2 Tentacle, an English word, comes from the Latin word “tentaculum,” meaning a “feeler” because “tentare” has the meanings of both feeling and acting at the same time.

3 https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/958247/alien-octopuses-cephalopods-earth-outer-space-aliens-cryopreserved-eggs-cambrian-explosion

4 Extracted from the explanation about CHO Eunji’s video work Cow Bathing for Spring Da included in the catalogue

of the exhibition Voiceless Return of the Foreclosed organized by the Seoul

Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Training the minds to go visiting1 Eunji Cho

 

Enna Bae

 

These days, Eunji Cho spends much of her day watching YouTube. For the last few months, the artist shared to me quite some YouTube videos of various topics, including a science video about octopus, a video on national petition against eating dogs, an independent film program video, TED talks, Gucci fashion show and Donna Haraway’s lecture. It is hard to define them in a single subject or form. While attempting to discover a kind of premise that I could depend on as usual, I realized that this situation was not unfamiliar at all. During the last ten years, Cho’s works that I encountered closely and from a distance came up with things beyond my expectation. When I was looking for the pieces that could make me understand such an unfamiliar appearance, Cho had already left for another place. Probably for her, a statistical logic of classifying things and then taking one while leaving another one does not exist, or the two different and opposite things may be totally meaningless. Curiosity. It was the only premise of all these that I could find. The pairs of binary opposition within the rationalistic dichotomous value system are never equal and that one of the two in each pair is supposed to be oppressed by the other. However, Curiosity generates relatively an equal relation. Wondering opened up a number of possibilities of the world, and it marked the beginning of the building genuine relationships at times.

The interests of Cho, which navigates the world of YouTube, looks like a kind of magic way of contracting space by entering the world, fascinated by the stories drawing her like a magnet and heading straight for the object of another interest, rather than a logical research concentrating on a certain subject. How can I describe her work? Instead of getting out of one world and then going into another world, she jumps into another world from the inside of one world without a distinction of the exit and the entrance, thereby folding into another space. Can this extraordinary pattern of deconstructing the whole part and reconstructing something can be explained in such words as so-called exchange and collaboration between interdisciplinary art and convergence art? Some might think her curiosity is reckless and for some, her interest may appears to be passive, while others may say that her way of being influenced is a sort of imitation. Somebody may define it as the theory of otherness in feminism, or a political implication through the body or an exuviated identity through transposition. Nevertheless, all the products that Cho creates ultimately come down to a poem. And can I arrive to this in this text?

As far as I remember, Cho started to talk about the octopus last year. For me, who was expecting a powerful image of an octopus squirting an inky liquid, Cho’s Letter Fish Fish Letter(文魚魚文) exhibited at Space Whistle in May last year made me feel a sense of pleasant betrayal once again. (Actually, I once made Jeremy Deller’s octopus breaking out of a burnt house, which was showcased at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, with a 3D printer.) The octopus does not appear in Cho’s story of an octopus. Not a single image or characteristic of the octopus is represented in this piece. It only left us wondering what on earth Cho’s octopus is. How and why is the octopus, a living organism, written as “letter fish(文魚)?” Between a fish in letters and the letters of a fish, fish and letter disappear and create something else is created. Some say it is an imagination, while others say it is the thinking. Hannah Arendt called a space of story making as training the minds to go visiting.

The octopus has four pairs of limbs. It is a mollusk, a phylum of invertebrate animals living in the deep sea with suckers on its legs. Octopus is also one of the popular foods in Korea. The definition of the tentacle of the octopus is still unclear. A long and flexible organ that twists in the form of a protruding horn in its head is called a tentacle. The process of the mollusk that detects and senses predators is also called a feeler or an antenna instead of a tentacle2. Tentacles have the ability to adhere to and capture the opponent in free motion. The octopus changes color according to its mood. White color indicates fear and red shows anger. There is no hierarchy among individual octopuses. Small octopuses withdraw in front of big ones, thereby keeping their own peace.

