On the Genuineness that Would Never Be Reached Anyway
어차피 닿지 않을 진심에 대하여: 박천
Edited by Cheon, Park
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
1.
In the first place, there is nothing external you can bring forth or prove as the basis for calling yourself “I”. It consists of what we can collectively refer to as the “inner world”, such as thoughts and memories drifting through our minds, or elusive emotions. The irony is that these unprovable experiences are precisely what constitute our sense of self. What’s even more absurd is that we try to communicate with others using this uncertain internal information. Yet, regrettably, this inner information is never transmitted to others in its pure, unaltered form. Even in the moment we utter “mom”—the most universal word—the warmth of the memories contained in that word inevitably differs from person to person. At this point, we are confronted with one of humanity’s oldest questions: Can language ever assure the transmission of truth? And it is precisely this inevitable failure—this condition of “the imperfection of transmission”—that Eun-mi Ryu takes as the premise of her work.
2.
Before Eun-mi Ryu took the concept of “the imperfection of transmission” as the premise of her work, her starting point was as pure as that of a young girl. It began with a somewhat sentimental question: “Why can’t my emotions be fully conveyed to another person?” Yet, whether by intention or by chance, the fact that the artist did not begin by tackling the grand discourse of “emotion” itself, but instead began by focusing first on the smallest unit of information—the signal—laid a remarkably solid foundation for her later explorations. To approach her emotionally charged question, Ryu has brought the signal—the most primal form of communication—which retains only the bare function of transmission, after taking out the complex inner feeling and context. A signal is the most basic system for conveying information through two predetermined states—such as “on” and “off” for instance. Yet this seemingly clear system actually relies entirely on the void of “nothingness.” For example, without the interval of darkness between the light turning off and on again, the signal would lose all meaning. Eun-mi Ryu’s <Seek Our Signal-searcher (2019)> delves precisely into this idea. The work takes the form of a video showing a small light flickering in the rhythm of Morse code within a pitch-dark forest. What the viewer encounters is not the light itself, but the afterimage left when the light goes out, along with the darkness and time that fill the spaces between each flash. The artist visually reveals the paradox that meaning is completed in the interval of the absence of light—the blank moments in between. If perfect communication were to mean the complete presence of information, then a signal system that depends on its absence as a necessary condition is, from the outset, born with embedded failure. Meaning can never be complete by itself; it exists only by leaning on its opposite—on the state of “nothingness.”
<Seek Our Signal-searcher> 2019, single channel video, 1min23sec
3.
If even the most primitive unit of communication—the signal—cannot be complete, then can a “collective experience,” tangled with the memories and emotions of numerous individuals, ever truly be shared as a single meaning? Eun-mi Ryu delved into this vast question through the landscape of Daegu, the city that stood at the very epicenter of the pandemic in 2020. Of course, the pandemic was not intentionally planned by the artist for the sake of her work. Yet, with uncanny timing, Daegu—the origin point of COVID-19 in Korea—became a vast laboratory for what might be called “an unshareable collective experience.” And Ryu, who was living in the city, became a witness standing at the very heart of that experiment. Everyone saw the same “empty city,” but that landscape was imprinted differently upon each person’s consciousness. For some, it became a scene of infectious fear amplified daily by the media; for others, a source of anxiety about livelihoods abruptly halted; and for yet others, an uncanny sense of liberation from the noise of everyday life. What was shared was merely the event of the disaster itself—the content of that experience remained perfectly private. Eun-mi Ryu’s series <Seesaw> exposes this mirage of collective experience through the medium of lenticular printing. As the viewer takes a single step, the image of an empty city suddenly transforms into the cold test pattern color bars—a visual signal that all transmissions have ceased. In that instant, the viewer visually experiences the moment when the media speakers, which had been spreading fear just seconds before, are switched off. In the end, even the memories we believe we “experienced together” are revealed to be nothing more than the sum of countless separate videos replaying from each individual’s perspective—a cold truth laid bare. If even the narratives of a community are so fragmented, then how can the smallest utterances of an individual ever be transmitted at all?
<Seesaw_101> 2020, lenticular, 100x75cm
4.
To address this question, Eun-mi Ryu places the most fundamental Other—the one who makes human existence possible—on the table of her artistic experiment: the mom. “Mom” is likely the very first word any human being utters after birth, and perhaps the one most frequently spoken throughout life. Within this single sign are layered the origins of a person’s existence, relationships, and memories—more densely than within any other word. The artist collected recordings of different people saying the word “mom,” then converted each voice into data—into visualized sound waves. In this process, all the memories and emotions embedded in the voices disappear, leaving behind only the data consisting of oscillating amplitudes drawn on a monitor. Then she solidifies this data into three-dimensional sculptures, which she collectively titles <The Mothers>. As a result, all the “moms” of the world stand together in the exhibition space—yet never being able to be as one. Each exists as a distinct physical form with its own height and shape. However, this work does not simply state the obvious fact—that your mother and my mother are different. Rather, it reveals the truth that the same signifier, “mom,” which we all use identically in language, operates within each of us as a completely different constellation of memories and emotions—that is, as a unique signified.
