Doing Women-Blanket-Basket: Persisting in pleasure despite it all

Doing-woman is “to want to be a woman.” You must be affected by the other and distribute the small and the humble throughout your body. To be a woman is not as fundamental a position as its opposite, to be a man, so instead of thinking of it as a thing to discard, each person must travel toward their inherent feminine plurality, the overflowing feminine existence within. One also needs a biological awareness of being a woman and discern with one’s energy the woman within one’s connections with other objects. I want to be reborn as a woman of another identity every day. In my text, I am a girl today and reborn an old woman tomorrow. I was a blade of grass today and tomorrow will be born a hunting bear. I want to be reborn as a color, a pattern, an image, or a small sign. I am not one woman but a multitude of women, not a woman here but here and there, a woman who makes the here a here-less there. To want to become a woman inevitably leads to empathy on a level of pure energy.¹

Doing is an active verb. Here, by saying “doing,” following the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, I attribute a headless quality to this verb and recognize movement in being. In doing, there is no subject-head that judges the depth, good and evil, and fixates orders. Instead, there is a body-mind – mind is not just in the brain – spirit of “women” that do, generate (life), and keep going in tandem with others. Others here might well appear in blankets or baskets or more. So, we shall explore “doing blanket” or “doing basket” as in doing women in the words of Kim Hyesoon, through doing-art by Seulgi Lee who was born and grew up in South Korea and has been based in France since the age of nineteen. Please let us note that if there is anything identified as Korean here, that it is simply for the doing of it – making it plural – as for doing the other, being “Ixcatlán,” “basket” or “blanket” as Seulgi Lee being or rather doing women must be “affected by the other and distribute the small and the humble” through her body. If this “leads to empathy on a level of pure energy,” I would also let us recognize it as the pleasure of doing, despite of all that tends to oppress it or make it impossible, which the artist evokes again and again.

Not all the expressions in the titles of the blanket-works are concerned with a troubling situation. However, as gathered here, they together tell how life lessons are taught to and from one another, describing a situation that anyone can imagine. Above all, they function to bring together the common experience of such situations: staying with trouble. Visualized in geometric shapes of colors and materialized into a Nubi blanket, this function seems to even elevate you into a joyful horizon, while dealing with any problematic structure of the expressed situations. They are cheering empathizers, vibrant equalizers – neither simulators nor unifiers – of whatever experience of life, be it hardship, mistake, or underlying inequality and injustice, one is having. They might bring a person into brightness, into vital positivity, and into an eternal movement of acceptance only to re-imagine and create another situation, another identity. Imagine the sensation of being protected by the blanket, resting, and even dreaming under it.  This is the moment when one could begin to do a blanket, or rather begin doing blankets!

I have come to dwell on the nature of this “plaisir” as she says, as opposed to work, occupation, or job. The overt positivity of the blankets of her Blanket Project U, as aligned with this artistic attitude, has also made me wonder about it, especially in relation to the saddening fact that the Nubi craft is now only a specialized, barely surviving traditional skill. And a vernacular culture of language is also affected by globalization. Aren’t we living in a broken world of increasing destruction, violence and inequality? Having said that, provided that making every blanket in the Blanket project U necessitated the close collaboration with a craft person, I wonder, is this pleasure a shared, and shareable one? In fact, Seulgi Lee’s “work” often involves collaborative process or interactive moments. Amongst her collaborative works, the blanket pieces in particular, which are an outcome of the collaboration between Seulgi Lee and the artisan Sungyeon Cho in Tongyong, have, in the artist’s own words, been loved the most. They have been collected by public museums and private collectors, so widely and for such a long time, as to become a sort of currency for the artist. If this is so, is any benefit, be it financial or symbolic, shared between the artist and her collaborating artisan?  Seulgi Lee had no hesitation or difficulty in answering that. She has an ongoing discussion with her by now long-term artisan-collaborator on the fee she offers to him. The collaborator expresses what he considers a fair payment, which they agree upon, premised on the clear distinction as he sees that she and he each deal with different markets. Having her own currency allows Seulgi Lee to “invest” her income into her next project, which gives her a degree of (artistic) autonomy. Still, one can argue the contemporary socio-technological and political condition for pleasure requires some examination with regards to the forms it takes, how it is generated, where the pleasure comes from. Pleasure can easily be a form of escapism, to distract oneself from facing reality, serious engagement and production of meaning. Differently to indulgent pleasure, there is also a pleasure of disinterest, which in the Kantian view was regarded as the defining property of aesthetic judgment and the capacity of imagination, as the aesthetic experience is free either from moral or rational thinking. Yet the matter of art is no longer confined to disinterested pleasure and aesthetics as we have seen the complex mechanism of context and institution, and interpretation and action that have transformed the notion of art for the last century. Seulgi Lee’s art practice should not be an exception to it.

