Despite its serialization period, it was praised for delivering a highly polished ending and was achieving considerable commercial success as well.
In November, at an event hosted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Content Promotion Agency, her work won the grand prize.
She had won many awards large and small over the years, but this one felt different in weight and meaning. The result of an award does not directly prove a work’s passion or perfection, but it was true that the thought of someone having watched her long struggle and acknowledged it brought comfort.
The ceremony was on a Monday in the second week of December, about two weeks before Christmas.
Because his work hours weren’t flexible, Ihyeon’s father couldn’t attend the ceremony, so instead he prepared a small plan to congratulate her.
He knew that, although she wanted to accept her parents’ efforts, the love and hate she had carried for so long got in the way. When the news of the award came, he—if no one else—could tell that she wanted to hurry and tell her parents. At the same time, he understood how she hesitated to contact them, unsure whether her parents would truly be happy about a prize in comics rather than painting.
First he contacted her parents without telling her and shared the news. As he expected, they were delighted—so delighted it came through clearly even over the phone. No, they were almost excited to the point of giddiness.
He suggested that on the evening of the ceremony they all celebrate her together. They readily accepted and thanked him for the idea.
At the time, because of an issue with her father’s exhibition, the two were staying briefly in Europe, but they immediately called their travel agency to change the date on their return tickets and, paying not-insubstantial fees, canceled all the remaining hotel reservations. For the sole purpose of congratulating their daughter for winning a prize for “mere comics.” Willingly.
In Ihyeon’s father’s view, she was someone who deserved all this happiness.
She did not begrudge giving up many advantages that her parents’ wealth and honor could have placed easily in her hands. Rather than simply jumping aboard the life others had laid out, she chose to live as a process of learning about herself.
The girl who had shone with passion in her early twenties was now on the verge of forty, about to step onto the road of middle age.
She was someone fully deserving of congratulations and support from parents who regretted their past, from a husband who was a sturdy comrade, a sweet lover, and an ardent fan, and from a beloved son showing rich talent under his grandparents’ influence.
He booked a restaurant a little more upscale than the places they usually went. He would pick up Ihyeon after school and head to a restaurant near the express bus terminal; she agreed to come straight there after the ceremony. That morning she had joked, face alight, that she didn’t know how many years it had been since a hotel buffet and that she’d fill up on king crab and Peking duck. She had no idea her parents were getting on a flight from Berlin to celebrate her award.
The plan was for her parents to arrive first and be seated at the restaurant; then the three of them would meet in the lobby downstairs and go up together. Once they were shown to their reserved seats, her parents—just arrived from Berlin—would hand her a bouquet with their congratulations. A simple little operation.
But due to weather in Berlin, takeoff clearance was delayed, and when Ihyeon’s grandparents landed at Incheon they were about an hour behind schedule. They started heading into the city.
Fortunately, the ceremony was running longer than expected, but even so, getting to the hotel in Gangnam meant the grandparents were bound to arrive later than she did.
Ihyeon’s mother was already in a taxi. The news said a Line 2 train had broken down at Seongsu Station, delaying the whole line, so she chose a taxi, which she rarely took.
Ihyeon’s father changed the plan. He switched the restaurant to a place where the grandparents, just in from the airport, might be able to arrive even a little earlier than she could.
He called her and asked what she thought about changing the venue to the Thai restaurant the three of them frequented. She agreed it was a good idea. It was also the place the three had celebrated when Ihyeon won his prize, which made it more meaningful.
Should we go through Tunnel 3, or head for Seoul Station?
When the destination changed, the driver asked that, and she simply said Seoul Station because she disliked stuffy tunnels.
As the taxi on Tongil-ro in front of Seoul Station headed toward Samgakji, the light changed just as they were about to cross the stop line. The driver grumbled that if the car in front hadn’t dawdled at the previous light, they wouldn’t have been caught, but she was in a generous mood.
On the radio, Wham’s “Last Christmas” was playing. Humming softly along to the song that stirred warm nostalgia, she leaned back against the seat.
