Miae Son

In her practice, Miae Son (손미애) challenges perceptions of the world through her personal cognitive, emotional, corporeal, and social experiences. Her works combine visual restraint with attention to language in a way that, upon reception, places them within a movement closely associated with conceptual art. This apparent rationalization does not, however, aim at resolving reality but at bringing out, through opacity, what resists comprehension, what is perceived as insoluble or dissonant. In her creative process, she uses automatism and other processes related to psychoanalysis to explore – through body memory and gestural repetition – certain somatic dimensions of identity. During this residency abroad, the question of belonging stood out as a guiding theme.

Miae Son modelled out of clay a series of beaks – inspired by “speaking” birds such as crows and parrots – and her own ear, for which she used a mirror in a gesture of self-observation documented on video. To these forms she added birds’ claws, hollowed out and designed as wearable prostheses, at once adornment, defensive extension, and puppet. Produced in different natural clays – the variation of which evokes that of bodies, voices, and languages – these performative objects displace language toward sensitive interfaces where the tensions of transmission, misunderstanding, and otherness are expressed.

Immersed in a francophone environment, Miae Son found a “small epiphany” in the sonorities of French and the process of language association. She was struck by the fact that she heard her own name in the pronunciation of the word maison; in Austria, her host country, it was as if her name didn’t exist as it was unpronounceable by German speakers, even when Romanized. Hearing her name in this foreign signifier that designates the space where one lives – a private space of shared memory – became an emotional experience to unfold. The polyphony of the phoneme son (손) revealed a unique resonance: in French, it unites auditory perception and hints at attachment; in Korean, it designates the family line, the name transmitted – and its written form evokes, in its simplicity, the outline of a house.

Welcoming the incomprehension of this discovery, and to better incorporate it, Miae Son conducted a series of poetic automatic writing exercises starting from her own name, the common noun, sounds, and written forms. This play on aural transliteration gave rise to a device consisting of engraved shoe soles – “mai” under one foot, “son” under the other – in which the word maison echoes, with each step, the Hangeul writing of her name (손/son, 미애/miae). In February, wearing these shoes, Miae Son exited the studio by the back door and walked in the direction that artists at Est-Nord-Est take to find the field and the wind. Her traces, her house, whispered like a litany to the vastness. Then she came back to the studio, bringing a sampling of her passage: snowy, fragile. She placed it on the heated floor of the studio and filmed its melting, patiently sponging, until it disappeared.