Words kill things. They are born where things are dead. Only if a thing die is there a word. Words replace things that are dead and pretend to be those. Those deceived by the camouflage of words, and those who cannot, or will not, stand the rancidity or stench of things in words submit to the rule of words, because they must stay alive 'no matter how.' A word insists that there is a world it refers to. It does not refer to the outside. It only mirrors itself. A word is just a word. Words are neither things, nor you, nor the world. The world of words is a desolate ruin, a deserted house, where flesh is always already dead. 'For the sake of' these words we live a lie. We, however, 'learn' that words are for truth, or words are true. It is through the discipline of difference, division, and discernment that the world where words mirror words(?!), the house of words, or the house of non-house gives security to the people of the house. Words divide the world which has no lack, gap, or division, set superiority, draw boundaries, nominate ownership, and make people fight. The world of nobody but for everybody is deleted and lies, injustice, and evils are henceforth created. If fights in the world should not cease, it would be because words divide me and the enemy, us and them, good and evil, and true and false, engendering hatred.

We don't live a life. We waste it only for 'words', for the house of words, and the hatred of words. Nietzsche knew it and says that we should thus be Übermensch(Superman). If life is always already a lie, and if it should nonetheless be lived, he urges us to dance and to jive and juke instead of working in vain to search for the truth in the lie. Lie, joke, metaphor, laughter, and festival! His over'man,' 'a man who goes over' lives thus. Playing with words instead of being swayed by them in the world filled with words, where things are dead; that is one road. The road, above all, to be an 'individual.'

Another road
A road of love
A road to you
A road to walk crying
A road where tears drop
A road where camellia, azalea, and pearl are trod
A road that can never be reached
A road on which one cannot come or go
sunrisesunsetmoonrisemoonsetstarsglitteringaroadtocrawlblindly

I must reach you. Although I am always already you, we cannot meet because of I being 'I' and you being 'you.' I will repeat, we speak 'words' that 'I' love 'you' in the world of words, in the pit of hell. Love thus takes place in this world. I speak to you, I write to you, you read me, you speak to me, you write to me, and I read you. Exchanges　that take place in different places. Exchanges that only confirm the disjunction of time and space.　In spite of our desire to be one, we miss each other. For and against that tragedy of missing each other, all we can do is read and write. The world of words, a complete pandemonium. Reading and writing, I finally touch you, lick you, and go into you. The work of reading and writing is the labor of flesh and the penance to reach flesh. Otherwise, literature would have never existed. In the midst of writings with no flesh, dead writings, writings with no life, and writings with no love, literature lives on as a site of desiring to be flesh, on the road that is not found on the map, barely possessing a shape of letters. The road that leads to the time before words. An impossible road. Literature is thus a site of wailing. As it cannot go back, and as it cannot reach you, literature writes, and writes while crying. One who reads is one who cries. According to Derrida, "the eyes are not for seeing but for crying." The body that sees what literate eyes cannot see(the body without eyes, the eyes that are not eyes) cries and writes. Without crying eyes, words could not have recorded sorrows and pains.

Looking at a pearl I think of tears, pain, and relationship. Living together without being able to kill or kick aside the outside which has invaded inside, embracing it instead, without being able to be a complete myself with interiority, soothing you instead, coaxing you with the tongue that is the whole body, spreading saliva, tolerating the different space of round. The shellfish that undergoes the pearl(heterotopia) does not utter a word if it is peaceful, brutal, painful, or strained. It becomes a metaphor only for human beings(Without metaphors, how destitute and shabby life would have been). The shellfish embracing the other, the shellfish is the self while bearing, feeding, and breeding the other. A shellfish is a shellfish, but it embodies the other in it. You eating me while saving me, thus the two is one shellfish. Is this self its self? Is crying me one? Do I look one to your 'eye'? One who cries is thus one who cries the other. You cry inside me. When it is revealed against my will that you are inside me, it is time for me to cry. Even if you are already in me, I cannot come to you or reach you. People all perform miracles in the world of words. I cry because you are aching, because you are eating me inside, and because you occupy too big a space in me. The lacrimal gland is the well in which you coil up yourself, the river in which you flow as saliva. The hell within the hell, the hell of body in the hell of words. The hell of water that never dries even though I have my cry out, the hell of water into which I keep casting a bucket because you do not die. But the pearls are 'b e a u t i f u l.' Whether they are genuine or fake, the pearls are beautiful. The enchantment of metaphors, the lure of the feminine. Hiding the narrative of sorrow and pain, the pearls are beautiful. Whether they are a noble woman's or a prostitute's, the pearls cover up unutterable sadness and an inaudible story of terrible love.〔……〕It is thus beautiful. The beauty of a pearl is the counterevidence that it abused, swallowed, and exhausted 'me' more. If a pearl is beautiful, please write, and sing, that I/you had so much pain.

