Correspondence: Earth, Rope, Salt

          Kim Minhoon & QF(Ha Sanghyun)

         

Hello, Sanghyun. I'm currently traveling near Las Vegas.

It feels like just yesterday when I was excitedly talking about going to see ancient petroglyphs, and today, I finally got to see them at the Valley of Fire. To reach the petroglyphs, I had to climb a set of metal stairs running alongside massive rock formations. A herd of wild bighorn sheep was resting at the base of the stairs, which made me a little nervous. The rocks were covered with carvings of various sizes—humans, animals, spirals, and shapes that looked like tools, all spread across a fairly large surface. I climbed the stairs effortlessly and stood in front of them, but I couldn’t help but wonder—how did the people who carved these images make their way up here? It must have taken an incredible amount of effort.

The rocks in this region have a striking red hue. I learned that it’s due to a high iron content, which has oxidized over time. Some parts of the rock and ground surface have also turned black, a phenomenon called desert varnish. It’s a thin, dark coating that forms over long periods in arid climates, created by the accumulation of clay, iron oxide, and manganese. The petroglyphs were made by scraping away this layer.

Shall we talk a little more about the drawings? Starting from the bottom, there's a figure with one leg exaggeratedly stretched out, raising both arms. Above that, a horned figure draped in a cloak stands beside a tree. Further up, three bighorn sheep face left, with a large cross-like symbol next to them. A ladder begins at the waist of the leading sheep, and as it ascends, there are large handprints, wavy lines, and two more figures raising their arms. At the very top, another figure is holding a staff, arms raised, with horizontal lines stacked above them. It felt as if they were whispering to me—reminding me that we are all connected, that I shouldn't forget. I thought about the ways we position ourselves—gazing upward in admiration, looking downward with condescension, or meeting something face to face.

There was a sense of awe and reverence in the way I looked up at the rock from the ground. Isn’t it natural for us to gaze upward at things that surpass our abilities or understanding? The endless procession toward the peaks of the Himalayas, the relentless pursuit of the tallest skyscraper—sometimes, it feels as if our spirits are elevated through such endeavors. I wish I could remember the very first moment I looked up at the sky.

When I climbed the stairs and looked down at the land below, the vast desert horizon and the scorching wind sweeping through the rocky canyons seemed to stretch my thoughts beyond the visible world. For a moment, I felt enormous, as if I had become something greater. How do you feel when you stand atop a mountain or a skyscraper, looking down at the vast expanse below? This perspective is often linked to arrogance, but perhaps it is also solitary—isolated, because it refuses to yield space to another.

Now, I stand face to face with these images etched into the rock thousands of years ago. I am not looking up at them in reverence or down at them from above—I am meeting them at eye level. In that moment, there is an unpredictable tension, a sense that what is before me could leap out at any moment. But at the same time, trust begins to take root. When we sit across from someone at a table and meet their gaze, don’t we become connected? Somewhere in the space between our eyes, emotions and thoughts collide, and before long, a bond begins to form.

Standing in front of the petroglyphs, I felt undeniably connected to something. It was beyond the language I could use, which made it both a comfort and a source of energy. The male bighorn sheep at the base of the stairs watched me until the moment I left. A young one, its small horns just beginning to grow—take care. That is the feeling I carried with me today.

Hello, Minhoon.

It has already been a month since I received your first letter. I haven’t written back for a long time. I think I struggled to find the right words to begin. Maybe it’s because I was already anticipating our third and final exchange, thinking too far ahead. Not too long ago, I went through a deep depression. The things I once cherished, the sensations I found joy in, all vanished so completely it was almost shocking. The possibilities of the future closed off, the past became distorted, and I found myself trying to hold onto time itself, keeping it from flowing. There’s an old saying—Carpe diem. In English, seize the day. I’d like to grasp the present, to hold it in my hands, to feel its damp texture. To keep it within my grip, yet still let it flow.

