Ifie Sin, A cold bird on the dead mountain #02, 2020, 4K single-channel video, 8min 40sec. © Ifie Sin

From the ‘A Cold Bird on the Dead Mountain’ trilogy, which features the remains of culled pigs, to Hwiang Bird(2020), which contains images from an excavation site of massacre victims, and more recent works related to the Jeju 4·3 Incident, Sin’s practice appears at first to stand firmly upon specific events and sites. Yet the works themselves explain nothing in concrete terms.

The surface of the image may reflect something resembling solid ground, only to be overtaken moments later by surging waves that fill the screen before flowing elsewhere. Sometimes, “diagonally.” Images tinted through color filters gradually shift in hue almost imperceptibly, teasing the eye, while something may begin to float upon them. Images and texts, drifting dust and flapping animals, alive and dead, at times appear at strangely identical scales.

When fragments of bone or taxidermied animals appear within these chains of images, the surface becomes intensely material. The shallow depth of field closely scans the surface as though one were holding an object in the hand, bringing it close to the eyes, and examining it from side to side.

When we focus only on the bones in this way, it becomes impossible to tell whether they are human or animal bones, scientific specimens, or evidence of massacre. Time can be sensed in surfaces aged like wood and in porous cross-sections riddled with holes, yet it cannot be translated into a specific number. This archaeology of images—brushing dirt from bones that suddenly rise from the ground—recurs throughout Sin’s work.

Archaeology, like history, deals with the past, yet it performs an entirely different task from writing history. History gives context to past events and arranges them into understandable, sequential order, whereas archaeology does not approach the past linearly. Archaeology must begin with the illogical relationships among objects that have simply surfaced.

It does not create narrative; instead, it confronts matter that abruptly rises from the past into the present. Unlike historical records that serve as the material of history, what archaeology excavates does not speak. As Michel Foucault pointed out, archaeology concerns silent monuments, meaningless traces, objects without context, and things left behind by the past. Accordingly, the archaeology of images found in Sin’s practice becomes a matter of confronting objects that rise unexpectedly and bewilderingly before us.

Logical continuity and linear composition are difficult to find in her videos. Texts emerge over slowly shifting images, but they do not explain them and at times create collisions instead. Images and words whose reason for being placed together is entirely unclear are attached before and after, above and below one another. They are less like sentences whose meanings must be deciphered than something closer to poetry.

Returning once again to A Cold Bird on the Dead Mountain #02, we encounter a sticky-looking black-and-white photograph appearing midway through the work. A human face with pale eyebrows and deep eyes appears unexpectedly amid alternating images of chemically cleaned bones, bones buried in soil writhing with microorganisms, and living and dead birds.

Together with the text, “The lukewarm, slippery, filthy convulsion quietly soaked the tangled hair with warmth.” There is information that can be read from the form of the photograph itself, yet because the camera moves from top to bottom while remaining in close-up, the photograph stimulates the sense of touch more than vision. Dust clinging across its surface seems to carry the tackiness of aged gelatin photographic paper.

Immediately following the photographic image comes a fragment of bone, then the beak of a living parrot. The chain of images does not create narrative, but rather produces surfaces that leap upward—at the boundary between image and object. This also provides a way to consider why Sin exhibits the actual bones appearing in her videos alongside the screens when presenting the work.


Ifie Sin, A cold bird on the dead mountain #03, 2020, 4K single-channel video, 8min 40sec. © Ifie Sin

Hwiang Bird brings the question of archaeology particularly to the foreground by recording an excavation site of human remains. The scenes in which materials unearthed from the ground are carefully examined one by one, classified, and sifted can be read almost as an allegory of how Sin’s images themselves operate. Here too, the chain of images becomes compelling as different impressions collide through materiality.

Images of completely dried bones intersect with images of rain falling over the excavation site. Large plastic sheets cover various parts of the ground as the sound of rain continues to patter, while some areas are barely covered with sheets of newspaper. The scene continues long enough for viewers to read the printed text, most of which appears to be advertisements.

The newspaper itself holds no particular meaning, yet at the very least it allows the here-and-now time attached to the site to be sensed. The remains in the soil cease to belong solely to the past the moment they rise above the ground; they become part of the present. In a similar context, during a scene in which bullets found at the excavation site are being sorted, the soundtrack changes tone and begins to play a popular song that had been playing at the work site.

Beings that have been buried could never have remained neatly placed within layered, linear, and logical orders of time. They lie within the ground, reached by digging backward through accumulated time. Yet they do not remain quietly buried within their own time. They are bound to rise suddenly. Much like things that have been latent and repressed.

In this way, Sin’s work becomes a field where things previously subordinated to different orders collide. They pull tightly against one another or suddenly loosen their grip, moving in strange ways. Hard images and soft words; flowing images and solid words exchange positions as they weave something together.

In addition, Sin continually invents strange words of her own. She transforms the word “fiancé” into “Hwiang bird,” or translates the practice of preserving something exactly in its dead state, “dead mount,” into the Korean phrase “dead mountain.” In fact, this actively makes use of the conditions of translation, inviting us to reconsider the meaning of the word itself: “translation” and the Sino-Korean term “飜譯.” The prefix “trans-” means to move across or leap to another place.

Interestingly, a similar image remains embedded in the Chinese character 飜, used in the word for translation. The character combines 番 with 飛, meaning “to fly,” and was originally created to signify a bird turning its body over. It evokes a turn that enables flight toward an entirely different place. In Sin’s context, this resonates with the recurring images of flapping birds, as well as the taxidermied bird lying still with its body overturned like a dead mount.

In this way, the work leaps across different times and different beings. From specific events to general experiences, from pig bones to human bones, images and texts spring upward. They cross between past and present, between different places, and even between life and death. Through this emerge text and texture. And through them, we are made to look again at the ground on which we now stand.

Just the other day, I clearly saw the people of Ukraine being buried in the ground. Archaeological images and poetic language turn themselves over, fly here, and collide with the present. And “the event did not pass; it remained forever in an everyday life to which one could never return.” (A Cold Bird on the Dead Mountain #02)

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