….

I climb underneath the ash

my country is beyond the horizon
all plains all river
the edges can be crossed with care
you might say that language is
harsh
but it is an ancient beauty
a life that rolls and sings
and we’re singing we’re singing

I wake up to a woman
wading through all birds
heart shaped leaves
with perfect breasts that hang
long and heavy
scars along her chest

her basket is safety

everything worth holding in two hands
has a perfect basket to respond
first you must begin
with the grasses
first you must tend the blades
the sweet small shoots
first you must make healthy the soil
care for this place
tend with fire
carry the seeds
first you must make the land right
first you must love your mother

what you care for will care for you

when you are ready
you will understand
how to make a basket⁴

“Doing basket” is something else and yet akin to “doing blanket.” Here I refer to Seulgi Lee’s Basket Project W (2017). It might well be said that this project has evolved from Blanket Project U not only chronologically but in the conditioning and conceptual approach. Taken up a few years later, it was with the income generated through the Blanket Project U that the artist could self-fund a trip to Mexico to meet and possibly work together with artisans. This time, it’s an old form of basket and the tradition of basket-weaving with local palm leaves in order to have its forms adapted. A basket, like a Nubi blanket, is another useful, old, everyday object specific to a culture, whose forms and skills to make have existed for generations and have been replaced by machine production with plastic materials. The similarities between the blanket project and the basket series include also the element of language. Whereas each blanket expresses a (Korean) proverb or vernacular expression, each basket expresses a descriptive word(s) of the surrounding environment and customs in the language of the village of the basket weavers, which however is rarely spoken as it has been replaced by Spanish, the language of colonial power. In fact, the majority of about 200 villagers are not able to speak Ixcateco, the indigenous language of the small village of Santa María Ixcatlán in the present-day state of Oaxaca.  Such language is now spoken by the baskets whose shapes are not as usual as adapted from the common forms through the collaboration between Seulgi Lee and the Zapotec weavers. They are not big or lengthy words so one might learn to practice: duchdi is rain, hwagutchaku is sunset, ʔu²sa²chã³ is coyote, sa² la² kwa²shu¹ngu² la² shhũ¹ itzie ske², means young girl with neat hair, sa kwa²ne² sa² ra² thwã¹, to eat an egg. We come to read them, or even speak them through the baskets whose shapes are now altered and thus enliven to speak. The baskets are now made longer or wider than usual and are joined together in three. The smaller and shorter ones make a set of twins.  Some other baskets either in single or as duo or trio have one or two smaller basket(s) attached on the sides. It looks as if they have ears or a nose. Actually, they are the bodies and faces; thin golden metallic structures hold these baskets when the artist exhibits them and form the bodies and in turn allow the faces to appear.

