It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m starting a Substack.
I’ve built it up in my head to be this monumental feat but in reality, it’s a Sunday afternoon in July at 1:33pm and I’ve decided that today is the day to actually start shouting into the void rather than just thinking about shouting into the void. Y’know?
There’s a few reasons that I’m here and most of them come back to a feeling of needing to write. If you want to get philosophical about it: there are times when it feels like if I don’t get the words in my head out onto paper, I might explode.
Or combust… Maybe dissolve? Who’s to know…
The other big reason is that I go to a lot of exhibitions. An amount that’s probably bordering on ridiculous (depending on who you talk to). I’ve always done it to some degree, but moving to Seoul turned the intensity up by more than a few notches.
During Covid I found that not only was I burning out hard at my job in Daegu, but I was no longer finding interest in pretty much anything that had previously brought me joy. Is that a symptom of depression? Yeah, definitely. Obviously. But at the time—as many of you will recall—there didn’t seem to be an end in sight to the uncertainty of the pandemic. I was thousands of miles from home and the only way to go back to see family would be to quit my job and move back; Korea didn’t allow much free movement until late 2022, the final restrictions having been lifted in 2023. Add all of these elements together—with the added fun of what it was like to be a teacher during the pandemic—caused me to enter the textbook definition of a downward spiral.
In 2021 I began to take monthly visits to Seoul for medical reasons. This left me with 2-3 days a month of some sort of reprieve from the month’s stressors. It was on one of those trips that I saw my first art exhibition in Korea, not long preceded by my first Korean art fair. It’s almost as if I’d forgotten what I loved about art: connection, storytelling, creation in its most straightforward form. The exhibition in question was Mark Dion’s Seoul debut at Barakat Contemporary; a quirky show filled with found objects, research-based artworks and field work that came together to make something entirely unique. I don’t remember how long I stood in corners of the gallery examining all of the everyday objects he’d collected, pouring over the exhibition text and his subsequent studies. It felt like a perfect pairing of the art world I knew and the art world I was now finding myself in.
It made me curious, which it seems is the best thing that it could have done.
And so on an eventual trip home in 2022 I gave myself a challenge: go back to Korea, move to Seoul, throw yourself into what you want and what could be your path. See all the art that you can, network your ass off, apply to every job possible and, above all, figure out if this (this life, this path forward) in this city is really what you want. If it turned out to be a simple daydream, I’d come home. If it had gravitas, I’d stay.
Flash forward to 2024 and I’m still in Seoul. Absolutely nothing about this journey has been consistent except for one thing: seeing exhibits. The constant within that consistency? I pick up the exhibition text from the front desk and write down notes upon notes in the margins. Any free space is a space that can be filled with thoughts on atmosphere, aesthetics, likes and dislikes. I’ve written about everything from inspiration found in brushstrokes to criticisms of a gallery’s AC levels. Somewhere in the middle of it all I’ve been honing a voice.
So, The Exhibition Text has been born…
I honestly don’t know if I’m any good as a writer. Up until now my writing has been limited to postgraduate dissertations and everything academic. I don’t know if anyone will resonate with what I write here or if this space will continue to be what it is now: a shot in the dark. But if you do decide to stick around, hopefully at least one of these entries will help you find refuge in my tiny corner of the internet.
I hope that you’ll stick around~ ^_^
What a beautiful description of your time (so far) in Korea!