Interview
White Dawn, Encountering a Mother’s Universe in the Time of Boundaries
by Lee Seo Hyeon
“At dawn on a hot summer day, a woman climbs a steep hill in Seoul’s Sillim-dong neighborhood, holding her baby. Right before the top of the hill, she opens a small door in the wall and lays down her crying baby. As she was about to turn her back on him, the pastor rushes out from the church and suggests that she write a letter before leaving. The woman leaves a few lines and goes downhill. This happened on the day she gave birth to the baby.”
This is the story that Woomi Chung, as an adoptive mother and artist, imagined based on the general story of babies taken to baby boxes and the limited information left about her own baby.
White Dawn, the Intersection of Light and Dark or the Boundary of the Gaze
Chung captures the dawn. Dawn is where times overlap—the time when the biological mother took the baby to the baby box, and the time when the adoptive mother awoke and spent the night with the baby.
While piggybacking her crying baby all night, she wrote down fragmentary thoughts about her art. One such note was “white dawn ( . ) eyeco tact.” This note contains a typo, and the dot in parentheses was automatically generated by the iPhone when she double-tapped the spacebar. The note seems to be the debris of a thought scribbled down as she strained to hold her 11-kilogram baby despite having burned up her physical strength. These traces of thoughts have been visualized as her artworks, which were presented in Chung’s solo exhibition, white dawn ( . ) eyeco tact.
This exhibition visualizes the desire for an omniscient perspective in the context of adopting a child, the desire that arises from blind spots in the pool of limited information. She aesthetically manifests her concerns and experiences as an adoptive mother, while putting together things that have never been placed together and were never thought possible.
The artist is not addressing policing to establish a system for those who are in invisible places. This exhibition is a step toward politique (politics) that candidly narrate and highlight areas of conflict in society.
Her political practice disrupts the boundaries of time and space that each of us occupy in society, and functions as a place that widens the opportunity to create positions for those without one.[1]
“My personal story became an opportunity to look back on the boundary, but I only point to the boundary. I do not think that this work represents the voice of those whom society does not care for. And pointing it out does not reduce the marginalized area—rather, it increases. The more you know and the more you feel, the wider your blind spots get. People, spaces, concepts, and so on that our society pretends do not exist. It seems like there is more and more work to do.”
Acknowledging the Longing for an Omniscient Perspective
“The relationship between the parties surrounding adoption lies in an information blind spot. For many, the time before the adoptee meets the adoptive parents and their family history lie in uncharted territory. For the baby box children in particular, information regarding their biological mother is far more inaccessible than those who are brought to an adoption agency. Anxiety about the unknown leads to constant imagination. I resisted things that trigger anxiety. And I took on a meaningless thing as a transcendent entity and gave it meaning.”
For Chung, the praying mantis became a vehicle carrying her fantasy about an omniscient point of view. From the time that the baby was born to around the time that they were brought to a baby box, the praying mantis stuck to the artist’s car. After learning about the baby’s birthday and the day when she was laid in the baby box, Chung began to think superstitiously about the bug.
“I was excited to think that me, my future baby, and their biological mother were connected from the beginning with the praying mantis as a messenger who did not fall off while driving down the road even on a rainy day. Through this episode, I could not deny that I longed for an omniscient viewpoint that connected us three.”
The artist recognized that this longing could become sanctified and at the same time accelerate romantic fantasies about [her child’s] biological mother, so she put the brakes on such thoughts. This is because romantic daydreaming can create another gaze of violence.
“I think about how, just like you may want to see, you may also not want to be seen. You say you have to look into it to see it, but, even if you look, you may not be able to see it.”
An Unknown Time Summoned into Your Mouth
Regarding her video A Box in the Box 1 from another solo show, Chung said, “I repeatedly kissed the road that many birth mothers, who gave their baby up for adoption or to baby boxes, would have walked on. A kiss is a ‘knock’ that attempts to visualize the socially invisible. The gesture intends to suggest authenticity through self-disclosure, but I was constantly reminded of the asymmetry between adoptive and biological mothers.”
In the video A Box in the Box 2, which was produced as an extension of the previous video, two mothers who intersect through a baby exchange their breaths through their mouths and resonate each other’s otherwise unknown time. In the video, Chung has stated, “The space inside the cheeks, swollen from exchanging breath, is a space erased by society. There exists the mothers’ universe. There too, is the universe of the mother I have never met.”
“To Draw a Blueprint”
Blueprint. By “drawing a blueprint,” we mean envisioning future-oriented hopes for life as an unknown territory. The blueprint (cyanotype) used by Chung is a visualization of her earnest prayer for the biological mother of her child.
The dusky dawn where nothing is clear, the indescribable heart of the mother after leaving the baby in the baby box, the wish for an anonymous being who will comfort her, and the prayer for her life that is hopefully not bound by the child she left—Chung’s work penetrates the meaning of blueprint.
“If you interpret the Chinese character for photograph, it means ‘to copy it as is.’ The women in the photos featured in Chung’s works do not actually exist as they are generated through ChatGPT. The photographs here do not copy the appearance of the women, but as a medium it clearly reveals society’s perception and the current circumstances that lack the language for the non-existent beings, both of which are reflected in ChatGPT.”
Likewise, Chung examines perspectives on invisible beings occurring amidst her life that revolve around adoption and women. At the same time, she emphasizes, “My work is just my imagination, and the spaces and narratives that lie outside its realm are the stories that really need to be told.”
By making visible those particles that are not included in the image [or norms] our society stands up for, this exhibition may have intended to serve as a fragmented mirror that reflects a true portrait of our society. You will be able to get a glimpse of how metonymy for social perspective can overturn the calculations of individuals and the majority. Through white dawn ( . ) eyeco tact, I hope that you will expand the boundaries of the perspectives you countlessly bump into in all corners of your life.
[1] Jacque Ranciere, History, Politics, Aesthetics, Eds. Gabriel Rockhill & Philip Watts (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 157. This references what Jacque Ranciere calls part des sans parts or “part of those who have no part.”