In your last letter, you wrote about admiring, condescending, and facing different situations. You also described how your body and mind expanded in the presence of the petroglyphs and the bighorn sheep. I received your letter while I was stuck in my room, unable to move due to illness, and I envied how open you were to the world. Admiring, condescending, and facing something—these are experiences that only those who take a step out of their rooms, into the open, into the outside world, can have. Then, I thought about a body that cannot stand, lying still in a room. The gaze of an unwell body does not reach outward. Instead, it turns inward, sinking into the world of sleep. If, for a moment, my eyes could open just slightly, they would meet only the ceiling or the wall. One could compare this to facing something, but it is not about connecting with an external subject. It is more like staring into a mirror, reflecting back onto oneself, or gazing into empty space without meaning. If someone were to enter the room at that moment, I would glance at them weakly from an angle, without lifting my head. This might resemble admiring something, but instead of awe and reverence, the gaze would be filled with intimidation, discouragement, perhaps even envy. Through your last letter, it felt as if you had stepped into my sickroom in that way.

Shall we talk about your experience of the bighorn sheep staring at you without the slightest movement? Recently, I met an artist who had a similar experience on Anma-do, an island where a thousand deer live. On this island, deer outnumber people. In our daily lives, we often see animals as something cute, or we encounter them through the safe, domesticated images presented by media. We observe animals within human-made systems—through tightly arranged grids, screens, and enclosures. But encountering animals in the wild, especially in overwhelming numbers, strips away the human tendency to observe them from above, as mere subjects of our gaze. And yet, this is not quite like sitting across from someone at a table, where “emotions and thoughts collide, and a bond begins to form.” This act of facing is also an encounter with bodies that could, at any moment, overwhelm or even kill us. To face something whose intentions are unknown is not just an act of connection—it is also a risk, a confrontation with the possibility of discord and misalignment. I want to talk a little more about admiring before closing this first letter.

When you created 〈YOU +〉 in 2022, you used discarded pine beams that had once served as structural supports. I remember you describing the experience of standing a 2.8-meter-long beam upright—something that had always existed in a horizontal position—and looking up at it. Watching your fascination with gazing up at something larger than yourself, I wondered where that desire comes from. The following year, you created 〈Bride〉 , which also surpassed human height. I'm curious how you will continue to engage with height and the experience of looking up in your sculptures. In 〈Bride〉 , the outermost surface was made by binding rope using traditional knotting techniques. Rope naturally yields to gravity, pulling downward. Recently, I participated in the creation of a performance where bodies were concealed beneath fabric, exploring intimate forms of contact. It was then that I fully realized how fabric can take on mass, or flatten completely against the ground. Even when fabric stands tall, it does not resist gravity directly—it absorbs force, yields to it, and in doing so, alters its own surface. From what I’ve seen, the new work you’re preparing for your solo exhibition seems to emphasize this quality of rope’s slackness. I’m eager to see how you’ll bring it to life. Looking forward to your response.

Hello, Sanghyun. I’m writing from my studio in Ilsan.

I was relieved to see that what you went through was written in the past tense. I’d like to share a small practice I’ve learned. Close your eyes and take a deep breath in, then slowly exhale. Repeat this, and with each breath, imagine your body expanding—like a balloon. As you grow larger and larger, still with your eyes closed, imagine yourself looking down at your palm. Resting there are the problems and emotions that have been weighing on you. Look at them from above and smile. They say it’s best to laugh out loud, but I usually just smile. Then, with each breath, return to your body. This is something I do from time to time, when I want to take care of myself.

That’s right. I looked up at the pillar beams.I remember saying it felt as though they were trying to tell me something. I spent hours with a chisel and hammer, carving out wavering, undulating forms. To me, that was a way of speaking—of engaging in a conversation through the act of making. And then, I placed it back high above, where it had once belonged. In that position, it resembled a doorway—an opening through which bodies could pass. But in a recent exhibition I participated in, the height was lowered to waist level, turning it into a barricade—an obstruction that restricted movement. It made me reflect anew on how space and the direction of one’s gaze are entangled. Having spent time with both moments, I began to feel how gaze and height are intertwined—how they open and close at once.

