Letter From

photos, memo, 2002

Letter from is a greeting card that I wrote to myself. In a red envelope, there are several photos of my surroundings such as my house and studio in RISD. Simple handwritten notes are on the back side of each photo. With the photos, there is a small greeting message from to Jin:

Dear Jin,

Living here is a little bit weird to me.

I feel that surroundings are slightly different from what I used to be with.

But I am OK. I hope you also enjoy your Wonderland, too.

Regards,

“” means “Jin”, which is my initial in Korean. The photos look common and banal at first sight but tiny parts of each photo were manipulated strangely. Numbers, letters, and signs in the photos were slightly changed. For example, “Fire lane” to “Fire pain”, “RISD store” to “RISD spore” and the color of a stop sign changed from red to blue. Some parts of the notes on the back sides of the photos are misspelled, which suggests what is unusual on the photos.

Unlike my other pieces, I decided to show this work to the viewer personally. I handed it to the viewers much the same way that I would if I were showing them a greeting card which I received. The viewer who did not know the Korean word “” assumed that it was from someone else. People watched the photos in a polite manner even though there was nothing much of interesting. In the middle of observation, some of them successfully did find that something was manipulated in the photos and started to wonder.

That was a moment I attempted to draw from the viewers; the moment when familiarity started to collapse by discovering a small piece of unfamiliarity which lies in a familiar world.

As I intended in the series of books, I hoped the viewer would come to understand the piece with time. In order to do so, I had to choose the level of the photo manipulation carefully. The change should be neither too obvious nor too hard to be found. I wanted to create a “slightly different world,” which I experienced and hoped the viewer would also experience. I wanted the viewer to feel the same ambiguity I felt in the moment of revelation.