Foreverism

To the Ends of the World

created: 2024.06.02. 13:13 · modified: 2024.06.06. 15:06 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Back in Seoul after five months. My favorite season. For the next three months, I'm ready to savor every bit of Seoul, and I can hardly wait.

On Saturday, my first weekend back, I had lunch with the people I went to the Inner Mongolian desert with in spring 2019 to plant trees as part of Future Forest's Korea–China Green Volunteer Corps. The volunteer trip was a one-off, but it left a lasting impression. Everyone is so friendly, too: whenever someone suggests meeting up, the others are happy to join, and a gathering comes together easily. So even five years later, we still see each other now and then. I'm grateful to have met them.

After lunch (though we talked until past five), I went to the <Reading at Hangang Park> event in Yeouido. With its open views and the weather we've been having, the Han River is already a lovely place to read. Add beanbags, and it becomes a reader's paradise. It's open from 2 to 9 p.m. (on Saturdays only), so you can come by after lunch plans and read to your heart's content. I arrived around six, spent a good while reading The Three-Body Problem, then packed up and left when I started getting cold and hungry. Next Saturday I have free, I'll come back properly equipped with a jacket and snacks.

Today, Sunday, I'd originally planned to get up at the crack of dawn and head to Jamsil for the <Easygoing Hangang Triathlon Festival>. Held for the first time this year, the festival greatly shortens the distances of a conventional triathlon so that ordinary people can take part at Hangang Park. It has beginner and advanced courses; the advanced course consists of a 1 km swim, a 20 km bike ride, and a 10 km run.

I only found out about the festival last Wednesday, by which point advance registration had already closed. The official Instagram account didn't say anything about registering on-site, so I left a comment asking. Normally, I might have given up once advance registration closed, but one thing kept me trying: crossing the Han River. The advanced course's 1 km swim went right across the river, from Jamsil toward Ttukseom! When I saw the route on Wednesday, my heart raced the way it had when I watched someone bungee jump in New Zealand. Swimming across the Han River—something I'd barely considered before—went straight onto my bucket list. I didn't have the nerve to attempt it alone, so I had to take part in this festival.

The lack of on-site registration information probably meant there wouldn't be any, but I held on to a sliver of hope and posted my question. To my surprise, the answer was yes. The number was far smaller than the 10,000 advance-registration spots, but they would take 300 on-site registrations on each of the festival's two days, Saturday and Sunday. Since the advanced course was offered only on Sunday morning, I needed to be among the 300 people registering from 9 a.m. that day if I wanted to swim across the river.

I was prepared for that. That night, I packed my swimsuit, rash guard, swim cap, goggles, bike helmet, energy bars, and everything else, set an alarm for six, and went to bed early.

But before falling asleep, I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram when I saw a post I wished I hadn't. Saturday's limited allotment of tickets had already run out, and because of concerns about crowds, they wouldn't accept on-site registrations for the swim on Sunday. The post had gone up around midnight. Should I have been glad I saw it then, rather than getting up at dawn for nothing? Still, since the organizers had changed their plans so abruptly, I let myself hope they might retract this announcement by morning, too... and left my alarm on.

I didn't even need the alarm to wake up. My eyes opened on their own at 4:55. Cruelly, the announcement hadn't changed. I considered going anyway and arguing that they couldn't reverse what they'd been saying right up until the previous day so late at night, and that I hadn't seen the post. But that didn't feel right. In the end, I gave up and went back to sleep.

I woke up again at nine, ate breakfast with more time on my hands than I wanted, and decided what to do instead. I would go see an art exhibition.

While I was in Busan, I'd saved five exhibitions I wanted to see in my notes:

• 《Yoon Hyup: Nocturne City》 — Lotte Museum, through 05/26
• 《Foreverism: To the Ends of the World》 — Ilmin Museum of Art, through 06/23
• 《Future Positive: Norman Foster, Foster + Partners》 — Seoul Museum of Art, through 07/21
• 《From Dawn to Dusk: The Nationalmuseum Sweden Collection》 — My Art Museum, through 08/25
• 《Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes on Earth》 — National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, through 09/22

Nocturne City had already ended, and I'd already seen the Jung Youngsun exhibition. Of the three remaining, Foreverism offers docent tours only twice a week, on Fridays and Sundays. Since today was Sunday, I decided to go there.