Conversely, Ryu’s series <Sentimental Waves> explores how this same voice data undergoes yet another variation once it enters the realm of interpretation. Onto the cold data, emotion-stripped of recorded voices, the artist overlays another imperfect system of signs—“color”. Just as red might signify passion to someone and danger to another, color too is a floating sign depending on its context, unanchored to any fixed meaning. The encounter between the waveform and the color—a physical trace of the voice and a cultural symbol—becomes a visual testament to how a single piece of information can splinter into infinite fragments of interpretation. In summary, Ryu’s another series <Frequency> anatomizes how the original information inevitably disintegrates into fragments losing its original form in the process by which uttered information is first transformed to data (The Mothers), and then reinterpreted as a sign (Sentimental Waves).
<The mothers> 2022, Wood, Variable Installation
<sentimental wave#sl> 2022,lenticular and wood, 75x40.3cm
5.
Perhaps the fundamental reason an individual’s utterance fragments so easily lies in the very system we rely on—language—which may have been incomplete from the very beginning. In fact, long before Eun-mi Ryu’s work, people back in the 20th century had already left us a monumental spoiler in response to this question. They declared that language is not a mirror reflecting reality, but an unstable system that operates only according to its own internal rules. In other words, in language, “error” is not a bug—it is the default. Ryu’s series <Error> customizes this structural fissure within the linguistic system. The work sets a subtle trap through imagery reminiscent of the infamous Blue Screen of Death—a computer system’s dreaded error screen which we never would like to face. On that screen, two different English translations of the Korean word “정의(jeong-eui)”, namely “justice” and “definition,” are layered together in lenticular form, so that depending on the viewer’s position, only one word can be read at a time. But this is not merely all about the trap. The genuine twist lies in the reversal arrangements putting the lexical meaning of “definition” behind the word “justice,” and the meaning of “justice” behind the word “definition.” This seemingly simple arrangement can be a conceptual snare because the artist exploited a subtle theoretical gap in the medium itself. Based on her long experience with lenticular materials, Ryu knew that while theory says the two images should appear alternately depending on viewing angle, in reality, both register almost simultaneously on the retina. Most brains, unable to endure such uncertain signals, hastily resolve the ambiguity by fusing it into a single word, either more familiar or first perceived one. Without consciously pausing and looking closely, this double-layered trap remains almost impossible to detect. In this way, we dare to believe to be true the incomplete information built within our own narrow view. After all, what this series targets is not merely the imperfection of language itself, but rather the intellectual arrogance of ourselves who live our lives completely oblivious to such imperfection.
6.
To summarize, Eun-mi Ryu’s work begins from an ontological condition: the moment internal information is expressed externally, it can no longer remain as the original but inevitably becomes processed data. Furthermore, her work explores the structural issue that even the system through which such data is transmitted must rely on absence that is a void. It also addresses the differences in reception, where even the same external world is imprinted differently within each person’s consciousness; and the limits of expression, in which each person’s accumulated inner world, though articulated through the same signs, ultimately disperses into different signified meanings. Finally, it even examines the cognitive blind spot that forgets all these errors in its haste to construct meaning. Through her various works, Ryu demonstrates the proposition of “the imperfection of transmission.”
That does not mean, however, that Eun-mi Ryu’s work seeks to verify the old philosophical debates as if following a textbook. Rather, it should be read as an attempt to demonstrate the unexpected possibilities that arise from such inevitable failures. What fails to be transmitted is not a rupture, but a condition through which new interpretations can emerge. Just as the blank intervals between flickering lights complete a signal, as the darkened cities of the pandemic were reconstructed through each person’s distinct memories, and as the word “mom” came to stand as sculptures unique to each, information has always been re-read anew within some kind of gap. Without that gap, the act of “communication” would have been taxidermized within a single fixed meaning, excluding all other possibilities. In that case, only the past might have remained in our speech, while the present and future might have been rendered unspeakable.
Therefore, Eun-mi Ryu’s work functions not as a repetition of failure, but as a device for exploring new interpretations. Precisely because it never reaches complete contact, it gives rise to more questions and creates more diverse relationships. Just as we can never fully reach one another, and yet, paradoxically, that very impossibility allows us to endlessly continue imagining one another.
2025.11. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. November. 2025. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.