For about a month since she’d heard the news of the award, she had been debating how to use the rather sizable prize money, and while she sat in the audience today waiting for the results, she finally decided. A museum tour of Europe for the three of them over Ihyeon’s winter break.
She planned to propose it over dinner to her husband and son. Thinking of their surprised, delighted faces, she smiled as if she were already seeing them.
Huh? What is that? What’s it doing?
At the driver’s startled voice, she reflexively looked straight ahead.
From Hangangdaero, the cars with the signal toward this side, Tongilro, were moving in a gentle curve. And in the next moment, a blue one-ton truck came into her view, charging at high speed from the direction of Sejong-daero toward that line of cars.
It was a roar that made it seem like everything around them had stopped.
It wasn’t just that it was loud. Mixed into it was a thick smell of violence and misfortune—something not ordinary at all, utterly different in nature from the big noises of a construction site or a sports crowd.
The taxi driver and she both saw it: the blue truck barreling straight at a mid-size sedan. It looked like nothing but a deliberate act of suicide.
She clapped both hands over her mouth, and screams burst one after another from the driver’s as well.
Struck on the right rear door, the silver sedan yawed and skidded back; together with the truck that had hit it, it lunged toward the back seat of the taxi she was in. The taxi driver was severely injured, and she died instantly.
From the moment the driver shouted and she fixed her eyes forward, everything happened within thirty seconds.
■ ■ ■
When I opened my eyes, I was in an unfamiliar place.
It wasn’t the room I use at Chief Han’s home.
I was lying in a bed, and because the pillow and the covers over my body were all clean and cozy, I didn’t feel threatened even though I’d woken in an unfamiliar place.
I had no memory of how I came here or how I fell asleep, so I needed time before my consciousness would work properly.
For a moment my body wouldn’t move, like just after waking from sleep paralysis. With a strange sensation, as if a certain stretch of memory had been erased by amnesia, I wiggled my fingers and toes inside the downy duvet that held the air richly.
The bed’s head was fixed to the wall with space left on both sides, and to the left of the bed was a window with curtains drawn. With curtains there, it was fair to assume there was a window beyond them.
It was raining. Maybe the window’s soundproofing was excellent, because I could barely hear the rain. Only the air was different. A delicate moisture drifting in the empty space. Maybe the five years I spent by the sea had developed that sense in me too.
Right—at the Director’s house I was helping with the shoot for Old Future.
Only after quite a while did my thoughts reach that far.
And I realized I was crying.
I didn’t know whether I had been crying in my sleep the whole time, or whether, as my head began to function and my memory stretched back to the painting I’d faced in the living room—and the monstrous pains that had been # Nоvеlight # sealed and were dragged out through that painting—fresh tears had started to flow.
The tracks where tears had run damp along my temple stung. Noticing it, fresh tears came again.
His living room. Above the big minimalist sofa hung my painting. It was the painting that won the special jury prize at the major gallery’s contest when I was sixteen.
My mother and father loved me without lack—enough to make friends envious—and they never demanded good grades or forced a future career on me in advance.
Instead, everything had to be decided by me, and the responsibility was mine. If I wanted it, my parents would give advice, but the decision was mine. From picking the topic of a performance assessment to whether I would sit the arts middle school exam or go to a regular middle school.
Unlike the friends around me who, powered by resistance to parents and older generations, built solidarity within their peer group, I had no target for rebellion. What rebellion could you wage against someone who forced nothing on you?
I could understand friends who griped about parents who cut their allowance because their grades dropped or refused to buy them trendy clothes because they were acting out, but I found it hard to feel deep empathy as someone who had gone through something similar.
Instead, for my mother and father, each other came first. There was a powerful bond between them; they understood, respected, and admired each other deeply. Their situation was different from couples whose passion for each other had already faded and who lived instead on affection for their children and a sense of shared household.
The earth does not revolve around me, and my parents’ lives do not revolve around me. The only thing that revolves around me is my own life.
That was the bare face of life I naturally learned through my parents’ way of raising me.
