This is an article I found from Po&Sie journal from Belin. Lee expressed the emotion of humiliation in his poetry, he saw that humiliation is the most fundamental and basic instinct as a human. He also saw it as a beauty in life. It read differently in the different language (in English and French). I particularly interested in french translation of his book, his book, 남해금산 (Namhaegumsan – Soutern Sea Silk Mountain as a direct translation) came out with a title, ‘Des choses qui viennent apres la douleur’ which translates as ‘things that comes after the pain’.

Can there exist a word like ‘Namhaegumsan’, which can gesture at and simply a landscape of the mind, without being emotionally explicit?

Namhaegumsan is a famous mountain in the Southern province of Gyongsangnamdo, in South Korea. More than this, Namhaegumsan, for me is a break-up on a wet, humid summer day; it is a song I sing alone on a night that a bright moon has lured me to a dark alley; it is the hesitant, diffused lights which struggle in a heavy fog in the earliest morning.

Namhaegumsan is a signifier for charged internal memories, not just the geographical material reality of a vast mountain.

To speak aloud, how does pronunciation affect this idea? When we pronounce ‘Nam-hae-gum-san’, the lips meet each other, then slip apart, and meet each other again, then drift apart to allow the final syllable. There are spaces and gaps within words, that other meanings might find room for themselves.

A poet, Lee Seong-bok (이성복 b.1952 ~) , also tells us that his Namhaegumsan comes to be as a phoneme of soft sounds: “mmm (ㅁ, Mi-um in the Korean alphabet)” from “nam” and “gum”. It is difficult to think of equivalent phonetic parallels in English. There could be a series of unavoidably charged idea-words: Mother, mooring, merriment, memory, memorabilia, melodic, madness, mammary, omnipotent, magma, magnolia, immanent and migration.

In his poetry, Lee does not describe the mountain in itself. Instead, he identifies Namhaegumsan with the pain of a newly broken heart, and the rim of a barely-scarified wound. He invites his readers to engage with the curiosity of his sister’s unheard story, as if rending open and exposing the inside of a watermelon, and asks us to see his mother flying on a humble piece of veneer wood. Instead of simply describing the landscape of namhaegumsan, he draws us into the backroom of our lives.

To me, Namhaegumsan is an unconditional hospitality for travellers, tireless attempts to find sense in untranslatable words, a fathoming of the distance between ‘me’ and ‘her’. This distance allows us to regard each-other in an unblinking relationship.

/ part from the artist statement for the exhibition called, ‘namhaegumsan’

* More reading

Tous Les Matins L’humiliation, Lee Seong-Bok, IN Po & Sie 2005 scanned pages in PDF

Dialogue avec Lee Seong-Bok