Essays

The dual mode of imagination that an outsider is compelled to maintain is neither reductive nor simple. Their silenced voices are always looking to re-occupy the spaces which have been denied to them or are being appropriated by those who claim to speak on their behalf. These various types of knowledges must be able to be performed in our voices. At NO NIIN, we are looking at the peculiarities of urgent and necessary voices, their chaos, and meaningful instances of the contributors’ non-standard, personalized orthography of every issue.

Independently from one another, we began reclaiming a loudly crying face to denote the feeling of being overwhelmingly pained by beauty and our inability to grasp it fully.

From our deepest desire to gather an imagined collectivity around us, we fantasize about going to each and every one of our friends, kin and relatives’ places to collect some garments they no longer use, as if they could be keepsakes of their presence. We sent out one hundred identical letters, with an invitation to send us one piece of their old clothes, no longer useful in their closet. If we united them all—we thought—we would be reunited again.

Written on Ice: Edible Memories of the Neighborhood of San Juan has been a six-month-long collective exercise where memories and identities have been transformed into six symbolic edible objects: ice-cream flavors.

During this essay, I will reveal how I learned to free myself from work when I was 15 and also amuse you with the intricate ways money developed a firm grip on me later as I fell into a wealth trap at 32 years of age.

If art has the bandwidth to hold our rejections, emotions, identities, anxiety and insecurities, what kind of an art scene does that make for those who manage the double shift of the immigrant and the professional?

Burning out led to a long process of defining sustainable practices, learning to say no and, from time to time, relapsing. Now that I have made the decision to say that I don’t make art, I would love to share a few insights about how to make agreements and tackle different collaborations within the arts.

I am the type of person who needs names and distinction in characteristics to comprehend whatever is happening in my world. I often blame it on growing up as a middle child in an immigrant family: the constant and urgent need to discern and explain what is mine and not. I am Minjee. I am Korean. I am a woman. Where are you from? What is your pronoun? What do I call you?

Dear Chris,

Consent is a narrow motorway and I’m walking on, half naked on the kerb, clutching my shoes, my books and her words like a schoolgirl at dawn, hoping I’ll be home.

What started with a few questions regarding the nature of the open call soon grew into a heated debate and triggered an opportunity for the exposure of several arguments and points of view in the form of a much-needed conversation.

Maybe I wanted to believe that deep inside, all humans are artists.

Sooner or later, the voice in your speech becomes watchful and you tread softly to avoid stirring the one-culture pot. With a thawing sharpness, you become that token brown person who is professional and diligent, accepting and forgiving.

Art universities didn’t teach you that art was a game with certain rules, they rather taught you how to worship the ones who’d figured it all out by themselves. But how about those of us who didn’t want to play by the rules, what was our alternative?

Vacationing requires taking the risk of being bored. No planning. No aspirations. No goals. No distractions. In a world filled with products and services marketing distraction as ‘happiness’, and in a work environment where multitasking is the norm and nothing is ever enough, vacation should be the opposite.

Our work is not separate from the life we are living: it is threatening and at the same time very very satisfying.