92. Home

How we know where it is. Returning to work. New materials. Art against erasure.

Ink on hanji.

Between the bedroom and the studio, over a tall stack of volumes, lies a thick fold of The London Review of Books. It’s next to a dry bar on top of which rests a sextet of coupettes. I notice all this with pleasure every time I pass by. When I get up to replenish the tea, linen curtains at the open windows stir. My neighbors are quiet, the birds rouse. Earlier, it must have rained.

I’m back after a month of travel—Los Angeles, Seoul, Palm Springs—a solid wall with terse breaks. It was important to leave each time; I both wanted to, and didn’t. I’m tired, and glad to be put for a while.

The idea of home haunted me even in Palm Springs at the American Documentary and Animation Film Festival, where it turned out to be a pervasive theme.

“We suffer for this land because it is our home.” From No Other Land.

There was the Oscar-nominated Porcelain War (which has some sick animation in it), Black Snow in which a Siberian woman says, I don’t like vacation, actually. I like being home; and of course, the Oscar-winning documentary feature No Other Land. All of these were tremendously, obviously, heartbreakingly declarative. All of them were refusals by people who know who they are, and where home is.

My film 엄마 나라 | MOTHER LAND (trailer) is itself a 6 minute experimental animated short about absence, grief, and a longing to return. It was included in a thematic (versus animated shorts) block, about women rising above. It screened on the second night of the festival. The curation felt tight; I was impressed and grateful.

Back in NYC, I’m falling back into routine, and the level of national and global crazy feels heightened in a familiar environment. One gray morning I read "Eulogy for a Republic,” in which a former government official talks about preparing to leave the United States:

There’s a quiet kind of grief that settles in when you begin researching how to leave your country—not out of hatred, not because of some performative declaration, but because you still love a place that no longer feels like home.

It stays on my mind all day.

In the studio

Follow-through is important. Movement is important.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to expand my technical range as well as deepen knowledge of subject matter. My stories consistently pull back to origins—the Korean language, history, rituals, traumas, myths—so I went to Seoul last month to get on it.

I took a gayageum intensive; procured traditional calligraphy and painting materials; began researching shamanism. These are all beginnings, and it’s a challenge to be patient with (versus overwhelmed or discouraged by) how little I know and how much there is to study.

I finally had a chance to sit down and review the photographs I took, and recently organized. I’m digesting, poring over, looking things up, rabbit-holing, sketching:

And synthesizing into vignettes:

Procreate Dreams

I remember certain moments in Seoul over others. This one is from a cold morning on Seonbawi, a sacred peak on the outskirts of Seoul with unusual rock formations,

where I met a mysterious woman in her mid- to late-sixties who gave me a reading in her tent-shrine:

This loop recalls that strange hour and the wind on the tarp:

I decided to finish on hanji with the brushes and ink I brought back:

The smell of Korean ink, meok, is almost floral.

Hanji seems delicate because of its translucency, but it’s actually very hardy material with incredible longevity. In traditional Korean homes, it was used to cover doors and windows because it would, among other things, block wind but let in light.

It’s also hyper-responsive. A big change from working with watercolor paper; the ink spreads and pools very differently.

Calibrating pressure, punctuation, and speed:

The loop, on hanji with traditional Korean ink, has a ghostly quality. Watch it, with sound:

It’s one of many signals coming in. Eventually I’ll know what it means, and by then I’ll have gathered enough to make a picture.

Oh, and my latest essay, “Versions,” is currently in the hands of two readers. Both are professional writers, one a seasoned editor. I’ll be submitting it before the end of the month to Manuscript Sessions at MVICW which I’ll be attending in June.

Provisions

Take in good things to make good things. Right now, mostly food and silliness in the face of all the grim.

1. d4 or e4? – I saw this animated short at Amdocs. It’s so fun. Visually and intellectually interesting too.

2. Aimee France – Who Wednesday Adams might be if she were twenty-three, baked cakes for a living, and lived in Bushwick. Her “what I had for lunch today” series on Instagram, delivered in an endearing monotone, makes me smile without fail.

3. Umma: A Korean Mom's Kitchen Wisdom and 100 Family Recipes – Legit. Heartwarming (and tear-jerking) stories about family, behind it all.

4. 25 Years Ago, Joan Didion Kept a Diary. It’s About to Become Public – I am conflicted and increasingly complicit. We will speak more about this.

5. A Month in the Country – This slim little novel feels like a comforting mug of soup. It’s surprisingly funny as well. Needed it.

6. Bonus: Padma Lakshmi brutally and deliciously burns “influencers” over their review of Semma, a beloved South Indian restaurant in Manhattan. Swipe thrice to enjoy. (To be fair—and there’s more to this beef than pronunciation—I myself have cringed listening to Lakshmi mispronounce Korean foods like “gochujang.”)

In closing, how you know.

I’ve been feeling run down.

Some of why most certainly has to do with travel fatigue and taxes levied by indulgence, compounded by anxieties around politics and the future. Consequent lethargy and lowness have been additional challenges in the studio.

It may seem a bit pat, but when I feel physically and mentally set back like this, I do ten days of what I call “detox lite.”

The core elements: limited diet, 5:30am to rise, miles and lifting before 10am, 11pm to bed. Let me know if you want to discuss further, but this has a 100% track record of snapping me out of a funk by Day Five. Extrication isn’t a perfectly straight, up-and-to-the-right, situation; more a positive average of oscillating points in that direction. But I’m on Day Four, and sure as sure, I turned the corner yesterday.

In a recent dream, I found myself in a rotating dormitory. Climbing to the fifth floor, I looked out over a shifting balcony whose view was dizzying; it felt like outer space. The building tilted until I elided into a walk alongside my friend Max on cobblestones below. I can never find my room!, I complained. Max, now someone else, replied: you just lean into the wind; that’s how you know.

Until next time.