Misaeng
Min-Young Her
01/09/22 – 24/09/22
Exhibition text from the artist:
When I was younger, my father gifted me a picture book of the buddhist tale The Spider’s Thread. The illustrations were the most terrifying I’d ever seen. It left me scarred and gave me a fear of spiders. The book was written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, based on other tales such as Frydor Dovstoevsky’s The Fable of the Onion. Another is the story of Sun and Moon ends with a brother and sister climbing up a tree to avoid being eaten by a tiger which had already devoured their mother. From there, they pray for help and a long chain/rope is dropped from the sky, saving them from their predicament. The tiger attempts to climb up the same rope only for it to turn to straw, snapping, and sending the animal down to its demise.
I often find myself thinking about this strange picture book my father got me, I wonder what his intention was in sending it. I recently asked my mum about the book and if there was any significance of spiders in Korea. She was told never to kill spiders, especially if they dropped down from the ceiling, that they were an auspicious sign that a visitor with good luck would come. Since then, I’ve seen two spiders glide down from above me.
There’s a species in Korea known as the “mudang spider” or the “fortune teller spider” due to the females’ distinct bright yellow and red colouring evoking the costumes worn by Korean mudang (shamans). It was often, if not always, women who would take on these roles; performing rites and ceremonies. A particular ritual that always interested me was the sitkimgut, a process for transforming or cleansing someone’s death or negative energies. Although it varies, the ritual includes a dance in a circular formation following only one direction. A cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The visualisation of DNA. The method of making rope. Did you know that, due to its mitochondrial DNA contents, you can trace a person’s matriarchal heritage through their hair?
In In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova writes about the concept of postmemory: “the ceaseless fascination with one’s family’s past… and the clinical boredom with which I roll my own contemporary backward to that past…”. The term is used here to describe a kind of “internal language” that references the concept of “inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience”. This language is seen as innate for immigrants and their future generations, but not necessarily fluent for them.
Almost a decade after her eighth child, my grandmother visited a hanuisa (traditional Korean doctor) due to persisting postpartum pains, to which the doctor told her one way to recover was by having another child. So she became pregnant and my grandfather tended to her every need, bringing her the best foods to provide her the right nutrients. And then my mum was born. My grandmother’s ailments were gone and she nicknamed my mum her good luck charm.
My mum retells stories like these fondly. Now she calls us bok dunggi: good luck charms.
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Min-Young Her is a multi-disciplinary artist of South Korean heritage. She graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts at University of Canterbury with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Sculpture (2019). Her work primarily focuses on viewer discomfort, using this uneasiness to explore the tensions in human relationships and to test the limits of our communicative abilities. She uses fibre as her predominant medium to abstract, or rather modernise, traditional Korean sensibilities. Since graduating Min-Young has collaborated and exhibited with Orissa Keane for The Physics Room (2020), The Den (2021), and The Blue Oyster Project Space (2021). Min-Young is currently working as a tattoo artist in Pōneke.
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Zac Hing is a writer based in Aotearoa. He dreams of someday living in a quiet sleepy town, smoking cigarettes and writing to his heart’s content.
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Photography by Sage Rossie
Design by Zoe Hannay
Sponsored by Parrotdog
