by Young-Ha Kim
"She never allowed it. So you can only see her performance in person. People who've seen it say it's amazing. It's possible that it's made to be something greater than it really is because her reputation was built on word of mouth. Anyway, be careful. A lot of people got screwed when they started hanging out with her."
Even before the curator's warning, an instinctive sense of precaution was growing inside C. He hadn't forgotten that the things he was attracted to were usually the very same ones that pushed him into an abyss. Mounted butterflies were the first things that gripped his fascination. He was still captivated by his old fantasy where the butterflies came alive, flying around with pins rammed through their bodies.
But why did he push sharp pins through his most treasured possession? How did he do it at such a young age, when he wouldn't have been able to do it now? Had he been seduced by butterflies or the act of capture?
In any case, one spring day, all the butterflies burned to ash. The fire that burst forth from the kitchen devastated the entire house in a matter of seconds, and C, coming home from school, sobbed, mourning his butterflies. His mother tried to soothe him by telling him, C, we can always build a new house. C cried harder.
When K arrived at Judith's apartment, he found that every trace of her had been erased. Someone had already moved in. K sat in his Stella TX, parked in the lot in front of the building, and listlessly listened to the radio. The conversation he had with his brother that morning had been unpleasant. C had reacted as nonchalantly as if he were hearing about an incident written in the newspaper. C had slept with Judith. Didn't that count for something? K couldn't understand his brother. A week ago Judith swallowed sleeping pills, turned on the gas, and committed suicide. It had been five months since he'd seen her, and she left like that, without contacting him.
What had happened between Judith and C? The only thing K knew was that C also had no idea that Se-yeon died.
K started the car. He smelled a faint acrid smell, like the engine oil burning, but didn't pay much attention. He didn't know where he was going even when he took a ticket from the Gungnae tollbooth on the Seoul-Busan Highway. As soon as K's taxi went through the tollbooth, it roared up to the speed limit and beyond. He weaved through the cars emerging from the tollbooths and went into the left lane, feeling his body being pulled back. Unlike other times, the sensation was foreign and made him feel lonely. He pressed his foot on the gas.
K inserted in the tape deck a cassette tape he'd bought a few days before from a street vendor and turned up the volume as high as it would go. The speakers screeched, the high notes warped. K opened all four windows. He couldn't think through the sound of the cars whizzing by and the distorted noise from his speakers. He sped to Busan and returned to Seoul, making the trip twice. His eyes became bloodshot. Though he tried to fall asleep on the shoulder a few times, sleep never came over him.
C's studio wasn't ready to film Mimi's performance. C hurriedly checked the lighting and set up his two camcorders. On the floor, he spread a large canvas that had been leaning against the wall, and then mixed paint. When the paint was ready, Mimi took off her robe, hung it up neatly, and walked over to the canvas, naked. The white canvas was blank. She studied the canvas and the camcorders. Then she squatted and examined the surface of the canvas. She smiled slightly, pleased with the rough texture.
White canvas. Someone once theorized that primitive man started to create art because of a fear hidden deeply within the human soul. The mere existence of a white blank wall is terrifying. That's why children scribble on walls and scratch the surface of new, shiny cars with knives. Frightened of an empty room without any furniture and paintings, people fill it up and refill it again. A late-night phone call, where you only hear the caller breathing, brings insomnia with its emptiness, its absence of conversation.
The theory that art originated from fear interested C when he first started to paint. It was a small but important consolation for him, who had to live off his art, that one could control inscrutable fear and transform it into art. But he still sometimes asked himself: What am I really afraid of?
C focused on Mimi and the canvas with his camera. Mimi circled the canvas as if she didn't trust it.
"Okay, let's start," he told her.
Mimi snapped her head toward him and asked, "Can I get a drink?"
She took three gulps straight from the whiskey bottle.
"Stop drinking," he ordered, grabbing the bottle out of her grasp, and held out the paint. Mimi kneeled and dunked her long hair into the paint. He started filming. She carefully soaked her hair in paint, slowly got up, and stepped onto the top left corner of the canvas. She started painting with her hair. As she painted, the paint got on her hands, knees, and blue paint took over the canvas. The cameras followed her movements from the front and the side. When she reached the middle of the canvas, propelled by her energetic head swishing, she raised her body. Her hair, drenched in blue, was disheveled, and the paint was dripping down her body. It trickled down between her breasts, down her spine, in between her buttocks. She solemnly rubbed her body, so that the paint would coat her skin. She became blue.
"Don't look into the camera," C called, his eye to the camera, but she ignored him and looked straight into the lens. Finally she rubbed her blue hands on her face. When she looked into the camera, a chill went down C's spine. He stepped back, overcome by a strange, inexplicable guilt.
"Let's take a break," C said, wiping sweat from his forehead.
She sighed, as if she had returned to herself, and stepped off the canvas.
"Do you want to wash up?"
She shook her head. She drank the leftover whiskey.