Looking up at something sometimes causes the skin on the back of my neck to fold uncomfortably—at least for me. Ever since I was young, staring upward for too long has given me headaches. I suspect it’s hereditary. I remember feeling this over a decade ago, when I was preparing for university entrance exams and sculpting faces out of clay. My teachers told me to observe the head from below, using the nose as a central axis to balance the depth and symmetry of both sides of the face. It truly was the most accurate way to judge proportion. By crouching down and looking up at the clay form, I could catch distortions and asymmetries in depth that weren’t visible from the front. But soon enough, the throbbing in my head would begin. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to prefer looking downward. When observing a face from above, I could still identify the areas that needed correction, just as I did from below. Yet, this perspective obscured the chin, making it difficult to assess symmetry. Looking up, despite the discomfort, was something I simply had to do. So, from the front, from below, from above—I sculpted a face. These days, I’ve been thinking that no single perspective is ever enough on its own.

I was reminded of something you wrote for my solo exhibition 《Four Beams》: “To sculpt the same way twice is not an act of seeking a singular origin, but rather an erotic repetition—one that unfolds here and now.” Recreating previous sculptures was not only a way to keep them from being lonely, but also a deliberate act of reexamining my relationship with the world. Can repetition be understood as something more than mere formal or physical labor? Is it always possible to raise a beam that extends beyond the scale of the body? Perhaps such beams were destined to collapse from the very beginning. And yet, we continue to build, searching for meaning within that act. As I work, I often imagine the beams collapsing. Collapse may signify failure, but it can also open up another dimension of creation. Just like how I once gathered sculptures and discarded materials from my undergraduate exhibition 《GRABO》 to create 〈They Were There〉.

《Four Beams》 was a sculptural reflection on the things that hold us up. I assembled beam-like forms—not necessarily vertical ones—from materials that once lay along railway tracks, aiding the transport of people and goods; from objects imbued with long-held desires; from fragments that shaped the conditions of the exhibition; from scattered limbs that had broken away. In our past conversation, we spoke of “what is already upright” and “what might be made to stand through an act.”* These ideas stemmed from the contrast between passive and active experiences. But now I wonder—were the beams I erected truly acts of agency? I had thought of them as something actively raised, yet perhaps, more than anything, they were profoundly passive. There were forces already inscribed into my body—things far beyond my own knowledge—waiting for a chance to be released. And perhaps I was merely a medium for that unfolding. It reminds me of how, without anyone telling me to, I once instinctively stacked pebbles near a valley. The act of stacking—it may be an impulse of longing, a ritual in itself. And yet, at times, that very impulse operates through violence or power, shaping the otherness of someone or something.

* The artist does not engage in this process to erect something, but rather to make contact with what has already been raised and to twist it. In this sense, a beam is not something that simply stands upright, but something that can be gradually raised through action—something to be pressed, something to be touched." — 《Four Beams》 Introduction, QF (Sanghyun)

Birds that drum the ground with their broad feet to mimic the sound of rain, earthworms that sense the raindrops and decide to emerge, and the birds that feast on them with satisfaction—in nature, survival depends on the ability to read the signals generated by others. But sometimes, those signals are deceptions. That’s why I found it interesting when you described your encounter with the bighorn sheep as facing something whose intentions were unknown. The path of coexistence is not just about harmony—it also involves the risk of discord and misalignment. And sometimes, what lacks a discernible intent is not even recognized as a living being. In Janghang, airborne dust from the copper smelting plant mixed with rain and seeped into the soil, poisoning the people who lived on that land—some even to the point of death. It reminded me of the residents of Love Canal, who were attacked by forgotten chemicals buried beneath their feet.

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? What answer comes to your mind? I came across an anecdote while studying environmental sociology. Botanically speaking, a tomato is classified as a fruit. And yet, I’ve never been fully comfortable considering it as one. In the United States, the Nix family once sued customs officer Edward L. Hedden over import taxes on tomatoes. The issue was simple: fruits were exempt from tariffs, while vegetables were not—so why had Hedden imposed a tax on tomatoes? The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of Hedden, classifying tomatoes as vegetables. The reasoning? Unlike other fruits, tomatoes are not typically eaten as dessert but are used as staple ingredients, like cauliflower or cabbage. In this case, the scientific, biological classification of the tomato was rendered irrelevant. “The dictionary’s definition cannot serve as evidence—it is merely a tool to aid the court’s memory and understanding.” The legal context of tariffs had interfered with the very definition of a tomato, and once the Supreme Court had ruled, individuals had no choice but to comply. Systems of classification—whether in biology or any other field built on social consensus—may appear solid and airtight, but they are profoundly malleable, easily dissolved under the pressures of politics and power. How effortlessly can even the facts we take for granted be rewritten?

