WC

Could you tell me a little bit about your recent exhibition in Korea?

JC

I had this opportunity to show my work at Euljiro OF in Seoul in a group exhibition titled Silver is the Back of Mugwort (은색은 쑥의 뒷면) (July 9 to  Aug 7, 2022). I presented two works as part of a single body of work—one is the sound installation, Moonlight (2021-2022), the other is an installation with text called Kattibi’s love of dual language (2022).

WC

I found the title of the exhibition really thought-provoking. I didn’t realize mugwort, this “ordinary” plant, has silver on the backside. I like how this herbal reference acts like a short poem, and gathers each artist’s work in an interesting way. It also reminds me of a Korean medicine clinic where they use Mugwort tteum (or moxibustion, a type of therapy that involves the burning of mugwort leaves). Would you walk me through the artworks in the exhibition? I’m also eager to learn about the context and the gallery Euljiro OF.

JC

The works in the exhibition share the theme of inherent codependency. The dependency can be found in the relationship between parents and their children, between immigrants and the environment, and between artwork and the art space. How to deal with codependencies as social individuals was what we were interested in.
 
The title of the exhibition comes out of this context. Mugwort is a very common plant in Korea (unlike in the US, where it is viewed more as a medicine) that is not considered precious. But the backside of the leaf has a shiny silver texture that is quite beautiful. The coexistence and codependency of the invaluable and valuable, dismissive and attractive, was something that the exhibition focused on.
 
Euljiro is a unique neighborhood in Seoul with numerous stores from different industries. It is an area of old Seoul with an ecosystem of over 10,000 hardware stores. Nowadays the area has become more of a cultural spot since young art spaces are scattered throughout the area, creating a mingling of old and new. Euljiro OF is an artist-run-space located in the center of this neighborhood. They support emerging artists with experimental practices that are not commercially-driven.

WC

As you developed Moonlight I felt like each iteration was talking to the others. It doesn’t feel like your art-making process here is “evolving” in one direction, but rather each step is itself a meaningful piece of work. I can imagine that the versions at Human Resources in Los Angeles and at Euljiro OF in Seoul could be seen together as one big project, or one exhibition. In The Light That is Not Yours (2021), an earlier version of Moonlight at Human Resources, materiality is very present. The materials whispered to me in a poetic and nonverbal way. Whereas Moonlight (2022) at Euljiro OF now has a voice that directly speaks to me in clear language. Both pieces are telling me something, but with different textures and volumes. How do you see the relationship between the two installations?

JC

As a Korean who immigrated to the United States, I kept on visiting the idea of “borrowing”—standing on borrowed land that I am not from, borrowing culture to explain myself, and borrowing a language that is not mine. Thinking of how to transform this idea with materials, more precisely, the physics of the materials, I began to think of a light that cannot glow by itself but glows by borrowing from another light source. The second-hand lamps in the installation are not connected to electric power and only glow by reacting with the UV blacklight that they are coated with. The lampshades are covered with UV blacklight-reactive substances that you can find in domestic spaces, such as paraffin wax, detergent, turmeric, fish oil, and olive oil. I related domestic space to language in that both form the architecture of our bodies.

JC

After this first iteration of the installation, The Light That is Not Yours at Human Resources, I thought that the work needed a sound component, and since the first idea came from borrowed language, I thought it needed the voices of people who are using a language that is not their mother tongue. So I interviewed ten immigrants or descendants of immigrants for whom English was not their first language and we talked about how language affects and forms our personalities and identities. The audio of these interviews became the main part of Moonlight (2022). So the previous installation acted more as a metaphor and the second installation included direct voices from the individuals that I think these lights represent.

Jisoo Chung, The Light That is Not Yours, 2021, second-hand lamps, UV blacklight, detergent, paraffin wax, toothpaste, fish oil, dimension variable. Installation view at Human Resources LA(2021).

WC

The Light That is Not Yours reminds me of your video installation, Deliberate Marking, Oblivious To Itself, But To Sing, To Sing, Very Softly (2020-2021). Both projects explore immigrant identity and the struggles that immigrants face. Both intersect those issues with questions of domesticity.
 
Deliberate Marking, Oblivious To Itself, But To Sing, To Sing, Very Softly, complicates the subject of the voiceover—who is speaking, who is borrowing whose voice. Moonlight also uses borrowed voices, but this time you make speakers’ identities clear.

JC

I find myself in both narratives—the texts from Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha that I used in the Deliberate  Marking, Oblivious To Itself, But To Sing, To Sing, Very Softly video and the interviewees’ personal narratives. Making work with these stories is to amplify them, hoping that others can connect to them as I did.

WC

What I appreciate here in Moonlight is the way you’re borrowing and gathering others’ voices without generalizing the participants. They are not labeled under the homogenous category, “immigrant.” I believe the questions you asked in the interviews played a crucial role. When editing ten people’s interviews, it’s easy to collapse differences by generalizing or finding common ground. The questions you chose, however, convey both the participants’ individual personalities as well as the communal experience of impossibility – of being fully bilingual or fully integrated into the immigrated environment.
 