"You're different," she said, removing the bottle from her lips. Her body glowed, like a firefly in a dark cemetery. She continued, her face smudged in blue. "I've met a lot of guys. I've slept with them and sometimes lived with them. But they couldn't deal with me. I don't know why. So how can you handle me? What makes you different from them?"
She was starting to relax. It was less because of the liquor and more because of the crazy spectacle she put on. He was envious of her for a second, an artist able to get drunk from her own work. He couldn't be immersed in himself like that, not when he was working.
It seemed an extraordinary indulgence in oneself.
Mimi came by C's apartment for the first time three days after their initial meeting at the café. They watched a videotape of his work in his studio. She showed interest. Looking at her hungrily watching the tape, he realized that she looked like a character in a Boris Vallejo drawing. But he couldn't remember its title. He was in the habit of remembering images, not words.
"I like performance art. Or miming," Mimi said.
"Video art is also fascinating," he ventured cautiously.
She didn't agree. "All you do is look at something through a lens. You edit it, looking at a monitor, then show it onscreen. It's no longer real if it's filtered."
"I guess you could think of it like that. But isn't all art a filter for reality? Drawings or sculpture change reality in some way and make it more real. You could say art is a reflection of reality."
C studied her expression. She didn't look like she was going to back down.
"Performance art is different. I meet things directly. I see death and lust in the audience's eyes. Depending on what I see in their eyes, my work changes immediately. If the purpose of art is to confront beauty, especially live beauty, aren't all other artistic forms fake? They are compromises and the residue of the desire for useless immortality. All criticism of performance art starts with the fear of true beauty. People preserve beauty because of their obsession with immortality. They are slaves of dead art." She was getting worked up.
"Immortality? What's wrong with immortality? Don't we all want to be immortal?"
She regarded him with disdain. "Fine. Let's stop arguing. But I don't want to force myself to make dead art. Life is short. There isn't enough time to do everything I want t
o do."
"Why are you afraid of the camera?"
She widened her eyes, insulted. "Afraid? I just don't like it."
"Fear often wears the clothing of hatred. If you are going to learn how to ride a bike, you have to turn the handles the direction you're falling, and pedal hard."
She mulled over his words for a long time, silent. But her silence wasn't a sign of being convinced. "Isn't it the same for you, too? You're scared of dealing with me face-to-face. Isn't that why you brought out the video? Isn't it? It could be you who need to turn the handles in the direction of the fall." Her voice got higher and higher, but lost confidence. He felt unsure.
"Well, then," he said, trying to breathe evenly. "Why did you agree to work with me? Why did you come all the way to my studio?"
"I don't know." She retreated and lit a cigarette. "I don't quite understand it myself. I sometimes think my work wouldn't be mine anymore if I put it in another medium. Actually, if that ever happened, I feel like the life that I've been maintaining against all the odds would crumble at the foundation. It's stupid, I know. Other people would think it's no big deal. But I think I've taken it too far. I wonder if there's another way to make art."
"I see. Then let's try working together."
She assented. She blew out a long stream of smoke. Bluish smoke filled the room. Her eyes followed the smoke dissipating slowly.
"I slept with a guy for the first time when I was a senior in high school. He was my Korean teacher. He would call me out and take me to a nearby motel. He sometimes got me out of study periods and sometimes even called on Sundays. It wasn't rape or consensual sex, but something awkward, in between. You know what I mean, right? I don't think I was in love with him. It was a point of pride for me that he would take off his clothes in front of me, when he was so popular with the other girls.
"Then I met his wife. A woman I'd never seen before beckoned me out of my study period. I knew who she was immediately. She was icily confident. She said to me calmly, 'You're that girl. You're very pretty. Do you like your teacher?' I nodded, but not because I liked him. I was acting like I did because I didn't like her coldness. Then she said gently, as if to a younger sister, 'You can't do this. Especially with him. Okay?' What do you think I did then?"
"I don't know." C shrugged, wondering if she'd just nodded passively.
"I screamed. I screamed and screamed like a deranged psychopath, stomped my feet and screamed, until all the students and teachers rushed out. I still can't forget her expression. She was calm, unmoved. What kind of person does that? I was scared. So I kept screaming, and finally my Korean teacher appeared. Then his wife slapped him and walked away, dignified, across the playing field. Everyone understood what that had been all about. The teacher didn't come back to school, and we heard he got divorced. Everyone blamed me for it. It's ridiculous, isn't it?"
Mimi cleaned up in the bathroom. She scrubbed her entire body meticulously, as if she were going to immerse herself in holy water for a religious ritual. She washed her hair with solvent to get all the blue paint out.
"What color are we doing next?" she asked.
"How's black?"
She nodded and dunked her hair in the paint again, her butt in the air, drenching her hair in paint as if she were alone. During her performance, Mimi's hair became a writing instrument, its thickness and shine gone wayward. An unsuppressed lust tore through C like a torpedo whenever he looked at Mimi writhing. He tried to concentrate on the act of filming.
