searched for the form of “loss” within a mass of plaster, Beckett searched for the same thing in words. The form of emptiness. Or a gravestone for vanished things. “Thus to end alone in the dark of the skull no neck no contour a hollow simply a box the last place in the dark a hollow” (Samuel Beckett). Ahn Soyeon once spoke to me about Giacometti as well.
“Giacometti said something like this too. When asked where sculpture should go once it leaves the studio, he said: the grave, it should be buried underground.” Yet according to the critic’s explanation, the sculpture is not completely buried. Like a marker stone or tombstone, part of it remains exposed, and that becomes a clue allowing us to perceive and remember something and to extend our thinking. I write down that Ahn Soyeon too has been shaping sculpture and shaping writing in order to realize precisely such a project.
In the email commissioning this piece, Ahn Soyeon mentioned Marguerite Duras. She also referred to the “burned book” in Duras’s novel 『Summer Rain (La Pluie d’été)』, explaining that she felt a particular affinity for Duras’s writing and films because Duras approached media by recognizing a distinctive point of contact or transition between text and image. Curious about what the “burned book” was, I found and read 『Summer Rain』.
It is a very thick book bound in leather, burned in places. Although brutally damaged by fire, the text outside the burned sections still seems more or less intact. Ernesto, the protagonist who cannot read, discovers the burned book and suddenly recalls a tree he once saw. Somewhere between the solitude of the book and the solitude of the tree, Ernesto miraculously reads the book’s contents in his own way.
Through Ernesto’s mouth, Duras suggests that “reading is a story one invents oneself continually unfolding within one’s own body.” Text presupposes “an essentially empty place,” and through changes in the meaning and function conveyed by words—not merely their form—it can construct a “body of its own.” Reading Ahn Soyeon’s criticism and encountering works produced as critical practices, I repeatedly felt that she tries to disturb fixed relationships, induce a forgetting of those relationships, and through that process present the universe formed by artist, artwork, and imagined viewer in another form.
Let us now look at a recent sculpture she made. Sculpture, when one considers its process of production, is by nature always separated from an original. The form of lack, loss, and forgetting itself hardened into a hand reaching toward something and a face whose identity cannot be known. The critic writes: “Far removed from the original, yet bearing memories of lack and loss, I think sculpture, for me, is something whose proper place—if there is one—would be a square or a cemetery.”
Criticism as an attempt to search for an appropriate place and form exists, as Duras put it in conversation with Jean-Luc Godard, “barely.” Duras wanted simply to let text pass across the screen. This aims toward a singular state that is neither writing nor cinema. “Cinema barely exists (le cinéma existe à peine).” Godard asks Duras, “Did you say with difficulty (avec peine), or do you mean barely (à peine)?” Duras replies, “Barely. Not with difficulty, no, I don’t see it that way (À peine. Pas avec peine, non, je ne trouve pas).”
For Duras, cinema exists barely, only just, scarcely. If the “criticism as creation” imagined by Ahn Soyeon is possible, then that criticism too would exist barely, only just, scarcely. It would have to exist that way. For that reason, the critic’s words do not simply sit on the surface of writing but continually traverse it. Like Duras, who said she made her texts “fold into cinema” in order to organize the reading of text on screen (“Je les fais se plier au cinéma, mes textes”), Ahn Soyeon continually folds and refolds the (non-)languages of criticism.
This act once again reminds me of Geryon in 『Autobiography of Red』. Assigned to manage government documents at a local library, Geryon stares at a yellowing index card beneath the fluorescent light switch that reads “Turn off when not in use.” Now he is about to flick the switches on and off wildly, moving “between the rows like a small bead of mercury.”
To repeat the intensity of this flickering pointlessly. To suspend a familiar sense of time and space. Could criticism itself enter into suspension in order to address artworks/events/situations that perform such “delay”? The critic does not hesitate to confront this laborious question.
* The title of this essay is taken from a sentence in Anne Carson’s 『Autobiography of Red』.