For instance, when you asked participants with the same national background to name an  expression from their native language that is difficult to translate in English, everyone said different things. Their answers reveal so much about themselves—what they think is important in terms of life and relationships. When I asked myself, I had a different answer from the others’ too. This shows that you, as an interviewer and artist, care about the participants and try to represent their voices and personalities as they are. Because of that, this work shows how language and the individual characteristics of the participants interact with each other.

WC

Can you talk about the interviewees you worked with? Are they mostly women? If so, why did you want to “borrow” voices from women? How important is gender in this work?

JC

I’m interested in the intricate relationship between languages and individuals who don’t  own  the dominant language or are non-native speakers of the common language. Thinking of language as a fundamental tool for self-recognition, I think a lot about how women construct a sense of self in the world we are living in. If the dominant languages are formed within the history of patriarchy (and white-suprepacy), the self-recognition of women is always through the perspective of others than them. They borrow the language of others to recognize themselves as if seeing themselves through the ‘speculum’, if I describe with Luce Irigaray’s take. In this way, the subjectivity of women is often hollow or paradoxical, which I view as a potential state of a new system. I am interested in how women, Others beyond, bring new systems to reconcile their impaired relationship with the given language.

Jisoo Chung, Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages, 2022,  acrylic panel, engraved letters filled up with detergent, paraffin wax, toothpaste, and fish oil, 154 cm x 60cm.

WC

When I heard one of the participants talking about sunshine and night, I thought of the title, Moonlight. They said their personality feels like sunshine when they speak in their mother tongue, whereas their personality becomes like a dark night when they speak in English. I thought that was about the relationship between the original and the copy. Because the moon reflects the sun’s light, moonlight can never be the original source of the light.

JC

It is interesting in a way that immigrants continuously experience a “split” between two cultures, two languages, and two homes that are existing in one body. How do we deal with this dissonance? What kind of possibilities do they see? What I think of often is the concept of “migrant orientation” in Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology. She says that migrant orientation is facing at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and toward a place that is not yet home. Thinking of the body of an immigrant in this way, their bodies are split in at least two different directions which creates fracture and thus a crisis of the sense of wholeness as a body. But as you said, maybe that’s a good thing, because I think this fracture somehow creates room.  Room for something new, room for others. I think about this a lot in my practice.

JC

The gap between two languages plays out in your work singular (2020) as a means of  addressing the social turmoil in the US—specifically the Asian hate crimes that started surging in 2020.

The video starts with a poem and ends with a poem, which I thought was interesting. Can you talk about the first poem? This poem is composed of two screens that are read aloud by a Chinese voice and an American voice.

WC

During lockdown, I had an urge to make a video piece exploring the duality of everyday life during the COVID-19 lockdown as an Asian immigrant. Being locked in an apartment out of the blue led me to contemplate domesticity, thinking about the ways in which it can be surreal. I tried hard to clean and tidy my domestic space to keep normalcy as usual, but when I turned my eyes to my phone or laptop, which was almost my only source to reach the outside world, there was ceaseless breaking news about Asian hate crimes, hate speech by the former president, etc. The world on the screen, which I’d call my “modern window,” felt detached or disembodied from the world happening in my small apartment.

I wrote two poems for singular. The first poem opens the video with two different AI softwares reading the same text at different paces. At that time, I was experiencing dyslexia, so I had to use this software to have text read aloud to me. On this software Speechify, the Chinese AI is the only language with a female voice; all the other languages have a male voice. When you feed an English text to a Chinese AI, they read it in a “Chinese accent” at a slower pace, creating a time disparity when played alongside an American Male AI. The second poem closes the video, but this time I read the poem instead of having an AI read it. Here, the temporal difference occurs internally between the visual (written) and audio material, not between two readers. It’s also between myself and technology. Considering the traumatic content of the video such as Asian hate crime footage, I liked how the second poem closes it out by saying “bye” and “Korea.”

JC

There’s a lot of discord, dissonance, and mismatching in both poems. First, the AI voice and the written text—here, there is an emotional discord between the two. The content of the writing is loaded with desperate, sentimental, and personal emotions but those phrases are distanced by the cold mechanic voice. The second poem also has the discord between human(the artist) and the machine as the reading pace from these two becomes gradually mismatched. The machine is reading the poem way faster than the artist, leaving out the artist’s voice alienated.

In the first poem, I found the poet’s sense of contradiction compelling. It seems like the poet is going through an internal conflict that I can see in phrases like “it’s important (actually nothing is)” or “They cannot (maybe they can),” These ambivalent statements create a feeling of a split body. The poet’s internal state is conflicted and split, as is their body. Can you talk more about these contradictions and the phrases in the poem?

WC

Poetry was one of the coping mechanisms that I found liberating during the pandemic. Because it was one of the only possible forms I could disentangle these issues through, I knew I wanted to start and end the video with poems.
 
