The Mystery of Words // Allison Boutillier
An essay response to Sora Park’s One of Them Will be Unlucky
By the time we reach adulthood, the written word has long since stopped holding any mystery for us. We are so accustomed to the tiny black shapes arranged in their tidy lines across the page that our minds jump immediately to the message they carry, forgetting to look at the spaces they occupy. Occasionally, something will challenge this easy ritual: we learn a new language and we remember the magic of discovering new meaning where before there was none; we struggle with a word puzzle that ruptures the distinction between a word’s shape and its meaning; and, sometimes, we learn that we have been using a word incorrectly and are stunned and maybe a little embarrassed when it unveils its true self. But, for the most part, in our day to day lives, language is a seamless conduit for the sense and meaning we seek, and we entirely take for granted that it will accomplish its given task.
More, though, than a mere beast of burden, language also has a funny way of burrowing itself into our identities. Every time we open our mouths, we speak our personalities, our histories, and our experiences, our age, and our education. The words we choose and the way we set them down, one leaning heavily against the other, tell our audience an intimate tale about who we are and where we come from. I write this in English, the lingua franca—but is that really even English?—of this part of the country. It is the language of my family, of my community, and of my history.
Image courtesy of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
In One of Them Will Be Unlucky, Sora Park explores this intersection between language and identity, revealing both the capacity of language to bridge places and ideas, as well as its propensity for disrupting the easy flow of our lives when it turns its back on us. Alongside the artist, we unearth the history of Park’s family, its grief and its pride, its distances and its closeness, and, above all, its complicated relationship with the written word.
When Park was growing up in South Korea, her family, large and small, recounted the story of her great grandfather, who was sent by the King of Korea to study medicine in Germany and to take refuge from the harshness of Japanese rule. It was an enormous honour, and no one else in the family held such claim to greatness or, indeed, such mystery. The story was engrained in the family lore, and the tracks it left in their lives were deep and well-worn.
Park’s father was the only son in the family, so by command of tradition, he inherited the family archives, including the writings and various scraps of paper that described the life of their most renowned ancestor. When the family moved across the ocean to Canada, these precious memories were packed into boxes and, distant from the family members and the country that treasured them, they were left in a forgotten corner, unread and unremembered.
These storied papers of the past remained in their cardboard prison until 2019, when Park returned to the country of her birth. She took with her some of her great grandfather’s postcards, hoping to learn more about the man who held such a prominent place in her family’s history. At first glance, the postcards Park carried were unassuming: a small collection of yellowing rectangles furrowed with spindly, fading letters. They were the mirror image of any postcard, taken from any mailbox, in any city in the world. But, beyond that superficiality, they possessed an intrigue that seemed almost impossible given their initial appearances: written in a combination of Korean, German, Japanese, and Chinese characters, they were Babel’s tower in a tiny square. Park hoped some of her family in Korea could interpret the postcards for her and tell her more about the life of her great grandfather. But, to her surprise, they could not.
Anxious and a little disappointed, Park continued her search for understanding. Where her family could not give her answers, she turned to the font of all knowledge, the last resort of human wisdom, the unparalleled collection of eminent works: Google. Park typed her great grandfather’s name into the familiar white box framed with cheery, loopy letters and hit enter.
“Who could have imagined what awaited her? The story her family had told since her childhood was cemented into the deepest foundations of her identity and, yet, in the pale white-blue glow of her computer screen, the internet offered a different version.”
Who could have imagined what awaited her? The story her family had told since her childhood was cemented into the deepest foundations of her identity and, yet, in the pale white-blue glow of her computer screen, the internet offered a different version. Park found an old article telling the story of thirteen Korean students in Berlin, each of whom eventually returned to Korea and became someone of importance. That is, except for one of them, who died in Germany, never to return to the soil of his native land. It was her great grandfather. Somehow the Germans had known that something would happen to one of the Korean students who arrived in their country. The number thirteen was hallowed in the halls of superstition, and it was clear to all who could see: one of them would be unlucky.
In moments of anguish, language, our trusted friend, is no longer there to guide us. Meaning disappears into the abyss where words do not follow and, somehow, no matter how pretty a phrase may seem, it is never enough to capture the depths of our sorrow. The blue lines of a cursor can grasp for clarity among the neatly arranged words on a page, but the racing beat of a grieving heart drowns out all sense and leaves only chaos. Here and there, glimpses of meaning pulse through, but the whole is lost to its disconsolate pieces and only the sharp edges of pain rise into focus: he is gone.
Image courtesy of the artist.
The lines and colours and shapes of words all carry a simple, gentle familiarity. From the time we learn to read as children, we look to the silhouettes of letters and their sharp contrast with the paper they are written on to tell us what we need to know. Up to down, left to right, we are pulled along by the yoke of convention, and we happily follow its unyielding contours wherever it wants us to go. But, is there something more than this to language? Something that lies beyond the letters children repeat daily in scribblers, the flowery phrases that adorn the great works of literature, and the short simple sentences tossed here and there between friends?
“Colourful loops leave spaces for thoughts that will never be spoken, and the yellow highlights of broken pages let us know that something is important, even if it will never be unveiled to us exactly what that is.”
In One of Them Will Be Unlucky, Park challenges us to accept the simmering discomfort of a language without understanding and of communication without meaning. Our minds recognize lines of text, but they never reveal themselves as anything we can see as words, always lingering on the edge of our ability to comprehend. Towering columns are laid out in the orderly configuration of writing, but there are no words to tell us what their curves and dashes are longing to say. Colourful loops leave spaces for thoughts that will never be spoken, and the yellow highlights of broken pages let us know that something is important, even if it will never be unveiled to us exactly what that is. Surrounded by a coordinated confusion, we are as helpless to understand as if we were trying to read in another language completely different from our own, like Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean—or maybe, as if we were a lone Korean student struggling to adapt to a new life in Germany.
Through her explorations of her family’s history, Sora Park confronted the reality of the story her family had told with so much reverence throughout the cherished spaces of her childhood. But, at the same time, she found a new kinship with a man, who like herself, had travelled across continents to a land where he did not know the culture or speak the language, a man who sought a different life somewhere else, whatever that would be. Now, in her art, she speaks her discoveries in the universal language of frustration and hope, of sorrow and redemption, and of confusion and renewal. And, behind it all, we can see that even though there are some things that can never be said, there are many more that are always speaking through us, even if there are no words to fully capture them: family, history, grief, and loss, and, in the end, the quiet certainty of a shared human experience.
Sora Park’s One of Them Will be Unlucky is exhibiting at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from November 20, 2020 - January 9, 2021.
Allison Boutillier holds a BA (Honors) in philosophy from the University of Alberta, an MA in philosophy from the KU Leuven in Belgium, and a JD from the University of Alberta. Over the course of her studies, Allison was the recipient of a number of awards, including the Marilyn R. Love Scholarship in Philosophy, the Alison White Faculty of Arts Honors Prize, and the James R. Lougheed Scholarship of Distinction. Her academic work focused on the role of language in defining the human experience, and her master’s thesis contemplated the problem of reconciling the individual with the universal through linguistic expression.
Allison has known the artist, Sora Park, since they were both awkward adolescents, and she is grateful for this opportunity to celebrate her friend’s art. At her day job, Allison does public interest legal research at an environmental not-for-profit organization in Edmonton, Alberta.