San Keum Koh is the one who reads ceaselessly. Although there are probably many artists who read and see more than her, San Keum Koh, first of all, visibly and importantly exposes the fact that she is a reader, a reading woman. Her identity as a 'writer' starts from that of the reader. She reads omnivorously. Type addiction. Freely traversing newspapers, law books, popular songs, poetry, novels, traditional landscape painting, and the categories and boundaries defined by the world of words and the world of perception, she ignores the difference among the fields, psychological weight, and practical significance and priorities. And for her, all the letters are the same because they are letters. Newspapers that convey objective 'facts,' law books that show the peak of the economic of language, literature that reveals the jouissance of language, and popular songs that preserves melodramatic language are reduced into exchangeable and indiscriminate letters. All the roles of words in the world of words(including terrorist language that resists words) are summoned.

Letters are mere materials on the verge of being translated and transferred to San Keum Koh's own letter of pearls. San Keum Koh counts the number of letters while rereading what she has read. The precise reading, the counting reading, San Keum Koh's reading transforms into the reading of visual difference. Letters discard contents and are transferred to the accurate count of the number of letters per line and per page. The letters without contents and the letters transferred from the dimension of meaning to the dimension of form exist only as visuality. The rhythm of the arrangement of the pearls reveal the difference, space, and gap between the letters that used to disappear when words generate meanings. The words whose contents have been removed now move to the stage of the play of presence and absence, emptiness and fullness, and the visible and the invisible. Rhythm emerges from a ivory white canvas. It is because what San Keum Koh reads, as it were all the letters to her eyes, are songs that are already visible and images that are already audible.

The number of pearls replaces the existence of words. The same number of words have disappeared as that of pearls on the screen. To say accurately, the pearls have eaten the words. No, the pearls have embraced them. At the moment we read San Keum Koh's words, we enter inside her. She eats the words, and vomits them on the spot as the pearls. She is thus not the one who reads words, but the one who eats words. Her nourishment as an author, her energy, and her exterior which is already her interior. She herself has entered the world of words, or the hell, setting the world's humble belief of living a life aside. San Keum Koh has taken the painful and grievous path, instead of a cold and calm one, or the path of wit and cynicism-the way of the individualist artist.

Literature aches. Poetry aches. The song that comes out right at this moment and the song heard then ache. It is painful to have relationships that become more estranged as I do my best to keep them and the confessions of failure that I continue to lose myself as I do my best. Newspaper articles do not ache. Law books do not ache. They do not have heart, emotion, or situation. But, San Keum Koh makes every word ache. Every word makes San Keum Koh ache. She cries before every word. She cries every word. The names of Soo Ah Bae, Seung Ok Kim, Ae Ran Kim, Soon Won Hwang, and Andre Gide reveal San Keum Koh's own 'taste' for literature. It can be different from mine. If you share some of San Keum Koh's favorite writers, you and she can easily be 'us' as if you have come across an acquaintance of yours. What is she going to do when moved in the face of the articles on Yonpyoung-do and the articles that press for the communication between North and South Korea, and the code on the military service law? In your split mother country that teaches you to hate the other who is you indeed, in your native country that teaches a young man sleepless for suffering from pathos of love how to fight, hate, and kill, did you cry before those cold and chilled letters on the newspapers and the code, recalling the people of Yonpyoung-do, evicted like refugees from the land they had inhabited for decades, by the attack of you that are I? Were you able to cry? Have you seen the pearl, the river, and the well inside you? As a record of body, not of words, San Keum Koh's écriture warms and melts the cold, sharp, and heart-chilling words, and lets them flow. That is the way of love by women, who wail that tears flow, but they have no idea why tears flow over and over in the world of 'the damnable cold heart'(Soo Kyoung Huh).

'Wailing women' who roam about the crowded street and cry others' cry instead of fleeing to their interior as individuals. Women who sing that they know nothing but love. Gypsies wandering on the path leading to you, not being able to become me. Mothers. Lovers. Beings of flesh. Marks of womb. Women with pearl earrings. Refugees pointing at the ruin. The others remembering the words of love and spreading them as if they are germs.

Again.
One must listen attentively to the words that every bead of San Keum Koh's pearls is embracing. You might want to identify the original text she read in order to find what her pearls conceal. I will not. Instead, I will listen to the voice of the pearls she has mounted one by one, a mere voice, the voice that is not a voice, or the voice of flesh. The resonance of love, the pearls that are already in me, the pearls that San Keum Koh had vomited, pain, love, and sorrow. I will thus recall you. And then I will cry again. You who are too far from me, you who are still inside me, you whom I can face only if words die, you who are there for good, thus for you who require a life as love, thus for me.

P.S
Other than the songs of the pearls, not a word is prepared for the scenes where metal balls reflecting you have been mounted. The words on them are still approaching from faraway. Not this time are they said.

Yang, Hyo-Sil(Esthetics)