《The Stump》 began from a lingering discomfort—an unease with no clear origin. These were things I needed to study. Through my work, I’ve had the chance to touch and handle so many materials—wooden railroad ties, their surfaces imprinted with the weight they’ve borne over time; smooth, transparent polycarbonate panels used for service windows; lime mortar, damp at first, but quick to harden; the beams that once supported a building’s weight; tree branches severed through pruning—and sculptures that emerged from my entanglement with these materials, like something excreted through the act of holding them close. These are undeniable facts. In the process of coming into contact with these things, I felt that what I needed to do was to linger—deliberately staying with what is uncertain.

Sanghyun, through these experiences, I’ve decided to trace three directional lines—returning to them again and again through sculpture. I want to face what we stand upon (earth), admire what we use (rope), and condescend to what we extract (salt). I want to speak about these three things. And I’m curious—how does the path I’m walking appear to you? Anyway... I must seem like a rather distracted person.

September is approaching, yet summer shows no signs of ending. Take care of yourself. It was a pleasant surprise running into you the other day.

Hello, Minhoon. The more we exchange letters, the longer they seem to become. It looks like we both have more and more to say. I might even feel a bit of regret when our third and final letter comes to an end. This time, I’d like to start from the end of your letter and move backward.

At the end of your letter, you wrote, “I want to face what we stand upon (earth), admire what we use (rope), and condescend to what we extract (salt).” What intrigued me was the reasoning behind these choices. What determined that what we stand upon should be faced, that what we use should be admired, and that what we extract should be condescended to? Why choose to face the earth rather than look down on it, and what does it mean to admire a tool, rather than simply use or hold it, these thoughts began to unravel into a series of questions.

At the end of your letter, you wrote, “I want to face what we stand upon (earth), admire what we use (rope), and condescend to what we extract (salt).” What intrigued me was the reasoning behind these choices. What determined that what we stand upon should be faced, that what we use should be admired, and that what we extract should be condescended to? Why choose to face the earth rather than look down on it, and what does it mean to admire a tool, rather than simply use or hold it, these thoughts began to unravel into a series of questions.

I once heard that the earth beneath our feet is, in a way, connected to all forms of flesh throughout time. The bodies of humans, animals, and plants—all that has died—succumb to gravity, gradually accumulating beneath the surface. Layers of soil are not merely geological strata; they are accumulations of time, intertwining the remains of the soon-to-die living and the already dead. When we create sculptures and when we exhibit them, how do we engage with the ground? The ability of an object to resist gravity and stand upright is often seen as an inherent property or a measure of its strength. But in reality, standing is impossible without a relationship to the ground. I think every artist and curator approaches the floor differently. There are gallery managers who apply a special epoxy coating, terrified even of slight damage; curators who pay no attention to the condition of the floor; and artists who have attempted to overturn entire exhibition schedules just to change the floor color. Many moments and people come to mind. Personally, I remember the time we cleaned the floor together while preparing for our exhibition at d/p. The more we scrubbed, the more the shape and color of the sculptures became visible. Some might have seen it as a pointless task, but we kept wiping the floor for hours, almost foolishly. I suppose, to me, cleaning was a form of making—a kind of curatorial act in itself.

The act of ‘stepping’ instantly establishes a relationship between the one who steps and the thing being stepped on—so immediate that the relationship often goes unnoticed. Especially for the one doing the stepping, this connection is even harder to recognize. The moment we step on something, it transforms into part of the environment—something natural and unquestioned. Even now, as I write this letter, I am stepping on a chair at a cafe. My laptop steps on a table, the table steps the floor. This entire sequence happens so ‘immediately’ and ‘naturally’ that it goes unnoticed. But I wonder—what happens when I become the one being stepped on, when I must endure more gravity in order to support someone else? When I was in school, we used to play a game called ‘hamburger.’ I’m not sure if you’d be familiar with it—it might be slightly before your time. One person would lie down, another would climb on top, then another, and another, until the person at the bottom could no longer endure it. My classmates often made me the one on the bottom, and at the time, I thought it meant they didn’t like me—that I was being excluded. Looking back now, though, I think they simply wanted to play with me.

