Jinwoo Hwon Lee - We Meet in the Past Tense 우리는 과거형으로 만난다
이훤 Jinwoo Hwon Lee is a visual artist and poet currently based in Chicago. Lee’s artistic practice uses literary and visual languages to narrate experiences and emotions between separation, displacement and isolation. His on-going series We Meet in the Past Tense 우리는 과거형으로 만난다 portrays the disillusionment of time we experience in liminality, especially as immigrants. Lee writes:
Fourteen years have passed since left home. I am still thirteen hours behind. I walk and make photographs every night between 7:00 and 9:00 PM. This is to join people back home. That’s when the day starts in Korea. Through the images, I enter a meshed space where it is no longer the morning of the next day in Korea or the night of the previous day in the States. Everything exists in form of images. There, I experience the oscillation of time. Time zones blur. The continuation of this experience vanishes all senses of permanent home.
I am in both places while I belong nowhere. By my walking at night, we, meet in the past tense.
What begot this series We Meet in the Past Tense 우리는 과거형으로 만난다 and the preceding monochrome series Tell Them I Said Hello나의 안부를 전해주세요 is the poetry book: Let us not be too desperate 우리 너무 절박해지지 말아요. In efforts to cope with the vanishing sense of home and growing sense of isolation, I wrote poems. It was an instinctive decision. I wrote to survive. To survive the debilitating and, quite often, suffocating emotions. I chose poetry for I do not have to elaborate in it. Desperately needed was a space where I no longer faced the reality. I didn’t have to make sense. The literary language was an outlet amid the epistemologically turbulent time. Later, 62 of the 250 poems written in this period were published as a book. The poems then turned into visual languages, once in the monochrome series Tell Them I Said Hello나의 안부를 전해주세요, then to this ongoing body of work. While reminded of the visual discrepancies, I still saw an overlap of what I was photographing and the landscapes from home. The black and white images throughout the series are either photographs of South Korea or moments at my in-law’s house – the place I spoke only Korean in the States. While shooting, I sometimes felt I was now in neither space. The physicality and visuality of the present faded.
Even after the emotion translated into three different bodies of work, I still suffer from said emotions. It is, however, experienced to a lesser extent now. Out of the desire to revisit the space, I recently reimagined the experience through the very representation of that time: the poetry book. Four versions of the books were made. In one version of the book, all Korean words are cut out; in the other one, all English words are removed. These two books morph into spaces where I only exist in one of the two languages. The third version does not open as all edges are glued together. This signifies the same space that does not open and is no longer accessible. Finally, the last book is a box made with the same cover that stores all words removed from the first two books.
words by Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 , edited by Alexa Fahlman