Monday Morning by Emily Watkins
This is the full version of the text written by Emily Watkins, who is an independent arts writer based in London, in response to Yva Jung’s solo show entitled “Monday Morning” at the Storefront/Departure Lounge in Luton, 2019. It was available at the exhibition in both printed word and audio formats.
Spoon rhymes with moon. Moon, incidentally, is cognate with the Mon of Monday – we start each week with the moon’s day. Meanwhile: mourning; morning. Mooning, nooning. Playful homophones, half-rhymes and double meanings swing through the practice of artist Yva Jung with their own logic, as malleable and (in)consistent as the lunar cycles which inspire it. A pleasure, for a writer as much as her audience, narrative lines coalesce and disintegrate only to be picked up between pieces; an exhibition of Jung’s work is a story. To begin at the recurring beginning, here is Monday Morning.
Jung’s survey, Monday Morning at Departure Lounge in Luton, runs elegant rings around its walls. The eponymous work, lending the exhibition its title and central conceit, is characteristically palimpsestic – drawn from a year-long performance, via drawing and story-telling, ‘Monday Morning’ is a video work charting the artist’s project ‘Morning Dew’. Each Monday, for one calendar year, Jung rose early to collect dew from nearby grass. Its receptacles are various; pistachio shells, contact lenses, syringes and envelopes all proved ready recipients for her quarry. The documentation of Jung’s dew collection process is methodical; ‘Monday Morning’ sees the harvest filmed from the same angle (close: her hand in the frame is as our own) again and again – a kind of highlights reel, birthed from a quiet labour. What is dew for? What does one do with it? Well, one might exchange it – for stories, and those stories for drawings. In advance of this exhibition, Jung bartered her hard-won dew for tales, songs, and personal accounts with the public in Luton’s town mall. The transactions have been translated into a series of new works on paper: ‘Morning Stories’, name incarnate. Their pinning to a gallery wall sees the cycle of exchange take concrete form; the display of ‘Story Records’ – a desk worn during Jung’s performance and now occupying the gallery floor – compounds the work’s ghostly drift, concept to object and vice versa.
Cycles – mundane and mythic both – recur throughout Jung’s oeuvre. ‘Half Moon Piece’, arcing soft as any space landing, takes the moon’s dependable trajectory as generative constraint for an installation composed of vials; rain; menisci. Here is a kind of translation – from lunar language to water, the waxing and waning of our starring satellite charted with the delicate accuracy of a pipette and glass tubes. Their fullnesses, and emptinesses, correspond to the moon’s – over those 52 Mondays, and while Jung was collecting dew, the heavens had their own agenda. We count a different way: in its simplest terms, Jung’s ‘Half Moon Piece’ is a bid to reconcile our rigid seven-day system with the moon’s ancient rhythm. Whether you’re Camp Astrology or Team Gregorian, the impulse to count our days down – to divide them into equal parts, find ways to measure the profoundly experiential – is hard to shake. Birthdays; holidays; anniversaries. Seasons: slippery.
‘First Day of Spring’ was created, fittingly, on March 20th 2019. Again leaning into the hard-and-fast rules of a cruel calendar to carve space for the essential human, this video work animates the ritualistic excising of lines from obituaries. Once a month, for one year, Jung scoured newspapers for resonant extracts. This practice grew without a work of film in mind; on the contrary, Jung’s dive into death records began following her own father’s passing. Each snippet represents one month further, another 30-or-so days beyond, the incident itself. It is comforting, in moments of deep grief, to look to the collective human experience. It is true that the most universal feelings are expressed most clearly in their specificities. June 20th: ‘Mary loved’. July 20th: ‘always, everyday.’ August 20th: ‘and needlepointing.’ September 20th: ‘lingers on.’ She does, doesn’t she? The video holds its text shifting-central, layered above the hands which bring each surface down upon the last. As there is strange common ground in grief, so the slippage of one life sits on top of the other. What would you write about someone, and how different would it be to how you felt? What is the gap between the deceased and The Deceased – between idea and mediated reality? October 20th: ‘William was’. November 20th: ‘Our beloved’. Some turns of phrase are par for the course: he will be missed. ‘years old.’ can be applied to anyone past their first birthday. Other excerpts are heart-breaking in their pointed specificity, ‘Spring. Dad.’, or significant for their call-back to a shared understanding: ‘on Monday’. After the papers comes the snow; December, ice from the sky – what was that about new life, and hope? After the snow comes the papers, more coherent now: a new year, and full circle. March 20th: ‘George died after a brief battle with cancer. He was 88 years old.’ Flipping, 2009 to 2008: ‘Snow on the First Day of Spring. Dad.’