No one can take responsibility for the results of my choices in my stead; blaming or resenting my parents changes nothing. No matter how much they love me, my parents cannot turn back time. They cannot take an exam for me or paint in my place.
My choice—unable to have perfect bonds either with peers or with my parents—was painting.
Painting was my language.
Technique and color were my words.
The more techniques and colors I could handle, the richer and more precise my expression became—my vocabulary and my grammar.
My mother and father never gave advice about my paintings and only helped when I occasionally asked technical questions, so by the time I entered the contest my work was uninflected by any particular painter, style, or art-world trend.
Put nicely, it was individual; put bluntly, it lacked roots. Some outlets that looked negatively on my prize even cited a “crisis” in contemporary art in which “legitimacy” was under threat.
But I hadn’t been painting with the goal of recognition from the mainstream art world, so it didn’t matter. I had rarely entered youth art competitions, and I decided to submit to that contest precisely because it was experimental—judging solely on the value of the work itself, regardless of age, fame, or style.
I didn’t want a prize. Painting was my language, so I wanted to communicate with the world, with someone, in that language. I wanted to know whether the language I used had the function of communicating with someone.
The opposite of alienation is probably solidarity. Bonds in which individuals, based on likeness, feel ease and belonging with each other, feel relief that they are not alone.
If you go beyond that stage, solidarity extends toward the other, not the self. To understand and accept the other, to be deeply connected, and at last to be in a state where you can give your life for each other with the belief that my affairs lead to yours and yours can affect me—that is the ultimate to which solidarity can reach.
The two figures in the work, pressed close like conjoined twins, depending on each other, stand in contrast with the busy background packed tight with varied geometric patterns.
As solid as the stability and cohesion binding the central pair are, the energy in the background surrounding them is unstable and bizarre.
Unlike literature, irony is not easy in the visual arts. By placing two people bound by solidarity at the center of the work, the artist is, conversely, appealing to alienation. Considering the artist’s young age, it can only be called a bold choice.
The method of expression that combined traditional painting techniques with pop-art imagination was, if rough in places, nonetheless full of the fresh energy unique to a new artist.
Unlike solitude, alienation always exists in relation. Alienation is the feeling that arises when you are rejected and excluded by another. It is a feeling you cannot have alone. Looking at the work, one is reminded of the longing, jealousy, and alienation we all feel at least once in life toward things that are beautiful, warm, and loving. And, comforted that the ugly feeling one had concealed is not one’s private shame alone, one can “bond” with the artist’s alienation.
Sukhee Kim’s judge’s comment for the special prize was sufficient on its own.
It read like a translation into actual language of what I had uttered through painting.
At that time, my world clearly stepped one stage out of the household and into the outside. It was my first experience of realizing that a boy who had craved only his parents’ attention and tried to define his worth only by his relationship with them could also gain communication and solidarity in other relationships.
But when I unexpectedly faced that painting again, what greeted me was not the memory of being understood.
It was the childish jealousy I had poured into it toward my mother and father. No—compared to what followed, that was nothing.
Before that first precious sensation could settle, my mother’s accident came down on my head and smashed everything.
And then my father, who shut out a world without my mother in perfect “alienation.”
The terrible things that came one after another—as if they had been prepared in advance and were lined up at the door—leapt out from where they crouched inside that painting and jabbed at my whole body. A monster with four arms, six legs, three necks, brandishing a merciless blade.
I had thought that with the passage of time I was growing duller whether I wanted to or not. I was wrong.
Confronted suddenly with the raw, unvarnished past, I was still nothing but a fragile sixteen-year-old with no defenses at all.
Tears fell. But they were mechanical tears.
Not a surge of feeling that bubbles up from the split in the floor of being and erupts, but a physical reaction—tears that, no matter how much they fell, brought no relief, resolved nothing.
Lying there, I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. I lifted my still-stiff arm, wiped my tears, and slowly raised my upper body to look around the room.
If the space was meant only for sleep, then the bed, the nightstand, a single armchair, and the small table beside it were all there was in the room. Instead of the pendant light hanging in the center, small indirect lights around the edge of the ceiling were on. The level of illumination...
