Set a boat afloat

The Japanese, during the period of Japan’s colo­nial rule over Korea, established reformatories in order to educate the Korean people to obey to their rule. These reform schools included the Mokpo school in Mokpo, Jeolla-do and Seon­gam School in Seongamdo Island, Ansan. There­in, the Koreans suffered from the poor facilities, a severe degree of human rights violations, exploitation of labor, and an isolation from the outside world under the name of “self-support.” Young boys, more than one could count, died of escape attempts and suffered from violence and malnutrition. Out of hunger, some died by mis­taking poisonous mushrooms for edible herbal roots and tree bark. That place where so many young lives were sacrificed became today’s Gyeonggi Creation Center! And I am an artist who eats, sleeps, and works in the site of the old Seongam reform school that still bears the young boys’ smell of blood. Even skipping one meal makes me dizzy, weeding half an hour in the art farm makes my legs crumble, and just being prevented from what I want to do makes me complain. Then I imagine how the young boys could endure that time period. Seongam-dong is a land reclaimed from the sea by the young boys’ little hands that quarried stone to build a breakwater. Although this area is now home to diverse salt plants and beau­tiful reeds, it was once the site of a salt field, the very source of power with which a human trampled another and of the salt as valuable as gold produced by the numerous sacrificed children at the Seongam reform school in 1946. That is how I installed my work on the site of the old salt field. Even animals go hunting no more than they need. Then why do human beings, the lord of all creation, fret over storing food, land, and money which was invented for the sake of convenience after all. Perhaps, that is a mental illness. It has been only 70 years since the war ended. Let’s give us some more time.it was not enough time to overcome things anyway. The gone sea caused a fisherman to shed tears of blood, and the boat was abandoned. The fish­erman must have gazed over the inland water without hope. The fisherman must have heaved a deep sigh, or rather wailed. There is nowhere in the country where the fisherman’s wailing did not reach! I set a boat afloat on that field of reeds that will take the people, who has been living as if they overcame or nothing happened.I floated a boat on that beds of reeds while imagining a coarse yet hopeful breath of a fish­erman starting a day as well as a boat returning with a full load of fish. I float a fish-smelling boat fully loaded with the fishing net the fisherman newly repaired yesterday, where no war or Seon­gam reformatory or salt field exists, among the reeds.