voiceless

blackened tree, once you were a snow covered branch
白炭や燒かぬ昔の雪の枝 -Tadatomo (神野忠知, 1624~1676)

Pitch-dark, showcased at the 2015 Hermès Foundation Art Award exhibition Voiceless, is the core of the narrative along with Snow Both of Us Saw and Dry Fields. Pitch-dark is comprised of black and white film footage of performance art that expresses phrases from 6 Japanese haiku poems in sign language. Alongside the haikus, sound samples from Paengmok Harbor and music composed by Jung Jaeil are showcased. A Japanese haiku consists of 17 syllables in three phrases, in 5/7/5 respectively and enables people to read between the lines since the phrases are not closely linked together in meaning. In Pitch-dark, the text becomes an abstract gesture without any tangible characters or sounds as it connects and separates from the sounds. In this way, the voiceless words do not signify any meaning to those who do not understand sign language. The artist departs from the significance of words and instead engages the emotion of condolence and empathy.
In 2014, Korean society was rocked by the tragedy of the Sewol ferry disaster. On the 16th of April, a ferry travelling from Incheon to Jeju-do sank in the sea around Jindo and 304 of 476 passengers were determined dead or missing. This devastating event created a collective trauma among Korean people. Pitch-dark examines this scar but does not mention it explicitly. The artist’s intention in this indirect exploration is to hold that the injury can be cured, yet to remember the losses and sorrow shared by the society. Through the use of this metaphor, the subjects that are mourning are not precluded to being specific identities set in distinct space and time. In this way, the work is a requiem for anyone around the world that has had their voice taken away.
The poem that was used in the work is as follows:

Snow we saw last year, it is falling again

Cold waves, sea gulls unable to fall asleep

Gazing intently at a white autumn flower, not a speck of dust

Tears that will vanish in my hands, like hot snow

Blackened tree, once you were also a snow covered branch

Wandering dreams in a withered field

* From the phrase “Blackened tree, once you were also a snow covered branch,” blackened tree originally connotes burned ashes in Korean but ‘ashes’ could not be expressed through sign language and so it was translated as ‘blackened tree’ and made the Korean title of the piece.