Anyway, I wonder if your decision to face what we stand upon is, in some way, an anticipation of that eerie moment—locking eyes with the child at the very bottom of the hamburger game. In such a moment, the child, the ground, the surface, the pedestal, the soil, the earth—what we’ve long tried to hide—might blink and quietly look back at us. Maybe the eyes of the bighorn sheep you encountered were that kind of eyes, too.

Shall we move on to admiring tools (rope)? Reading your words, I was reminded of an old philosopher who unfolded his thought between the use of tools and the act of observing them. According to him, there is a difference between using a tool (ready-to-hand) and encountering a tool as an object (present-at-hand). When we hold a hammer and use it, it doesn’t present itself to our awareness. The hammer moves in sync with our body, within a sequence of actions that follow the “usefulness of hammering a nail.” This is hierarchical—in that the relationship involves asymmetrical force, that the way of acting is already organized into a fixed system, and that the system remains unseen. On the other hand, when we look at a tool (in the philosopher’s example, when a hammer breaks), we begin to perceive it as an object with specific qualities. Of course, even if a hammer lies unused in front of us, that doesn’t necessarily mean it becomes an independent being. A hammer is always placed within a network of relations—with humans, or with other beings.

The philosopher I mentioned earlier is Heidegger, who was also a thinker of technology. While reading his analysis of tools, I came across something intriguing that I’d like to share with you. In Korean translations of Heidegger, the term ‘using a tool (ready-to-hand)’ is usually translated as ‘손-안에-있음’ (being-in-the-hand). By contrast, the situation of seeing a broken tool—‘present-at-hand’—is translated as ‘눈-앞에-있음’ (being-in-front-of-the-eyes). But isn’t that a bit strange? Wouldn’t a more accurate translation of ‘present-at-hand’ be something closer to ‘손-지점-에-있음’ (present-at-a-point-in-the-hand)? There may be a scholarly reasoning behind this translation, but from a non-specialist’s perspective, it feels somewhat odd. If we were to adopt the term ‘손-에-있음’ (being-at-the-hand) instead, it might more clearly suggest that even in the moment a hammer breaks, it still remains in relation to the hand. It might also remind us that this situation is not solely about ‘seeing’—but still about relating to the object through the hand.

The more recent philosopher Sara Ahmed, in her book 『Queer Phenomenology』, discusses the situation of the broken hammer using the term “present-to-hand.” This was her way of critically reflecting on how the expression “present-at-hand” tends to reveal the hammer’s properties as if they were somehow independent. Of course, a broken hammer appears to us differently than it does when in use. But even in that moment of disconnection, it still does not become an independent object; rather, it remains situated within a set of relations—with the hand, and more specifically, with the many hands of the past that made the hammer, in concrete and historical ways. Ahmed placed importance on the idea that the properties of a hammer emerge from its proximity to the body. Furthermore, she asks which bodies (or objects) we allow to come close to us, and which other bodies (or objects) we distance and push out of sight. 『Queer Phenomenology』 is an intriguing work that relates philosophy’s notion of “orientation” to queerness and sexual orientation, so I hope you’ll read it sometime.

Shall we return to the rope for a moment? In your expression, what does it mean to admire a tool(rope)? It seems to be something different from simply using the rope as a tool. Here, you treat the rope as an independent entity, separate from the body. But there’s something I’d like to ask—does admiring, in this case, assume a situation where we look only with the eyes, quite literally? In your last letter, you described “the act of sitting across from someone at a table and meet their gaze” as an example of facing. For me, it brought to mind Marina Abramović’s <The Artist is Present> (2004). Just as her work speaks of the “presence” of the body, yet ironically reveals all kinds of “mediums,” the situation of facing someone from a distance does not simply refer to the event of that moment—rather, it seems to draw in the histories that each has passed through, as well as all the mediums that make that moment perceptible in the present.