Her body morphed into the handle of a brush, her hair into bristles. C followed her movements through the bluish viewfinder. He was too used to looking at the world through a lens. He realized that when he walked around, he unconsciously blocked every scene as if he were looking through a frame, believing more in the images he edited on tape than things he saw in person. He actually became attached to the edited images. The video camera was his shield, a small but safe refuge from the vast unknown. This might be why he can't get closer to this seductive performance artist. For a split second, C wanted to stay in his world, the world he knew, one he'd reflected on, created, and captured. Mimi hummed some tune he didn't recognize. He thought she might be crying.
He wouldn't ever leap over this distance between them. He despaired, realizing he would never muster up the courage to cross the chasm separating him from the world, the objets he manipulated into art, and the women he'd been with. He thought about Judith, who had walked to the North Pole. When he turned thirty, he had realized that the ability to love another is a skill.
K's taxi was pressing beyond 170 to 180 kilometers per hour, whipping dangerously past Gumi on the two-lane Seoul-Busan Highway. A tunnel sped toward him and swallowed him up in a matter of seconds. The ringing in his ears became louder, but he didn't hear it. His senses were starting to slow down, to dull. Everything—the wind slapping his face, the shrieking music, his fatigue, his hunger, and speed—felt hazy and far away, as if he were dreaming. K's skill in avoiding a crash was more by instinct than rational judgment. When he emerged from the tunnel, the speakers blew, ripping the music away suddenly, leaving pure silence. His body lurched, unused to the quiet. His ears were ringing, pounding, pulsating as if something were stabbing him. The car swerved into the slow lane and skidded onto the shoulder. Instead of braking, he stepped lightly on the gas and recovered the car's balance. He managed to get back into his lane, only slightly scraping the guardrail in the process. Inexperienced drivers tend to brake in these situations, which causes them to flip over. It's crucial to make sure you handle the wheel lightly, quickly alternating between stepping on the accelerator and the brake to regain your bearings. When K had full control of the car, he slowed and pulled over. The only sound he could hear was the whoosh of passing cars. He felt like he was experiencing the kind of quiet that exists inside a womb. That silence bothered K. He got out of the car to get some air. Where am I going?
K didn't have an answer. He stood next to his car, wondering where he should go, but he couldn't decide. He had never asked himself such a question. He'd always sat behind the wheel, stepped on the gas, and only then chosen a destination.
Mimi came to visit when C was almost done editing his film. She walked in the door, looking haggard. The woman who had thrashed passionately on canvas had disappeared without a trace. She seemed like a shell of her former self.
"How have you been?" he asked.
"I've been thinking about those people who believed their souls would be sucked out of them if they were photographed," Mimi joked, looking tired. She laughed awkwardly, the way people who haven't laughed for a long time do. A muscle twitched in her cheek.
"Come on in."
She did, slowly. She looked around, almost bewildered, as if she had never been there before, and sat on the sofa. "Would you like some tea?"
"No, thanks." She shook her head. Her thick hair shimmered, following the movement of her head.
"What's up?"
"I was hoping I could see your tape of me."
"Sorry, no." He refused flat out.
"Why not? Why can't I see my work?" Her voice trembled, but she didn't beg. It was more of a monologue, like an actor's—something that was supposed to be internal, unheard by others, but actually needed to be spoken and heard to make sense.
"The tape has captured your work, but it's not really you. It's also me but not me at the same time, since it's my work, something I filmed and edited." He refused her request even though he didn't have a real reason for doing it. Cruelty breeds a secret pleasure.
"That's not a good enough reason. I think I have a right to see it, at least once."
"Why do you want to see it?"
"I don't want to tell you. Please just let me see it." Mimi's words were hollow, dispersing into the air, again like a monologue.
C changed his mind. He decided to show her the tape. He found it and inserted it in the VCR. Mimi gnawed on her nails while it was being rewound.
"You bite your nails?"
Her nervousness was well founded. Her crazy abandon radiated from the video uncensored, passion exploding onto the canvas. Watching herself on the tape, she may have been facing herself for the first time.
C turned on the original, preedited tape. Mimi stared at the screen like a statue. A stillness enveloped the living room, as if a holy ritual were being performed. That mood even infected C, who had seen the tape many times, and he remained quiet, respectful. In the tape, Mimi was attacking the canvas with her whole body, slashing at the surface with black paint. Her hair slid over the smudged imprints left from her breasts, and her body slithered over it all, obliterating the strokes of paint. Throughout her performance, she mumbled incoherently, as if she were a Native American shaman casting a spell.
"Stop it," she ordered. C paused the video. She got up and paced the living room, muttering like she had in the video. A song, or maybe a spell. Her gaze never left the screen.
"You have to give this to me. You can't show that."
"What?" C got up, mirroring her panic. "You can't take it."
"Why? Why not?" She calmed down. He went over to her and pressed her shoulders down to get her to sit. She refused to look him in the eye.
"You can't throw away all the work we did," he insisted. The time you invest was proportional to the magnitude of your obsession. Nothing was free from this rule, be it love or art. "Why are you so afraid? That isn't you. It's been processed. Your performance has a value of its own, and video art is something completely different. It doesn't take away from your creation. Why can't you understand that?"