It's no exaggeration to say I went because of the poster. I think I first saw it in a photo of the outside wall of Ilmin Museum of Art on a friend's Instagram story. Even before I read that the exhibition was about longing, I think I instinctively felt that emotion in the poster. If I had to analyze why, perhaps it's the combination of a seaside sunset—a cliché image of happy memories—and compositing that seems to suggest a doorway into the past. I was struck by how it conveyed an intensely personal feeling like longing in a way anyone could understand.

Because I'd decided on impulse to go after seeing the poster, I hadn't read the exhibition description closely. I was prepared for the possibility that the show wouldn't live up to my expectations, but thankfully I enjoyed it plenty. Joining the docent tour at the scheduled time and doing a quick first pass through the exhibition probably helped. Here are the works that stood out to me.

The iMac's design and colors, the image on its screen, the sunset scene wrapped around the desk, and even the iridescent effect—all together, they looked like a single jewel. No, prettier than most jewels.

〈Something to Remember You By〉 is an installation consisting of an ivory-colored pantry built in one corner of the gallery, a cake, a radio, and a playlist. Each element is thoroughly ordinary, yet its slightly unusual proportions create a sense of strangeness. The elongated scale of the pantry is an attempt to approach abstract concepts that interest the artist, such as an “infinite timespan.” A cake has the capacity to commemorate both past and present. The model cake, made of PVC, illuminates a hazy, fortunate future alongside soft jazz that seems almost eternally fashionable, as though time had stopped. The artist writes, “We can dream of the future, but the scale of that time will be nothing compared to the future that will (actually come upon us).” Rather than seeking to preserve and protect a fleeting moment, the artist thus finds a different possibility in the properties of objects he believes can give equal weight to past and future. The same goes for synthetic materials such as laminate flooring, PVC sculptures, PE Tupperware, and melamine-coated chipboard. For the artist, genuine feelings, responses, and connections to objects—beyond the artificial qualities of kitsch—form a “duality” that can take precedence over the longing for eternity or its illusions.

It's a shame that installation art doesn't come across fully in photos, but that's also what makes it special. This work transformed a fairly large room, floor and all. I genuinely gasped when I entered, but there was no way to capture the sense of space in a photograph. The same goes for the jazz playing on the radio. If I could, I'd take this whole room and the iMac desk above and put them in a corner of my home.

〈Mushrooms and Meditation〉 is a video installation that connects the spread of a mushroom's mycorrhizal network with the 1923 Kantō Massacre. During Japan's Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, the Japanese press spread false rumors that Koreans living in Japan were attacking towns, ostensibly to calm the chaos caused by the quake. Noting a similarity between the way this incident spiraled into catastrophe and the way fungal networks take root in the surrounding soil, the artist researched the material states of mushrooms and humans, and how collective memory is transmitted and dispersed. The properties of mushrooms suggest that forces and orders distinct from human society can bring about decisive changes in the world, beyond human notions of truth and falsehood.

Maybe it's because I've become more interested in lighting lately, but I've grown fond of glass and find myself looking closely at it. Glass keeps its shape; rather than yield to an outside force trying to reshape it, it breaks. So the sight of glass taking these unusual forms, draped across the floor and shelves made of metal rods, felt fresh in itself. The comparison between the spread of information and the spread of mushroom spores was interesting, too.

I tend to spend a very, very long time at art exhibitions. Even at shows where the average visit is estimated at about an hour, I often stay three or four. I want to read every description and take in every work fully. Lately, though, my approach has been changing: while spending about the same amount of time overall, I move quickly past works that don't do much for me and devote more time to the ones I really love. No matter how abstract or deeply meaningful a work is, if it's right for me, I should enjoy looking at it from the moment I see it. And there are already more than enough works like that to fill my time.

With an exhibition ticket, you can also enter the Newspaper Museum at the top of Ilmin Museum of Art for free. It was just right for a quick look around after the main exhibition—a little dessert.

That was it for the museum. Next, I'd heard that the outdoor Gwanghwamun Book Yard was open nearby, so I went over, only to find it wasn't running this week because of another festival. I'll be back soon.

The Sejong Center for the Performing Arts building suddenly caught my eye and looked beautiful to me, like a modern reinterpretation of a traditional tiled roof. If it were the size of an ordinary tiled-roof house, it might not have made much of an impression, but there's a grandeur to its scale.