Visual PDF
Published 2024
Author: Kay Slater
Introduction to alternative text catalogue:
The alternative text catalogue project was created by the staff and contractors on the Accessibility Committee at Grunt Gallery. Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, straddling the line between information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!
Creative Access Descriptions:
Cover (front):
The cover features a cool blue background highlighting a central image, framed by the exhibition details: ‘grunt gallery, November 23rd, 2023 to January 20th, 2024’ at the top and ‘Sora Park Daughter, Daughter, Daughter’ at the bottom. The focal image shows a square, grey plexiglass panel depicting a baby cradled in adult hands. This panel, set against deep bell pepper-red walls, takes on a dark red hue. A second panel is installed perpendicularly to this, but the image cannot be seen from the photo’s angle. However, the room’s lighting casts a yellow shadow from this panel onto the cement floor, creating a play of colours amongst the otherwise red glow from the walls. Beyond the panel, a row of oval discs hang against the back wall, reminiscent of sliced cylindrical rice cakes spilling to the left.
Cover (back):
This page lists image credits for Dennis Ha’s photos used in the catalogue, all of which are installation shots from the 2023 exhibition. The images listed are named and described throughout the alt text catalogue as they appear.
Cover inside:
The cover’s inside pages are a single image that runs across the folded double-spread, interrupted by the inner catalogue’s pages. The image is a wide shot of the entire exhibition as seen when one enters the space. The left wall and page feature the suspended, cascading rice sculpture dramatically illuminated from above with red gels whose light pools on the cement floor. On the right is a wall installation with a centrally installed sentence “…and she lived happily ever after” in glacial blue styrofoam serif letters. Underneath this is the all-caps text “WITH HER THREE DOGS!” in the shape of Sora’s own handwriting, arranged in a curved line like a smile. To the left of the centred text are three squiggly sculptures depicting braided Korean hair, and on the right side, one of three suspended dog sculptures can be seen; however, the other dog sculptures are visible in the reflection of a framed plexiglass panel, installed in the centre of the gallery between these two walls which is split by the fold of the catalogue.
Page 1:
The page is all text. The footer shows the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black painted brushstroke) above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits.
The interior pages are thinner than the cover but still feel thicker than photocopy paper.
The credits read
grunt gallery
Daughter, Daughter, Daughter
Sora Park
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Whess Harman
Writers: Whess Harman and Areum Kim
Design: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photography: Dennis Ha
Printed in Canada by Mitchell Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-25-9
All Rights Reserved. Publication copyright 2023 grunt gallery. Artwork copyright 2023 the artists. Text copyright 2023 the authors. All images courtesy of the artists.
Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.
Note from transcriber: the following paragraph has Indigenous spellings of nation names followed by the English translation.
grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty and towards a respectful relationship with this place.
grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.
Page 2 and 3:
The double-page image shows the middle section of the installation, where four plexiglass structures have been installed in a zig-zag pattern bisecting the gallery space. Three structures are square plexiglass panels in grey, yellow, and dark green. Each panel displays an outlined illustration of a baby. The fourth structure, featured centrally and prominently in the photo spread, is an accordion room divider of translucent red plexiglass. The folding screen illustrates baby Sora crying at her doljanchi, her first birthday party, wearing Hanbok – feminine traditional Korean clothes. Her Hanbok consists of a colourful jacket made of strips of embroidered ribbon and a full, wide, wrap-around silk skirt that billows around baby Sora’s crying form. Since the sheets are translucent, one can see the sentence …and she lived happily ever after with her three dogs on the wall beyond.
Page 4 (left):
The same blue as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image is a close-up of the yellow plexiglass panel, the colour of sunflower petals, which is seen at the bottom with the cement floor on the other side. However, the red wall beyond causes a colour shift to orange, and the pale blue letters of the sentence …and she lived happily ever after with her three dogs, become yellowish green. The plexi image is the baby Sora cradled horizontally in her mom’s hands. Baby Sora’s expression is neutral, neither crying nor smiling. Her eyes are open, and she stares directly at you.
