Some Aspects of Love

Installation view of Some Aspects of Love at the Ringling College of Art and Design

Video (projection), Audio component: yes, Performance by the artist, 4min 33sec//

The artist’s performance of readings from “A Lover’s Discourse” and the glue – a metaphor for love for its bonding property for joining two objects, alter the original meaning of the texts in displacement.

The left panel of the video shows the artist reading excerpts from the book, “A Lover’s Discourse” by the linguist, Roland Barthes with copies of the texts scattered on the floor. On the right panel, the artist reads the Instruction and Warning on “Stick’n Seal Adhesive” with the tubes of glue on the floor.

In the artist’s performance, emotions from “A Lover’s Discourse” evaporate in the writer’s esoteric words in his attempt to analyze love, while seemingly dry instruction and warning from the glue is read dramatically to bring out the emotion of love. The original meanings of the book and the texts from the glue are lost by the contrasting emotions in the performance and a new interpretation emerges. In the new context, these two subjects are altered with an entirely new meaning by the performer’s foreign Korean accent in her reading of the texts written in French and English.