Moonlight, 2021, Installation view at Human Resources LA.
secondhand-lights, detergent, UV light bulbs
As a Korean who immigrated to the United States, I kept on visiting the idea of “borrowing” - standing on a borrowed land that I am not from, borrowing the culture to explain myself, and borrowing a language that is not mine. Thinking of how to transform this idea with materials, more precisely, the physics of the materials, I began to think of a light that cannot glow by itself but glows by borrowing from another light source. The second-hand lamps are not connected to electric power and only glow by reacting with the UV blacklight that is shedding them. The lamps are covered with the UV black light reactive substances that you can find in domestic space such as paraffin wax, detergent, turmeric, fish oil, and a little bit of olive oil. I related domestic space to language in that both act as an architectural form of our mental and physical bodies.
Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages/ 2022 / Acrylic plexiglass, wax , detergent, fish oil, blacklight(UV light) / 170cm x 60cm
A sentence from Abdelkebir Khatibi's book "The Love of Two Languages" translated by Google Translate. The sentences written with substances that are reflected by black light are visualized by the amount of a daylight.
Khatibi, Abdelkebir (1990). Love in Two Languages. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press
그는 태양을 생각했고
그렇게 함으로써도 그 이름,
즉 달의 이름이 이중 언어로
여성에서 남성으로 반전
단어를 별자리와 함꼐 회전시켜
이상한 매력을 만드는 반전
우주.
He thought of the sun
and even in doing so its name,
that of the moon,
inverted itself-from feminine to masculine
-in his double language.
Inversion which makes words wheel
with the constellations,
making for a strange attraction
of the universe.”
Moonlight, 2022, Sound, 9min 35sec
Interviews from the immigrants whose native language was/is not English.
Interviewees : Jenny Eom 엄소현, Dajin Yoon 윤다진, Y. Stevie Choi 예은 스티비 최, Nancy Lee 낸시 리, Caroline Yoo 캐롤라인 류, Christine Yeri Lee 크리스틴 예리 리, Fara Nasiri 파라 나시리, Dulce Soledad Ibarra 둘쎄 솔리데드 이바라, Coffee Kang 커피 강 (康欣怡), Ruoyi Shi 류오이 시.
