A Note From Trembling Things

Exhibition Catalog

Sunhyewon, nestled in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, is a historic hanok shaped by layers of life and memory. PODO Museum continues the Sunhyewon Art Project by opening this place as a space where art and the public can meet. Following Kimsooja’s To Breathe—Sunhyewon, the second edition, A Note from Trembling Things, brings together three women artists: Mona Hatoum, Choi Sungim, and Kim Yunsoo.

The three artists take materials that are easily overlooked or discarded in daily life as points of departure: a spider’s web, bread bag twist ties, plastic, and corrugated cardboard. Through repeated gestures, these fragile materials acquire an entirely different density and presence. Over time, fragility gathers strength. Beneath the rafters of Gyeongheung-gak, Mona Hatoum’s vast web stretches across the space.

A web is both a home and a form of protection, and a structure of intense labor for survival. Slender strands connect again and again, holding taut tension within a precarious structure. At times, what appears most fragile proves capable of remarkable tenacity.

Choi Sungim joins together small twist ties discarded from bread bags, gradually weaving them into a vast textile surface. While raising four children and caring for her household, the artist’s fragmented time is transformed through repeated gestures into something tangible. Fragments of daily labor reveal the accumulated depth of a life sustained over time.

Kim Yunsoo cuts plastic once used to cover strollers along the contours of feet and builds the shapes up in layers. She also repeatedly rolls and joins thin strips of corrugated cardboard. As these gestures accumulate, the original shape of the foot becomes less distinct, while its overlapping traces gradually unfold into a landscape.

Joining, winding, cutting, and stacking allow time to gather within ordinary materials. Embedded in them are traces of days lived and a quiet endurance that often goes unseen. Sunhyewon, too, holds layers of lived experience and memory. As the artists’ time settles into the space, traces of different lives briefly meet and overlap.

To tremble does not necessarily mean to be weak. Some things continue by trembling; some bend and yet refuse to break. We hope A Note from Trembling Things offers a moment to notice the time quietly held within things we easily pass by, to consider the lives that have endured through that time, and to gently ask after one another.