If I bury you 3,806 feet under

If our bodies are watered by rain

If our bodies are blown by wind

If our graves are watered by tear

Would flowers bloom 3,806 feet under?

*3,806 ft is the length of the bridge

between Sorokdo (Island) and Goheung (Land).

“The clinic—constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse—owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.”

The birth of the clinic, Michel Foucault”

Sorokdo holds such a distressing history and many people still are not aware of this place and its people. To reflect on the history and story of the islanders, having an interest and empathy must be the first step and I would like to initiate the step by archiving their story with creative methods.

They are memory images, but they're also images of the future. There's a kind of utopian feeling to the images, very often a dream image. The bodies that can be together in a different type of world.

So they resist reality.

They have, in a sense, created a utopian otherness out of what is actually a quite abject situation. It's like a utopian blink, to use Adorno's term.

There is a sentence in Sorokdo describing death as follows;

Patients die three times -

First, socially,

Secondly, physically

and Thirdly, by being dissected in the examination room.

라. 부부동거 (Married Couples) 음성으로 치유되 었으나 사회복귀하여 자력으로 생활하기 어 려운 노령자，무의무탁자， 신체장애 원생들이 상호 결합하여 상부상조 함으로써 안정된 생판을 영위하도록 부부동 거를 허용하고 있다. 그러나, 가임 환자가 동거를 원할때에는 불임시술 후 동거토록 하고 있다.

Older patients who are bacteria-negative, and unable to take care of themselves are permitted to marry. Marriage provides companionship and the opportunity to help another.

Younger couples of child bearing age are encourage not to have children.

-1984 Sorok National Hospital annual report, p75-

Original version in Korean, the last sentence is younger couples can only allowed to get married after vasectomy surgery, but’s changed to ‘encourage not to have children’ in the English translation.

To my first lover

I want to be your lover next life.

And we will collect green tea leaves.

Chapter 1: Daughters of Their Daughters

Invitation to a Korean adoptee from Sweden

Chapter 2: Finding Liver

Invitation to an organ regeneration researcher

Chapter 3: There would be no tears if there were no sea between us

Invitation to her first secret crush

Chapter 4: Bath

Invitation to a woman who is in art school in her 40s

What space does this project create?

• Scent of ‘Utopian Blink’ (Theodor Adorno)- The painting doesn’t deliver Utopia pragmatically but it keeps alive the scent of it.
• Space, body and time become reorganised by recollection through a moment of the body becoming fragmented and fractured.
• Shift attention from observation to imagination to conceptualising to reconfiguring.
• Element of the relation between ethics and aesthetics.
• Element of the link between theorisation and fiction - comparison to pure observation or pure theory.
• Questions the limits of theory, questions the limit of observation.