Bids to grasp the ungraspable, define the indefinable, connect Jung’s dew work with her obituary project and with strands of her practice more widely. Monday morning is an idea, but dew – early, wet, cold-ankled and en-route – is tangible. Manifest anew each day, it disappears as sunrise melts into afternoon: reappearing like clockwork, dew’s here-and-gone-again ticks as reliably as any timekeeper. ‘Morning Dew’ is to Monday morning as relief is to a Friday night – of, not in. Jung’s practice verges on poetry, in this crux of itself: the quiet transmutation of what ought to be ineffable into artefact. A magic trick, or synaesthesia. We know (and we do not know) how grief feels – but, manifest, how does it look?
‘Two Buoys Two Void’, a c-print photograph, stages a simple proposition in answer to that impossible question. Jung and her mother are pictured from behind, facing away from the camera and leaning on each other via two buoys. They both hold the women up and separate them: two voids. Wrangling again with Jung’s loss of her father, his absence here is at once filled and underscored by the spheres. Lunar in their stillness and size, the top buoy’s position between two heads implies a third whilst highlighting its not-there-ness. Grief is delicate; grief is self-compounding. It relies on external structures, independent forces and occurrences, to flourish. By its very nature, grief is inside and outside at once; just as the buoys are held by bodies, so they hold those bodies in place and apart. We can see these objects, and via their physical properties the metaphysical presence of a much larger idea is summoned. ‘Two Buoys Two Void’ is a photograph of what we cannot see: the invisible translated into visible language.
This careful doubling, more sketch study than blueprint, extends beyond individual works to the investigation of their ideas across mediums. Many of Jung’s ‘Monday Morning’ pieces have a sibling, either part of the exhibition or in her wider practice. Conceits are revisited, as though from different angles, and their themes considered anew: ‘Spooning the Moon’, a video from Jung’s Florence Trust residency, unites the family tree. Part of the ‘moon clan’ (see ‘Half Moon’, ‘Two Buoys Two Void’ and the monthly rhythm of ‘First Day of Spring’), ‘Spooning’ is likewise a child of Jung’s concern with language and translation. It springs from a line of Eudora Welty’s: “The word ‘moon,’ came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word.”
Twist to wane and back to wax. Jung’s film sees a series of spoons held in front of the moon, allowing its light into the frame to lesser or greater extents as holes in their surfaces appear and disappear. Spoon rhymes with moon, sure – but the rhymes here are as visual and conceptual as they are linguistic. The silver disc of spoon above-below the moon’s orb, and a roundness in the words themselves, conspire to materialise Welty’s hallucinatory prose. Moving from word to object and back again, the oral primacy of eating and speaking push recipe into poetry, communication into nourishment; the impossibility of translation expands beyond languages and encompasses the passing of ideas through syllables. Jung’s writing on a version of this slippage, moving from her native Korean to English, sheds some (moon)light: “The experience of being in between places and being exposed to possible misunderstanding (via speaking the second language) led me to be conscious of the element of language in my work, in particular, naming the artwork.” In her PhD thesis, the artist explains how, “just as foreigners speak with a particular accent, which is an audible overlap between the native and foreign language, [she] explore[s] the misplaced and overlapped perceptions through art.”
If artwork has an accent, Jung’s is barely audible. In those overlaps, inter-ideas and between works, are hints of a student working on their conjugation: take ‘Two Buoys Two Void’ and ‘First Day of Spring’, which share a kind of conceptual suffix. The artist’s loss of her father is approached for a third time in the blind embossing ‘Monday Mourning’ – call it a second-person exercise in the same verb table. Its writing is almost invisible, suggesting itself from one side of its paper to the other, but the shared aesthetics of font and its textual medium rhyme with the obituaries in ‘First Day of Spring’. The moon hovers in the paper’s texture, crater shadows cast in its embossing. Thematic sibilance abounds in the thread of personal loss, held tight as Jung’s linguistic trompe l’oeil, Mourning/Morning.
Last in Jung’s Monday Morning story – and fittingly, most quiet – are her wooden ‘suitcases’. ‘Brief Pause’ and ‘Mooning Monday’, both from a series, are displayed in the gallery’s storefront window and alongside ‘Story Records’ respectively. On first inspection, they look a lot like their moniker might imply: roughly the right size and shape, sturdy and in context, the structures encapsulate Jung’s generous sleight of hand with characteristic insouciance. Bulging from one side, each case implies its impossible contents. A pregnant belly – nine months, forty Mondays – or something bigger? It’s one thing to have stars in your eyes, or the world at your feet – but here’s a new idiom. Here’s the moon in your suitcase. Jung’s practice hinges on a subtle staging of her works almost as physical synonyms for their titles – and yet, in this simplest of conceits, layers of meaning stack rather than fall away. Each piece, a deliberately incomplete answer to its implied question, what is a moon? Dew? Grief? Via a kind of idea-echolocation, Jung tests bounce-backs to eliminate one false certainty after another: truth, by process of elimination. What we’re privy to is the process.
Emily Watkins is an independent arts writer, based in London. Her articles and interviews have featured in international publications including Apollo and Harper’s Bazaar Art.