On the Genuineness that Would Never Be Reached Anyway
어차피 닿지 않을 진심에 대하여: 박천
Edited by Cheon, Park
번역: 김미혜
Translated by Mihye Kim
1.
In the first place, there is nothing external you can bring forth or prove as the basis for calling yourself “I”. It consists of what we can collectively refer to as the “inner world”, such as thoughts and memories drifting through our minds, or elusive emotions. The irony is that these unprovable experiences are precisely what constitute our sense of self. What’s even more absurd is that we try to communicate with others using this uncertain internal information. Yet, regrettably, this inner information is never transmitted to others in its pure, unaltered form. Even in the moment we utter “mom”—the most universal word—the warmth of the memories contained in that word inevitably differs from person to person. At this point, we are confronted with one of humanity’s oldest questions: Can language ever assure the transmission of truth? And it is precisely this inevitable failure—this condition of “the imperfection of transmission”—that Eun-mi Ryu takes as the premise of her work.
2.
Before Eun-mi Ryu took the concept of “the imperfection of transmission” as the premise of her work, her starting point was as pure as that of a young girl. It began with a somewhat sentimental question: “Why can’t my emotions be fully conveyed to another person?” Yet, whether by intention or by chance, the fact that the artist did not begin by tackling the grand discourse of “emotion” itself, but instead began by focusing first on the smallest unit of information—the signal—laid a remarkably solid foundation for her later explorations. To approach her emotionally charged question, Ryu has brought the signal—the most primal form of communication—which retains only the bare function of transmission, after taking out the complex inner feeling and context. A signal is the most basic system for conveying information through two predetermined states—such as “on” and “off” for instance. Yet this seemingly clear system actually relies entirely on the void of “nothingness.” For example, without the interval of darkness between the light turning off and on again, the signal would lose all meaning. Eun-mi Ryu’s <Seek Our Signal-searcher (2019)> delves precisely into this idea. The work takes the form of a video showing a small light flickering in the rhythm of Morse code within a pitch-dark forest. What the viewer encounters is not the light itself, but the afterimage left when the light goes out, along with the darkness and time that fill the spaces between each flash. The artist visually reveals the paradox that meaning is completed in the interval of the absence of light—the blank moments in between. If perfect communication were to mean the complete presence of information, then a signal system that depends on its absence as a necessary condition is, from the outset, born with embedded failure. Meaning can never be complete by itself; it exists only by leaning on its opposite—on the state of “nothingness.”
<Seek Our Signal-searcher> 2019, single channel video, 1min23sec
3.
If even the most primitive unit of communication—the signal—cannot be complete, then can a “collective experience,” tangled with the memories and emotions of numerous individuals, ever truly be shared as a single meaning? Eun-mi Ryu delved into this vast question through the landscape of Daegu, the city that stood at the very epicenter of the pandemic in 2020. Of course, the pandemic was not intentionally planned by the artist for the sake of her work. Yet, with uncanny timing, Daegu—the origin point of COVID-19 in Korea—became a vast laboratory for what might be called “an unshareable collective experience.” And Ryu, who was living in the city, became a witness standing at the very heart of that experiment. Everyone saw the same “empty city,” but that landscape was imprinted differently upon each person’s consciousness. For some, it became a scene of infectious fear amplified daily by the media; for others, a source of anxiety about livelihoods abruptly halted; and for yet others, an uncanny sense of liberation from the noise of everyday life. What was shared was merely the event of the disaster itself—the content of that experience remained perfectly private. Eun-mi Ryu’s series <Seesaw> exposes this mirage of collective experience through the medium of lenticular printing. As the viewer takes a single step, the image of an empty city suddenly transforms into the cold test pattern color bars—a visual signal that all transmissions have ceased. In that instant, the viewer visually experiences the moment when the media speakers, which had been spreading fear just seconds before, are switched off. In the end, even the memories we believe we “experienced together” are revealed to be nothing more than the sum of countless separate videos replaying from each individual’s perspective—a cold truth laid bare. If even the narratives of a community are so fragmented, then how can the smallest utterances of an individual ever be transmitted at all?
<Seesaw_101> 2020, lenticular, 100x75cm
4.
To address this question, Eun-mi Ryu places the most fundamental Other—the one who makes human existence possible—on the table of her artistic experiment: the mom. “Mom” is likely the very first word any human being utters after birth, and perhaps the one most frequently spoken throughout life. Within this single sign are layered the origins of a person’s existence, relationships, and memories—more densely than within any other word. The artist collected recordings of different people saying the word “mom,” then converted each voice into data—into visualized sound waves. In this process, all the memories and emotions embedded in the voices disappear, leaving behind only the data consisting of oscillating amplitudes drawn on a monitor. Then she solidifies this data into three-dimensional sculptures, which she collectively titles <The Mothers>. As a result, all the “moms” of the world stand together in the exhibition space—yet never being able to be as one. Each exists as a distinct physical form with its own height and shape. However, this work does not simply state the obvious fact—that your mother and my mother are different. Rather, it reveals the truth that the same signifier, “mom,” which we all use identically in language, operates within each of us as a completely different constellation of memories and emotions—that is, as a unique signified.
