2012, Dawon

이 작업은 한국어로 말하기가 너무 벅차다.

The title of the work is Dawon Is My Little Sister. I do not believe the title itself means much, but the time when I still could not give him a name made it unbearably difficult for me for a very long time. He was given a name that could stand as a subject. His father, unseen in the photograph, lived his entire life as a poor stranger, drifting around the world on a fishing boat. The time he stayed with me was far too brief. His final days, drawn with compassion, were strange and revolting, because he was like a fragment of a blackened wall no one could speak to, and he was not alive. You exist only through your traces upon mine. Writing about you is nothing more than describing the absence that surrounds what no longer exists. You are an empty figure that no writing can fill.

He came to me for the last time in 2012, the year I turned twenty. I stood outside the cold iron door and wept with regret, yet I did not open it. I looked through the intercom without emotion or words. He was no longer frightening. He was thin and old, wearing rubber shoes whose soles had worn away. That unfamiliar sight stirred a fleeting guilt within me, but I turned my back on it completely. Through the intercom, he said, “If you press the doorbell once more, I will stab myself in the chest and die.” Those were the first and last words he ever said to me since I was born. A few days later, he took his own life in my father’s hometown. After his death, other uneasy feelings began to overtake me, and I felt myself falling ill. This work began from the trembling wish to face those feelings that cannot be put into words. He is my father, and yet not my father. That day, he left a note saying he loved me and was sorry, along with a shabby box of tangerines.