I’d also like to ask what it might mean not just to face a tool, but to admire it—to look up at it. For you, is the rope a tool for shaping another object, or is it an ornament, or is it something to be faced directly, or perhaps even an object toward which one directs a gaze of reverence—something that lies beyond our capacities and understanding? Seeing your words, “No single perspective is ever enough on its own,” I get the sense that what matters may be the experience of shifting—of moving between admiring, facing, and condescending.

Lastly, what might it mean to condescend to the extracted salt? I don’t have many immediate thoughts about extraction itself. All that comes to mind is that it’s a process of separating and transforming matter. But when it comes to the act of looking down, a few things do come to mind. In performance and live art, audiences typically face the performer and the stage head-on. Even when the entire space is used, performers and audiences are often placed on the same level. But I can think of a few works that structure the act of looking down at what’s being seen. There’s Lee Shinhoo’s <Stolen Baby, Stolen Dog> (2023), where black gravel and limp bodies are dragged like trash, viewed from a terrace above the theater; the Lithuanian Pavilion’s <Sun & Sea> (2019) at the Venice Biennale, where an opera unfolds on an artificial beach, with people lying down as the audience looks down from above; and 《Isometric》 (2018), in which objects from the first floor are lifted upward by performers, while a car and a gorilla move at a constant speed, also viewed from above the terrace.

I can’t fully explain each instance of condescending, but perhaps I can speak from my own experience as the artist of 《Isometric》. This form of condescending creates a strange kind of distance. Humans, unlike birds, cannot fly, and so we are never able to see a subject from directly above. What we get instead is an odd diagonal—an oblique angle from which we can only partially condescend to what’s below. I think this slanted perspective separates the viewer from the object being viewed and prompts the viewer to become aware of their own position. We live in a time when everything is turned into spectacle, yet we rarely register ourselves as spectators. It is only through this violent mode of viewing—slanted, elevated, and concealing the observer—that we can begin, however faintly, to recognize that we are in fact watching. As someone not embedded in the situation unfolding below, as someone whose position is secured from above.

So again, what does it mean to condescend to what is extracted? I know you graduated from the University of Seoul, where the entrance exam involved modeling human faces out of clay. (I failed the exam a few times myself.) You once said that during the test, you had to look up from below to align both sides of the face, and that you preferred looking down because the upward gaze gave you headaches. I find it interesting that when we look down, there is inevitably a part that goes missing—in the case of the face, the chin. Perhaps the artists I mentioned earlier were, through this very gap in perspective, trying to make us feel—paradoxically—that condescending from above is never enough on its own.

There were so many fascinating points in your second letter: the social pressures embedded in seemingly neutral systems of biological classification; chemicals that attack us through unknowable routes; the violence involved in the act of stacking; the realization that I wasn’t the maker of the work but its servant; the generative force of collapse; your citation of my words—“To sculpt the same way twice is not an act of seeking a singular origin, but rather an erotic repetition—one that unfolds here and now”; and your phrase on “how gaze and height are intertwined—how they open and close at once.” I hope we’ll have a chance to meet sometime and talk about everything that couldn’t make it into the pages of your second letter.

As I write this, it’s September 6, right in the midst of Frieze Week. After attending a few openings and parties, my body feels exhausted, and I find myself short of breath. Yesterday, I spoke with an artist over Zoom, and I keep thinking about the long pauses that arose as he stumbled over his words. The way he slowed down to choose his words carefully, the grand yet humble ambition to treat every moment and all of life as performance—standing before that, I felt myself quietly shattered. Finding one’s own pace. Breathing in one’s own rhythm. I think that’s what I need now.

I’ll look forward to your final letter. I hope you stay well in both body and mind during this busy time.

Hello, Sanghyun. It’s been a while since my last letter.

Lately, I’ve often ended up staying in the studio until dawn. I’ve been wondering how I might better manage my time to maintain a healthier routine. But it feels like I keep failing...

I’ve been wondering, is it possible to pass through without leaving a trace? No… I don’t think it is.We always leave behind remnants, and those remnants will go on to create new stories of their own. It’s not an entirely optimistic tale. A stump is not simply what’s left after a tree has been cut down—it can be a living, breathing, burning memory, or the place where something new and different begins. But at the same time, it may also become a cold gaze—one that evokes the absence of something that once was.

