From a Place Deeper than the Tongue and Throat

Siyoung Joo (Director, Art Centre Art Moment)
 
I remember the day I checked on Wonjin Kim’s condition through a brief message while she was in the intensive care unit, and felt a wave of relief after confirming she was safe. I heard about the “illness that felt like an accident” only after she had fortunately passed a critical turning point. The “turning point” she described must have been an unimaginable struggle between life and death.
 
A life in which a sudden accident leads to illness; a life in which a disease that began inside the body is discovered; a life lived with illness remaining in the body—illness inevitably exists within the journey toward death. Though it begins inside the body, once a diagnostic name is externally assigned to me, life puts on different clothes. Illness leaves traces on the body in one form or another, and seeps into the remainder of one’s life. This unpredictable transition arrived suddenly one day. In the exhibition 《still speaking through motion》, Wonjin Kim composed three works: 00. Outward Swing/Inward Sway, +01. Drifting Close, Tilting Softly, Holding On, -01. Still in the Drift.
 
The connection of these three works—from 0 to +1 to -1 and returning to 0—draws a narrative gathered from events she recently experienced: the discovery of illness, the process of treatment, and the aftereffects. She sought to connect past and present through the act of tracing sensation. The sense of time she experienced then was likely conveyed in the form of waves, or as a perception of temporal vibration. I attempt to gather the scattered fragments of her language and memory and reconstruct them as a sequence of events.
 
How incomplete language is. With the language we use, nothing can be explained perfectly. When we attempt to speak of “beauty” and “pain,” there is a clear limitation: the more we try to explain them, the further we move from their essence, beyond the labels attached to objects and experiences. In Han Kang’s novel Greek Lessons appears a woman who has lost her speech. In describing her, the phrase “She murmurs from a place deeper than the tongue and throat” is often used. Words boiling deeper than the tongue and throat cannot easily flow out as sound, yet they seek a language that does not obscure truth, that contains truth in its own nature.
 
There are many situations and emotions in the world that cannot be expressed through agreed-upon language. Could something beyond language erupt to awaken such things? Because language cuts out only the expressible part of the whole and contains it within a signifier, truth may in fact be distorted in the process. Language can contain everything and yet contain nothing. If language—used to recombine fragments of reality and experience—cannot reach any reality, how can it function as a tool to understand human life?
 
Wonjin Kim gathers the pain that caused her to “lose her words,” and the scattered fragments of language from the period in which she had “lost her speech.” In her 2024 solo exhibition 《A Vestigial Trace Study》(Artspace Boan3, Seoul, 2024), she examined the interaction between language, body, and thought through articulatory muscle mechanisms and modes of utterance.

Having explored the complexity of linguistic thought—its fluidity, differences, and errors in speech—within neurological and bodily mechanisms, she dives once more into the deep essence of language in this exhibition. She must “speak” again about the condition in which she lost language. The words she wished to retrieve and organize within her system of thought are not yet complete—indeed, they can never be complete. Thus she gathers scattered fragments of language, waiting for the possibility that something might erupt between silences.
 
How incomplete memory is. In Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious,” Funes remembers everything. Because he remembers every unit of time, he in fact remembers nothing. We witness the same condition in those afflicted with diseases of memory loss. Even in daily life, do we not often experience illusions when memory and experience become mixed? '

Confusion of memory leads to confusion of time. Human incompleteness, unable to remember fully, is fragile and precarious, composed of memories mixed and recombined without context. Yet perhaps precisely because we cannot remember everything, because we find balance between memory and delusion, we can enjoy the present time. In the arbitrariness of memory’s hierarchy and order, we gain the temporal margin to approach human pain once again.
 
In Greek Lessons, the man losing his sight recites Borges’s words: “Time is the fire that consumes being.” Time holds the powerful force to transform and extinguish existence. This reflection on finitude and death leaves us with questions about the irreversibility of time, in which past, present, and future intertwine.

A small change that occurred inside the body came to dominate the entire consciousness and sensation of the body. In the process of consciousness losing control of the body, fragments burst forth, dividing everything into binary oppositions: memory/non-memory, consciousness/unconsciousness, sensation/numbness, reason/emotion, acceptance/refusal, life/death.
 
Wonjin Kim begins her story with 00. Outward Swing/Inward Sway at the entrance of the exhibition. The discovery of illness began as a kind of “pounding” she could not accept. The impact from the outside moved from exterior to interior, and again from interior to exterior, oscillating between polar points. In her 2023 solo exhibition 《Dancing in the Thin Air》(Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), she presented a pirouette work revolving around a fixed point. In rotational movement around an axis, forces sustaining energy and forces resisting direction occur simultaneously. Previously she spoke of human existence through the linear movement of persistence and resistance; now she approaches it through pendular motion.
 