Page 5:
A white page titled “Whess Harman, Curator’s Introduction”.
Page 6 and 7:
The essay is laid out in three columns across the two pages.
The essay reads:
Red walls for drama. Red light for drama. Red rice cakes under red light floating on a red wall for drama; I think Sora Park was successful in conveying a sense of drama with these works. It was the word that kept coming up as the screens were shuffled around to work within the space. When you walk around the back of the screens, the plexi goes alight in grey, red, yellow and green, but you are awash in a low, drenched red.
In this exhibition, Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, Sora explores saju, a Korean practice of fortune telling and divination. Specifically, she focuses on the common and repeated reading given to her that predicts that fulfillment will come through herself having a child. The red becomes a spotlight, but also the recessed red square of a saju divination chart. In this prospective world the continuance of daughters becomes an utopic unending. There is a tempting rhythm in that; passing a lineage through time and being connected through matrilineal lines in a path that moves in each direction. But in the immediate present, it’s also a tremendous obligation that carries the crush of thousands of years of culture that has shaped what and who a daughter is and expected to be. In the gallery, Sora’s work in this exhibition humorously rejects the foretold utopia of daughters bringing forth an endless line of more daughters, but even when gazing affectionately at the dog butts and their accompanying braids, there is still a reflexive tightening in my chest as I recall my own firm exit from the responsibility of continuing the family line. It caused some drama, of the disappointment variety, followed by more than a few half-hearted lingering years of, “well, you say that now, but you never know.”
When we received Sora’s proposal the tension that was so attractive was the way the proposed work was attempting to confront the enormity of expectation to fulfill a destiny of motherhood, while also finding agency in the feeling of incredulity that comes when faced with the expectation to concede to destiny. The assumption that a child-free woman is someone who is by default unfulfilled sounds archaic, but it is and will continue to be an assertion made in many communities and upheld as cultural value and legacy. There is personal and cultural tension in this work but it is also very familiar. In my own, and in many Indigenous cultures, the term “life giver” has been used repeatedly in a strictly biological sense, diminishing the many other roles in community that are required to give and make life and community whole. Roles among which cisgendered, intersex and transgendered community members can themselves be joyfully fulfilled without having a biological relation. There is so much depth, complexity and curiosity about gender, community and familial legacy that gets ironed out in narrow questions like, “when/are you going to have children?” or “are you going to give me grandbabies?” that feels similar to the futures offered to Sora though the saju readings.
Daughter, Daughter, Daughter does not offer a resolution to the anxious burden of expected and obligatory motherhood, but it does come sideways with a quick jab at the ribs like a needling reminder; what if children don’t inherently secure one’s happiness? Why should we consider reproductive opportunities as fated, rather than intentional choices? In seeking autonomous, unfated choice, Sora’s work meets at the dividing line between past and future, in an imperfect and pressurized present. Here, the red saturation of the exhibition holds the alarm of divinely determined futures but proposes, cheekily, that happily ever after can be a purposeful choice, scaled to our desires and capacity.
Page 8:
The same blue as the cover fills the page around a black-bordered photograph. The image shows a close-up of the 3 squiggly forms, depicting braided Korean hair joyfully flying in the air. The inner plaits of the braids are the same glacial blue as the letters, and the sculptures are otherwise red on the top and upper sides, though not as intense as the red wall. Sora describes it as similar to the orangish-red of a cooked lobster. These are suspended to the left of the …and she lived sentence, and above the large handwritten capital letters of the words with her from the sentence with her 3 dogs. The E in the word her looks like a reserve letter or backwards 3.
Page 9:
A white page titled “Areum Kim, How to move pillars: A reflection and a rebuttal to a fortune reading”.