Doesn’t everyone, in some way, long for things as a way of participating in the world where their loved ones live? A world shaped by the time my family, friends, partner, and teachers are each creating for themselves… In my case, I often feel the urge to pick up the things that fast-moving people tend to overlook. I’m a very slow person—there’s no denying it. I often see situations where speed becomes a kind of ranking, and if that’s the case, I guess I’d be the one at the very bottom in the hamburger game you mentioned. Still, I hope there are things one can see from that position. Things that are very slow and deep, things that didn’t flow easily, or that have always been there.

Extracting something. I heard this recently—apparently, at any given moment, there are over a million sailors out at sea. Even as I write these words, and likely still when you read them. I picture the massive floating containers, storage vessels, and the goods loaded within. Not long ago, there was a trend among people around me of buying things from TEMU. I got curious and ordered a few shirts myself. To my surprise, they arrived at an unbelievably low price. A shirt that costs less than a pack of cigarettes… Of course, I didn’t feel like I could actually wear it outside. The problem is, the question still lingers: how is this even possible? If I was able to buy something at a price I could hardly believe, and if companies manage to profit by selling at such volume and low margin, doesn’t that mean something—or someone—is inevitably being exploited in this structure?

This isn’t just a problem of the offline world. Within the vast global network, we’ve become machines that excrete data—like taking a dump.  I remember you once mentioned using AI in your work. I talk with AI quite often myself. I still vividly remember the sense of wonder I felt the first time I used AI for personal purposes. In any case, for something like this to be possible, information must be extracted. So much of life now becomes data through our portable digital devices, and AI crawls this data in the blink of an eye to shape it into something else. This, too, may be one way the legacy of imperialism continues to function. The method of conquering land through the extraction of physical resources has shifted—now, by extracting data from lives, power redraws its territories. Our bodies and our lives themselves have become a kind of resource. Multiple corporations pierce through a single body, rendering an individual’s reality into something measurable. I have to admit, the recommendations YouTube or Netflix serve up are often astonishingly accurate. It feels like the algorithm is preemptively shaping my preferences—which is at once incredibly convenient and deeply disempowering. It sometimes feels like the one who knows what I like… isn’t me, but the corporation.

These kinds of artificial intelligence systems form weighted values based on learning. The information that the current majority considers relatively important will only become more reinforced and circulate more widely, while information that isn’t treated that way will stagnate or become buried. It’s something we must be fully aware of: our everyday actions constantly accelerate informational imbalance. Then where do the memories of those excluded even from the process of data production go? At times, these matters feel overwhelmingly vast—so much so that it’s almost bewildering.

In my first letter, I wrote about the experiences of admiring, condescending, and facing in the desert. To admire something is, in part, to be overwhelmed by its qualities—but it is also an attempt to draw closer, to better understand it. To condescend is to look down from above in an effort to grasp what lies below, but as with trying to align the symmetry of a chin from above, it often leads us to overlook what’s hidden—to miss something. And to face something is to accept the demand for tension in that moment. If these directions of looking are not merely visual experiences but can also be re-sensed through the posture and attitude of the body, then how might they be embodied? I began working with that question. Spending long stretches of time with something, watching it, waiting to hear what it might say to me—this felt like something I needed.

Carrying these questions with me, I returned to the earth. Soil—earth—is not merely ground, but, as you mentioned, a layered accumulation of stories. It is a place where the concept of territory becomes incarnate, where human and nonhuman bodies intermingle, where the soon-to-die and the already-dead have shaped its form, and where new life begins. In this sense, soil is not a passive background to life, but something active in itself. Though often considered what lies beneath our feet, it is also—just as in the anecdotes I mentioned earlier—a dense, teeming site of buried, forgotten, and trampled ghosts.o face the soil was to express a hope that I might be able to perceive this entanglement. It was a way of asking how we might receive such vast inheritance, memory, or pressure. In that way, I came to think of soil as a historical subject.

In my 2022 solo exhibition 《GRABO》, where I explored the verb as a condition of sculpture, I used “to shape” as a material action, through which I made pottery-like sculptural forms out of clay. After the exhibition ended, I filled one of them with soil and planted daylilies. The vivid orange flowers blooming from within the sculpture remain, for me, a rather beautiful memory. And this summer, when a rose-red rock suddenly appeared among the familiar brown hues of the desert, that red existed as it was—so intense that there was no need to impose any meaning between us.  It was a confrontation—facing a face flushed with heat, a face so honest it felt almost burdensome.