Contradiction and conflicts are always at issue as a queer individual. I struggled to reconcile my sexual identity with the expectations of my Korean Christian family and society at large. It definitely created lots of internal conflicts, especially when I desire something and desire to speak out, while constantly self-analyzing.
 
I think this dynamic is similar to my relationship with language. Whenever I find a word for my emotions or thoughts, it never feels right, never enough. It’s like a leaky container—the meaning often slips through yet the word still contains something temporarily. In one of the poems in the video, after I said, “it’s important to hold our hands together,” this action became less important. After I said “they cannot snatch us,” I began to think “well, maybe they might be able to.” But don’t get me wrong. Because I see writing poetry as a liberating act, I wanted to explore this dissonance in a playful way. I think it’s funny to expose myself contradicting myself, while attempting to write something non-legible, perishable, transmissible.

JC

That dissonance becomes clear with the intentional irony of its title, Singular. The video concludes with the second poem. In the poem, the artist asks an anonymous receiver, “Do you write sperm plural or singular?” The absurdity of this question, asking about the grammatical construction of a very intimate bodily residue, amplifies the systems that require one’s body to be measured  and quantified in a certain way. Bodies are mixed, tangled, and messy, and cannot be quantified in such a way. This tension continues with the two split screens in the video: the left side shows the interior of a mundane, domestic space, and the right side plays clips from the news and social media that show the violence and discrimination toward Asians in the US. I viewed these clips with the gaze of perpetrators seeing Asians as outsiders and foreigners. Because these two screens are juxtaposed against each other, the uncanny feeling that comes from having a split and disembodied self is again amplified. This juxtaposition made sense to me, because I have also experienced the same disorientation when the world is violent toward one’s body. I understood that this feeling of disorientation and disembodiment has been anthropomorphized by the robot vacuum cleaner that appears a lot in the video.

Woohee Cho, singular, 2020, single channel video, 5 min 56 sec.

WC

I enjoy how people interpret the robot vacuum cleaner in different ways. I think of it as having an abstract quality, rather than a literal one. The robot cleaner gave me complicated feelings. When you’re locked in a smaller space, it’s hard to feel a sense of time. The robot cleaner, however, cleaned the whole apartment everyday at 6 PM, which held me accountable. It stopped in the middle of nowhere because it would be stuck on a miscellaneous object, which made me think of my daily life. It tried hard to suck up my feet, because its system failed to distinguish the human body from dust. This reminded me of fascism, or the political status quo at the time in which the former president blamed immigrants and marginalized people for the virus, and the general public reiterated this narrative by committing hate crimes.
 
With the juxtaposition of two different realities—footage of hate crime and domestic space—this robot vacuum cleaner seems to unite these two things. It is not only an extension of myself and a companion (but an uncanny one) who accompanied me through this harsh reality, but also a body double of the world and its many problems.

WC

Do you think there is a perfect bilingual person?

JC

On the subject of juxtaposed realities, one of the most thought-provoking interviews I’ve done was with the artist and curator Jenny Eom. It lingered in my mind for a while. She said that a perfect bilingual person can never exist because whichever situation you’re in, you’re going to think in a certain language. The more you become comfortable with one language, the emptiness you feel in the other language becomes greater, because you learn how much it cannot express. One side is filled, the other side becomes empty. It’s always lopsided.

WC

I agree. Humans in general have different abilities in speaking multiple languages. That is, different languages exist in your brain in inequivalent ways. Some might seem to be fluent in multiple languages, but actually one of their languages may function more primarily, depending on situations. You cannot equally be fluent in multiple languages.
 
I think about this relationship between mother tongue and secondary language a lot—how you cannot help but fail to be “a perfect bilingual.” I want to say that this is actually beautiful. Because you are partly emptied, you can grow in that space. In my new home here in the US, I’ve been given time and space to embrace this perpetual failure. What makes home, home for you?

JC

I don’t think I’ve found that answer yet.

WC

I want to think of it as a more fluid idea. We both often use text elements in our art practice, and English is not our mother tongue. What do you think makes us desire to use language when making art?

JC

Since language is a big interest for me, I think it comes in naturally. I am interested in the ontological dilemma between being and language. As a being, you need a name (language) to be recognized and exist, but it simultaneously confines you into a certain frame that is socially constructed. This dilemma creates ambivalence, which I think requires us to view ourselves within multiple contexts/perspectives rather than a single one. Also, in the process of dealing with this dilemma, there are a lot of internal negotiations happening in order to make sense of yourself within the existing system, which I think is similar to the process of how we deal with life.

WC

In my art practice, I often desire to work with something difficult, discomforting, and troublesome. My definition of queering is laughing, dancing with these charged issues.
 
Language is a communication tool, but to me, it often also acts as an obstacle for communication. I was surprised and thrilled when I discovered that writing poetry could be a liberating experience that can make space for such non-describable things. That’s why language is interesting because it’s not only a subject, but also a material. It is a subject that is difficult to me, but also a medium that I can hold hands and dance with.