Page 10 through 13:
The essay is spread over four pages in seven columns. A single footnote is embedded in the essay for this alternative text format. The essay reads
The artist received a saju reading that motherhood is her destiny, that once she gives birth to a daughter prosperity will follow. In the fortune chart, this prediction is etched into a red cell. A red world that signals a turn in fortune, as long as that world includes a daughter. Saju is often presented as advice and an imperative at the same time. Sometimes it seems that the advice-imperative is confined within the limited social imaginary, in this case a limited imagination for a young biological woman. In this exhibition, a red world ushers us into an alternative, a question, rebuttal, loophole.
Saju is a popular divination practice in South Korea, which translates to four pillars. A person is a house whose four pillars are erected on the year, month, day, and time of birth. Fate is transposed to an eight-cell chart, four columns, two rows of heaven and earth, lettered and colour-coded. Thus the word “eight letters,” or palja came to mean “destiny.”
Within this worldview, the past, the singular moment of first breath, mandates, directs, molds, the course of one’s life. The die has been cast. The fortune readings then, guide, conduct, inform the choices one c/should make in life. Saju readings often elaborate on social and familiar relations, placing an individual in a web of cosmological and sociocultural mandates.
In this exhibition Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, the artist Sora Park responds to this cosmic and cultural imperative to motherhood, delving into the familiar and cultural memories of a diasporic individual. The gallery space becomes a certain red world that the artist builds as a response, weaving in multiple realities of women across time: hers, her mothers, other women of history, namely a famous mother in the Korean collective memory. The first part of the exhibition acknowledges a 16th century woman, who is known as the mother of a renowned calligrapher. Barely named, she is also one of the only few documented female figures in pre-modernity Korea. Both Park and I have learned and read about this story in our respective elementary educations in Korea, which goes:
The wise mother, seeing her calligrapher son growing too arrogant of his skills, challenges him to a bet. In total darkness, she would slice rice cakes and he would write. When the lights turned on: the domestic task done to perfection, a boasted artistry embarrassingly botched.
Did the calligrapher’s mother receive a fortune to birth greatness? At least she was mothering her son’s way to greatness. We don’t know anything else about her. The oversized, red sculptures of rice cake protrude from the red wall of the gallery like a playful nod to the sanctified myth of model mother/womanhood, one of the only few examples that the artist could locate within the Korean cultural memory. (Not coincidentally, the first woman to appear on Korean bills is another mother who raised a great son.) As if mimicking the silence of the female archive, the red light and walls subsume the red rice cakes into a soft obscurity. Using a form that is so uncannily large and playful, the artist puts laughter between herself and this archetype from the past. I imagine a laughter of identification (look at what they are still telling us 500 years later) and relief of distance (I might have a choice in the matter).
Like the tempo of the exhibition title Daughter, Daughter, Daughter, the gallery space is roughly divided into three temporal sections, past, present and the future. The temporal aspect seems to resound with the finicky notion of time within a worldview of predeterminism; the future has somewhat already been shaped by the past, so where is the wiggle room, the personal agency? In the gallery, the rice cake sculpture adorns the section of the past, as the artist contemplates the dismal past female role models offered to her childhood. Zig-zagging the gallery are plexiglass structures of green, yellow, grey and red, UV printed with drawings from the artist’s personal archive. The artist appears as a young daughter, severed from much context, save for a set of motherly hands that hold her. The plexiglass section is titled Present (My Mom and I). Interestingly, the present is entirely constructed of fragmented snapshots of her and her mother’s past. This past-present is shared between the mother and daughter, as are the rituals and belief systems coded in the plexi sculptures. The folding screen is used for jesa, death anniversary rituals, where the front side demarcates the living, the back side the spirits. There is a picture of the artist at her doljanchi (a first birthday party) when a child is tasked to draw from a group of objects that will signify their future. The colours of the plexiglass, serving as filters to look through, are drawn from Park’s saju chart.