Stepping is not merely about standing on a surface—it is the act of pressing down into the ground, of sensing it, and coming to recognize one’s own presence. As you said, to step is to rise against gravity, but at the same time, it is to depend on what supports the feet. If the soil we stand upon is itself something active—something that holds memory and history—then how might it be meeting our gaze? I wonder whether I can find the “mediums” woven between the warp and weft entangled within the earth.

To mediate is to form a connection between two things. Around this time last year, I gave a presentation titled “Rope and Knot as Mediums.” In preparing for it, I traveled through time—from antiquity to the modern era. The crafting of rope from vines, bark, or animal hide has played a significant role in human history. Rope has been widely used in transportation, agriculture, and other fields, and it helped shape the everyday cultures of different eras and peoples. As it developed, it took on distinctive forms in different regions through the craft of knotting. Knot languages(knot script) were used across the world, including in the Americas and East Asia. In Korea, they were reportedly used in parts of South Jeolla Province until the late 19th century. Western ornamental knotting (macramé) is said to have originated in Babylon and spread across Europe along the path of conquest. East Asian knotting crafts evolved through exchanges among the Three Kingdoms. Isn’t it interesting that knots and tassels appear so frequently in Buddhist sculpture? Rope and knots carry various symbolic meanings. The word “knot,” which is still used to measure a ship’s speed, derives from literal knots tied in rope. And what today’s scouts call “pioneering”—constructing frameworks by tying ropes to branches—originates from the techniques used by military engineers during territorial conquest.

So these symbols could not be seen as mere relics of the past. Ropes and knots have, across different times and spaces, carried layered meanings—shaped by intersecting powers and cultures. They were often rearranged through histories of conquest, and at times, stripped of their original contexts and summoned for entirely different purposes. For instance, the decorative knots of the West (macramé) once served as a display of wealth and class, tied closely to histories of cultural appropriation and imperial expansion. That’s why, rather than viewing ropes and knots solely as tools, I chose to admire them—looking upward, hoping to encounter the memories they carry and to listen for what they might say to me.

While preparing that presentation, I once had a conversation with a craftsperson who said, “A knot without a wish is nothing but a tangle of string. If you bring your hands together and chant, ‘Be beautiful,’ with care, joy will settle into it.” At the time, I thought it was a rather nonsensical thing to say—but as I moved my hands and twisted the rope, I began to understand what they meant. In that sense, rope feels like a kind of portal.

Lastly, the block of salt, uprooted from a distant land called Pakistan and carried across vast oceans by ship, feels like a kind of nomad. Or perhaps it could be described as an ark. It bears the traces of the great sea, the immensely slow evaporation of water pushed onto land, the autonomous archive of the Earth, someone’s livelihood, the sweat and labor of a person greeting the morning with a pickaxe, the trembling of passionate muscles, the trace of rain melting it during a move, the graceful elevation of loss, the watermarks across a rock face reminiscent of a canyon, the birth of ancient organisms in the deep past, the body’s unchanging dependence on salt, the salt vein discovered by the horse Napoleon once rode, the livestock licking suspended blocks of salt, the transport of goods, and my own gain derived from something optimized for economic efficiency, all embraced within a global commercial network. For me, these salt blocks are living records—remnants pausing briefly after a long journey, and signs of a new beginning. I used the word condescending to describe my gaze not because the salt was easily understood, but precisely because it was not. Your remark that “condescending is never enough” truly resonated with me.

The decision to work with earth, rope, and salt seems to converge, in the end, into a single question: the question of “the stump.” What remains? What can become a new beginning? Where are the boundaries between the two? A stump is not simply the trace of a tree that has been cut down—it remains, allowing us to sit beside it. Looking at the trees that have given us fruit, limbs, and trunks, I want to follow the memories they hold.

I’ll leave it here for now. How about writing your final letter after seeing the exhibition? While writing this, I realized that autumn has already arrived. The sound of crickets drifting in through the open window makes for a lovely night. Wishing you strength for all that remains this year. See you soon.