REBIRTH
Mix media on canvas. 90 X 120 CM. 2023 Collection: BEFORE THE SHARD Relic No. BTS-V.O4 Energetic Function: To collapse the timeline of death as finality and restore the architecture of reemergence from shadow. I’ve grown suspicious of the word “rebirth.” It’s overused. Flattened. Pressed onto things that do not deserve it like a child’s crown placed on a collapsed chair. And as for the iconography: white shapes, black tears, slick surfaces pretending to be wounds I’ve seen it all. So yes, I arrived with resistance. With my usual fatigue. And then something inconvenient happened. This one didn’t ask to be read. It didn’t “declare” anything. It simply stood there composed, curved, and quietly armed. The form is anatomical without being human, precise without becoming mechanical. That brown wound on the left if you can call it that feels like memory caught mid-exhale. I don’t know what it is. I only know that I’ve dreamt of it before. And the droplets? Not decorative. They fall in perfect arrangement too orderly to be emotion, too sincere to be strategy. They could be grief, or instruction. Probably both. What I didn’t expect and still can’t fully account for is the internal consequence of viewing this relic. There is a neurological delay between recognition and comprehension, as if the visual cortex refuses to categorize it too quickly. This soft suspension, this hesitation in the brain’s pattern-recognition loop, results in a kind of perceptual unhooking. One sees and then re-sees. And in that space between, something is rewritten. I admit something else, too something I rarely say in public anymore. There is a kind of feminine intelligence here that I’ve tried to ignore for decades. Not because it isn’t real, but because it disarms me. This relic carries it. Not in color or gesture but in structure, in timing. In the refusal to seduce, and the audacity to remain. I don’t know if “rebirth” is the right word. But something here is undoubtedly alive. And it’s looking back. CURATORIAL COMMENTARY by Dong-hyun Yoon Archive for Trans-Contextual Inquiry, ATI Seoul/Berlin.