In the Present, the artist and her mother are intertwined, as her mother transmits her rituals to her daughter. Generational transmission, fragmented through migration and bilingual translation, are deeply implicated in how the artist might perceive her past, present and future. After all, the saju reading itself was given to the artist by her mother. The plexiglass panels speak to such transmissibility, readily allowing in the view of the other side. And the view is coloured with predetermination, that an individual’s life has already been drawn. As fatalistic predeterminism is, Park’s work notes that there are other assortment of predetermined rules enforced on us by structures like patriarchy anyway, like the rice cakes. The exhibition ponders the reverberations of receiving a fortune reading like the strong suggestion to mother a daughter, which feels authoritative because it seems to be confined within the limited social imaginary, in this case a limited imagination for a young biological woman.
Walking through the Present, the viewer is poised to look at the proposed future through these tinted glasses. Park told me that once she asked a saju reader, does being a dog mom count? (He did not respond.) In her version of the future, happily wagging tails of dogs and flying braids flank blue letters that jovially shout “…and she lived happily ever after / WITH HER THREE DOGS!” It’s a foil to the wall of rice cakes, with its jovial, carefree claim to the artist’s own take on motherhood, and ultimately, on self-determination. The sculptures transition from red to blue, a colour that is not present in the artist’s saju chart. The braid is a status symbol of a non-married woman, of girlhood. Here, Park opens a frail moment of a yes, and if so. She entertains the saju reading while opening up a flexible moment of interpretation and indeterminacy. And all of these thought processes in the exhibition are underscored by the fact that the artist is concerned as much with the past as she is with the future. Situating herself in past mothers and her own mother, the artist affirms the ostensible links between individuals to collective memory. According to Claudia Rankine’s poem, the past is not something we can leave behind. She says, “It’s buried in you; it turned your flesh into its own cupboard.” (footnote: Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American lyric. Graywolf Press.)
Going back to the red plexi folding screen⏤in the gallery, the viewer can see the screen as both a backdrop to the past and backdrop to the present. The future may seem playful, but there’s a forcefulness of will behind it. The past is buried, while occasionally bursting onto the surface like the unnamed mother, motherly hands that hold you and press on a fortune reading, your own hands that divined one of the first fortunes at the first birthday party. In fact, the saju reading only gained a kind of validity when Park learned of her great-grandfather’s death; that he was a student in Germany, whose death was heavily predicted by the superstitious beliefs of the Germans. It may be easy (or compelling) to wave away a fortune reading a mother sends you, especially if it’s a practice from the land you and your family left behind. But sometimes the past hurtles from the depths to shout ‘what if!’ The exhibition is created at the moment of a suspension of disbelief, and then unfolding from there. I find myself asking, how deep do those four pillars go?
Page 14:
A white page with a single column of text. Sora Park’s name is bolded, and the page is numbered and labelled Biographies in the footer. The main text reads:
Sora Park (she/her) is a Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist living on the traditional territories of the q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), Máthxwi (Matsqui) and Se’mya’me’ (Semiahmoo) First Nations. She received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and received her MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Bergen, Norway. In her art practice, she is currently interested in exploring the space between clarity and confusion brought on by diasporic experiences.
Page 15:
A white page with text. Areum Kim’s name is bolded. It reads:
Areum Kim (she/her) is a writer, book-maker and arts organizer based in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, AB. Her research is often concerned with diaspora and translation. With her collaborator Teres, she runs Yolkless Press, an initiative to make artists’ publications.
Page 16:
The same blue as the cover fills the page around a stacked pair of black-bordered photographs. Both images show the tactile objects from the show, with the top image featuring a pair of hands touching one of the smaller objects and the bottom image showing the hands touching a piece of plexiglass. The smaller objects are miniatures of the rice cake ovals and the dog mom letters, braids, and dog sculptures from the wall installations. The plexi is a red square panel with a section mimicking the folding screen where the UV-printed illustration can be felt and seen.
Return to the Alternative Exhibitions Catalogue Directory