Conversely, Ryu’s series <Sentimental Waves> explores how this same voice data undergoes yet another variation once it enters the realm of interpretation. Onto the cold data, emotion-stripped of recorded voices, the artist overlays another imperfect system of signs—“color”. Just as red might signify passion to someone and danger to another, color too is a floating sign depending on its context, unanchored to any fixed meaning. The encounter between the waveform and the color—a physical trace of the voice and a cultural symbol—becomes a visual testament to how a single piece of information can splinter into infinite fragments of interpretation. In summary, Ryu’s another series <Frequency> anatomizes how the original information inevitably disintegrates into fragments losing its original form in the process by which uttered information is first transformed to data (The Mothers), and then reinterpreted as a sign (Sentimental Waves).
<The mothers> 2022, Wood, Variable Installation
<sentimental wave#sl> 2022,lenticular and wood, 75x40.3cm
5.
Perhaps the fundamental reason an individual’s utterance fragments so easily lies in the very system we rely on—language—which may have been incomplete from the very beginning. In fact, long before Eun-mi Ryu’s work, people back in the 20th century had already left us a monumental spoiler in response to this question. They declared that language is not a mirror reflecting reality, but an unstable system that operates only according to its own internal rules. In other words, in language, “error” is not a bug—it is the default. Ryu’s series <Error> customizes this structural fissure within the linguistic system. The work sets a subtle trap through imagery reminiscent of the infamous Blue Screen of Death—a computer system’s dreaded error screen which we never would like to face. On that screen, two different English translations of the Korean word “정의(jeong-eui)”, namely “justice” and “definition,” are layered together in lenticular form, so that depending on the viewer’s position, only one word can be read at a time. But this is not merely all about the trap. The genuine twist lies in the reversal arrangements putting the lexical meaning of “definition” behind the word “justice,” and the meaning of “justice” behind the word “definition.” This seemingly simple arrangement can be a conceptual snare because the artist exploited a subtle theoretical gap in the medium itself. Based on her long experience with lenticular materials, Ryu knew that while theory says the two images should appear alternately depending on viewing angle, in reality, both register almost simultaneously on the retina. Most brains, unable to endure such uncertain signals, hastily resolve the ambiguity by fusing it into a single word, either more familiar or first perceived one. Without consciously pausing and looking closely, this double-layered trap remains almost impossible to detect. In this way, we dare to believe to be true the incomplete information built within our own narrow view. After all, what this series targets is not merely the imperfection of language itself, but rather the intellectual arrogance of ourselves who live our lives completely oblivious to such imperfection.
6.
To summarize, Eun-mi Ryu’s work begins from an ontological condition: the moment internal information is expressed externally, it can no longer remain as the original but inevitably becomes processed data. Furthermore, her work explores the structural issue that even the system through which such data is transmitted must rely on absence that is a void. It also addresses the differences in reception, where even the same external world is imprinted differently within each person’s consciousness; and the limits of expression, in which each person’s accumulated inner world, though articulated through the same signs, ultimately disperses into different signified meanings. Finally, it even examines the cognitive blind spot that forgets all these errors in its haste to construct meaning. Through her various works, Ryu demonstrates the proposition of “the imperfection of transmission.”
That does not mean, however, that Eun-mi Ryu’s work seeks to verify the old philosophical debates as if following a textbook. Rather, it should be read as an attempt to demonstrate the unexpected possibilities that arise from such inevitable failures. What fails to be transmitted is not a rupture, but a condition through which new interpretations can emerge. Just as the blank intervals between flickering lights complete a signal, as the darkened cities of the pandemic were reconstructed through each person’s distinct memories, and as the word “mom” came to stand as sculptures unique to each, information has always been re-read anew within some kind of gap. Without that gap, the act of “communication” would have been taxidermized within a single fixed meaning, excluding all other possibilities. In that case, only the past might have remained in our speech, while the present and future might have been rendered unspeakable.
Therefore, Eun-mi Ryu’s work functions not as a repetition of failure, but as a device for exploring new interpretations. Precisely because it never reaches complete contact, it gives rise to more questions and creates more diverse relationships. Just as we can never fully reach one another, and yet, paradoxically, that very impossibility allows us to endlessly continue imagining one another.
2025.11. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. November. 2025. Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.