I=Water
Documentation (Please turn on the volume)
Detailed Picture
When I was in my twenties, I moved to the United States from Korea, I found that my experiences as a foreigner separated me from those who were native-born or who moved to the U.S. at a much younger age. I always felt as if I was in transit with no destination. I continued to feel as if I was in an in-between perpetual state of I am not entirely comfortable in my new home. Simultaneously I felt great nostalgia and yearning for my native country. Now several years later, this state persists. The sense of dislocation, while not as pronounced, is still vivid in my day-to-day reality.
As a multimedia designer, I decide to create digitized work conveying these sentiments as if analog nostalgia and memory in my installation I=Water. The piece is set in the middle of a small room with a pool situated at waist-height. Two speakers hanging from the ceiling graze the surface of the water and beside the pool is a microphone. Playing from the speakers are audio clips of departure and arrival information I have recorded from bus stops and train stations as well as bilingual messages in Korean and English and footsteps crunching gravel. The audio clip in Korean is a friendly message while talking with Korean friends and that of English is a lecture in a class. Compared with the Korean message, the English one is much more blatant and less warm. The sound emanating from these speakers causes the water in the pool to ripple.
The viewer can passively listen to the audio and watch the rippling patterns, or she can choose to speak into the adjacent microphone. If she does, a monitor located under the water, on the pool's floor, turns on and begins to show a pre-recorded video, including images of footsteps, the residue of ashes, and drawings I produced with thick brush strokes following a traditional Korean drawing style. If the viewer decides to start speaking, her voice triggers the audio to turn off; if the viewer decides to stop speaking, the silence triggers the video to turn off and the audio to turn back on.
Many of the components of this installation are obviously personal: the use of both Korean, my native tongue, and English, my second language in the pre-recorded audio; the use of video footage of my drawings; and the use of other imagery that I find particularly sentimental. However, I chose many elements in the installation that are more “universal” or “anonymous” in their qualities and that are also used in the works of other artists to conjure up particular emotions when the viewers interact with the installation. Specifically, the use of water and the use of sound are particularly important to me.
Water is fluid, constantly vacillating and in flux. I think these qualities metaphorically characterize not only immigrants and their mixed feelings about their new countries but also all people in times of confusion and displacement. Everyone seems to be constantly moving through psychological spaces of settlement, transition, and dislocation.I=Water 2005