If the blankets of Project U were creating kaleidoscopic movements, these do a gymnastic dance. It’s from there that the sense of joy or pleasure arises. The “everyday” scene of the Ixcatlán baskets as they are shapeshifting. And it’s from here that the moment of “doing baskets” comes. They are no longer by-gone utilities or useless craft to preserve but the living one, asking you to move along, doing it, doing them, to doing duchdi, doing hwagutchaku, doing ʔu²sa²chã³, doing sa² la² kwa²shu¹ngu² la² shhũ¹ itzie ske², until sa kwa²ne² sa² ra² thwã¹.

I would like to repeat the question but ask differently whether doing women, doing blanket, and doing basket contribute to decolonization and indigenization, and how. The reason for this shift lies in that the artworks by Seulgi Lee seem to resist any big words, conceptual, and academic notions, even though the works led me to arrive at those. Or perhaps it’s because the artist is in the position that saying them is not a simple matter. This position may well come from having been born and growing up in South Korea, a country that was once colonized and is still in a long process of decolonization, while it is now also the colonizer even if it is still at war, a complex legacy of colonialism. Indigenization is not a familiar word either in a common sense or in critical discourse that the artist may belong to, as the word came with the western colonization. Korea was the colony of Japan, the “empire” which ironically took an anti-colonial stance against the west in its colonial venture into Asia. Still, the artist would not agree with any of this identification. Nor is it what we may get from doing blankets or baskets. 

Seulgi Lee acknowledges that living in France as a woman who was born and grew up in Korea until she came to Paris in her late teens made her question who she really was. People had kept asking her where she came from. Tired of the same questions over and again, one day she even replied, “I come from Africa.” It might be a problematic response as it could other “the Other” again. But what if it is only to be and do “the other”, among many others, and that’s what she or her work would keep doing? In that regard, it becomes even more relevant that the artist invited the figure of mischievous monstrosity in her earlier works. The work PLUIE (RAIN) (2005) is an example. It rains from the hair of a woman whose face we are not able to see, which makes a fountain.  What does the fountain imply? Water falling from the head into the fountain promises a cyclical and continuous movement that does not define a beginning or ending, isn’t this what woman – doing women – represent? In the artist words,

I’m interested in shaping this state of in-between, transformation of the heap (amas) of hairs like vegetative mass, into a liquid state. I’m trying to keep this state in suspense, the water flows as much as it can, it is a fountain functioning in a continuous loop. The sound of the water blurs our perception of time in a repetitive movement, leading us in an endless time. Or even restful, introducing a grotesque dimension on a head without voice. […]

The name PLUIE is coming from this visible movement from top to bottom, and it is a fountain emphasizing the transfigured link. I take the rain for a fountain, I like to imagine things being upside down, such as the relationship with others...⁶

IDO (2009), which sounds like the French word hideux, meaning hideous or ugly, introduced a hairy monster on the façade of a public bus and let it run across the city of Bordeaux. It “transfigures” the everyday vehicle as well as everyday roads with humor, surprise, and pleasure. What is called ugly is only to cut across what is already designed, constructed and fixed which are enabled by power like a nation state or colonial regime that conveniently makes use of identification and categorization, even to determine what is human and what is not.  If indigenization is a long process that needs somewhat painful unlearning of our possessive, predatory, extractive, and productivist habits, Seulgi Lee’s work gives support for us to undertake that process by unsettling the status quo and whatever becomes objectified, and even almost lost for that reason, animating them, bringing movements to them, or rather doing them. In doing, not ceasing at a being, we must be “affected by the other and distribute the small and the humble” through our bodies. This would lead us to “empathy on a level of pure energy,” in which we find pleasure despite all the challenges, and a fountain for an endless loop, that is the continuity of such empathetic movements. By the way, do you know, it’s said by the beloved and respected elder and scholar of indigenous epistemology Manulani Aluli Meyer, that the synonym for indigeneity is continuity⁷? As I have learned, the notion of continuity is found in intergenerational stories, stories of ancestors, stories of lands that feed us people who in turn take care of those lands, and languages and cultures living them. It is not about identity or racial distinction but the daily practice of loving: that is continuity. So now we may know where our doing with pleasure goes.