A pendulum repeats movement along a fixed path in periodic time. It also contains a restoring force returning it to equilibrium. Through this pendular motion, she speaks of accepting what happened to her body. When the spring turns and the metronome’s pendulum begins to move, she stands before the simplicity of death that strips away life’s complexity. If the spring stops, the motion stops.

She continues the movement hoping it will not cease, but repetition cannot be eternal. Physical death, death of consciousness, the end of pain, the end of illness—all arrive. The tempo maintains a rhythm slightly slower than a heartbeat; when it seems about to extinguish, the automatic spring mechanism rewinds and life continues. The spring is another swing. Though the event began abruptly, the aftereffect of one swing persisted so slowly that time itself became unrecognizable.
 
The process of accepting illness and undergoing treatment became preparation for living with a wounded body. Lying on a narrow hospital bed, she heard that her case was considered a miraculous survival, yet she could not guarantee the present alive moment; she heard about the time she herself could not remember.
 
At the center of the exhibition stands +01. Drifting Close, Tilting Softly, Holding On, a work about what her body experienced and the traces that remain. Tactile sensations intersect between what can be touched and what can be seen. Sometimes the visual gives rise to tactile feeling—like “the sunlight caressing.” Sensations left by landscapes, sounds, and smells remain tactilely. That sensation touches us. Touch is not unilateral; it touches and is touched simultaneously. It implies relation. It connects existence to others and to the world, grants the feeling of being alive, reveals our existence through sensing another being.
 
The hands that approached her were hands that opened the world by touching and being touched. The hands that reached, slipped, and tilted were formed into membrane surfaces. That hand can project everything. For her, it became the hand that summoned the world, called the past into the present, and affirmed the future.
 
Membranes connecting self and world fill human life. The skin forming the membrane she called “the thin place.” Fragile yet connected, within thin membranes lie fragments of memory and time. She stitches this thin membrane with thread. Thin skin bears traces yet allows glimpses beyond. Shadows of self and other cross as reality and illusion.
 
I wish to call this thin place a shelter. In the shelter she constructed from gathered fragments, countless gestures are inscribed. Gestures become lost language, lost memory, transformed into dance. Like a stage where many surround her lying figure, the group choreography moves very slowly. Her treatment was such.
 
In the innermost, intimate space stands -01. Still in the Drift. She placed her most painful time here. Under bluish white light, lying on a bed shoulder-width wide, she restores the traces engraved upon her—the extent of memory her gaze could follow, the trajectory of the eye. Countless connected lines, machine sounds, signals, cries, breaths—intangible trajectories where sight, sound, and touch intermingle. Lights that could not extinguish remain. Beneath overwhelming weight, in the darkness of silence, they summon slowly emerging fragments of language and memory. The light remains where her gaze once rested. Faint yet clarifying pain, flickering yet summoning lost memory and time, these lights engrave the traces of pain more deeply.
 
Standing once more before 00. Outward Swing/Inward Sway, Wonjin Kim will live not as “one who approached death,” but as “one who witnessed death closely.” The identity of witness allows her to accept her wounded body and to interpret her illness narrative within reflective and social contexts. Returning to the shelter, crouched within the membrane, she murmurs repeatedly the unsaid “words.” Can we approach her work further through Borges’s statement that “all language is a path to meaning”? The “language” she has pursued is a system beyond everything, a structure and a path toward the meaning of herself, her work, and her life.
 
She still stands before language as a system that weaves and transforms all layers of consciousness and sensation, time and space, memory and record—yet she remains silent. The sound of speech is absent, but silence and the power to understand silence wait to become a greater story. The journey that began last winter has continued slowly through gestures that did not cease despite the absence of language. She is still within that journey. Yet she has secured the possibility of quietly entering her work and arranging the events that befell her.

The small rabbits hidden in the exhibition reflect us as mutual witnesses. She will find the point at which the traces in her body and the time in her memory slowly become utterance. The words boiling deeper than her tongue and throat will emerge as language that does not obscure truth, containing truth itself.
 

Footnotes
1. Han Kang, “Greek Lessons”, Munhakdongne, 2011.
2. Wonjin Kim, solo exhibition, 《A Vestigial Trace Study》, Boan1942 Artspace Boan 3, Seoul, 2024.
3. Jorge Luis Borges, “Ficciones”, Minumsa, 2011.
4. Han Kang, “Greek Lessons”, Munhakdongne, 2011, p.122.
5. Wonjin Kim, solo exhibition, 《Dancing in the Thin Air》, 2023 Kumho Young Artist Selected Exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023.
6. Pirouette is a ballet term meaning “a movement of turning in place on one leg as an axis.”
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception”, Munhakgwa Jisungsa, 2002.
8. Jorge Luis Borges, Willis Barnstone, “Borges at Eighty: Conversations”, Maumsanchaek, 2015.

References

• 《언어 없는 춤 (Still speaking through motion)》