‘文語’ means written language, while 口語 refers to spoken language. Written language, namely writing was considered as a men’s domain in history. Women’s writing was excluded from history because it was a language of silence or that of breath without its place for utterance. Even when it remained in history, it was defined as a lack of masculinity writing. In her article “The Laugh of the Medusa (Le rire de la médusa),” Hélène Cixous points out that women’s writing has been considered inferior to the men’s as an emotional and illogical personal confession and argues that all the symbolic orders are based on the male-oriented binary opposition. Cixous strongly claims that writing that defines traditional qualities that characterize women—such as experiment of their own somatic pleasure without hiding it, the characteristic of accepting others and the destructive power of denying the law—is the only way of being released from the masculine discourse that focuses on the rational logic. Letter Fish Fish Letter by Cho consists of the Song text by Letter fish series that feature drawings with traces of cutting, scribbling and coloring by extracting pieces of old books, Letter fish dreams human’s past in which these pieces of books are hung connected to each other like candies and Letter fish knows how to enter my brain. The old books that are torn into pieces and connected to form a long line here are popular humanities books that the artist has had since she was a student and that most students of the time probably know. Cho’s act of deconstructing, rearranging and recombining general theoretical books, including the collection of Korean literature in the 1960-70s, a book written by Thomas Aquinas, Green Review series, Sherlock Holmes and the History of Art, can be seen as another form of feminine writing that Hélène Cixous refers to.

The octopus often appears as an extraterrestrial organism coming from outer space in science fiction films or dramas both in the East and the West. A recent research shows that such an imagination is not groundless. According to the result of the study announced by a group of 33 researchers3, the collision of the earth and the groups of the cells of the organisms living in the space led to the exclusive growth in the Cambrian period (extending approximately from 541 million to 488 million years ago), in which all the fauna except for the vertebrates lived. Afterwards, octopus’ eggs that could be stored at a low temperature were combined with some species of squids, and octopuses began to reproduce rapidly around 270 million years ago. It proves that the octopus is an extraterrestrial organism coming from the space scientifically. Believe or not.

The reason that Cho delves into the object of octopus, a mysterious creature on the earth, is not just due to sensuous and odd senses derived from its flexible and moist tentacles. Rather, she may be attracted by the following facts: the body and brain of the octopus are integrated; its multi-neural system enables the octopus to change the color and shape according to their circumstances; they have the natural ability of observing others; the octopus has mysterious genes that allow them to learn, evolve and change. Communication with others is not about legal or political settlements, but about having our identity continuously adapt to the circumstances surrounding us. Genuine communication is based on the power of observing the environments, in which our identity changes, and thinking about the experience the identity encounters in such environments. Curiosity again. It becomes the starting point of the real relationship building with others. When we believe that the subject of communication with others should be ourselves only, we become narrow-minded. And when we do not consider ourselves as an object of communication, we can be eroded by so-called ‘anthropocene’ and become the slave of ‘capitalocene’ established by human beings. As Dana Haraway mentioned, it is necessary to turn our attentions to nonhuman beings, such as environments, animals, living organisms and machines, without being afraid of our identity changing via the influenced of by others. It is time to start ‘a new cat’s cradle’.

Eunji Cho is an artist director musician feminist animal lover vegetarian and activist Cho is a person who transgress all these boundaries and creates coincidences in the boundary of all these. CHO is both part and a total of the boundary of all of them. And she controls their apex. She is a poet who makes new patterns, located at the boundary between all of them. The subjects that Cho deals with, such as earth, egg, flower, circle, flashiness, mythology, ritual, sweat, sun, song, music, language, fashion, massacre, immigration, disaster and death, are the substances that reflect her “attitude of responding that she is not avoiding because she cannot,”4 while transforming herself in a wide range of colors sometimes in order to continue art, to continue life, or sustain herself at times. These substances are vulnerable beings that are deadly due to social and political influences, or they are the others that can be interpreted in different forms and meanings, depending on individuals and societies. We hope our stories for themselves will be restless while transgressing sensible and political areas or understanding both physically and mentally in a repetitive manner. Such stories will reproduce different stories. What we believe normal will be seen as abnormal and vice versa. And such little thoughts will continue. The world will secularize the world in the way we think of us while we are changed by you and respond to others. Thinking and acting like an octopus, whose brain and body are integrated, or the other way around.

 

This text is modified from the result of the 12th SeMA Residency critic workshop, Eunji Cho’s magic art of constracting space and cat’s cradle.