Dawoon Park
Wibbly-Wobbly Symbol, Touchy-Feely Space
Reenactment of Ineffable Events through the Queer Use of Iconic Form-Meaning of Korean Mimetic Words
Supervisor HfK:
Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick
Co-supervisor HfK:
Prof. Dennis P. Paul
Supervisor University of Groningen:
Prof. Dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann
Co-supervisor University of Groningen:
Dr. David Shim
Dawoon Park's doctoral project investigates Korean sound symbolism, especially so-called uiseongeo (의성어) and uitaeeo (의태어), as a way to understand how language carries sensory and situated experience. These expressions are often discussed as onomatopoeia and ideophones, but the project approaches them within an artistic research framework, where artistic practice and theoretical positioning are developed in relation to each other.
The project asks how experiences that are difficult to say directly—because they may be intimate, vulnerable, or deeply personal—can be translated into artistic form. Its central concern is close to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of ‘a-phonie’: Literally meaning “non-voice,” aphonie names a condition in which a voice cannot easily enter dominant systems of speech, meaning, or recognition. In this sense, Korean sound symbolism can be understood as a way of giving form to affective memory before it settles into any logocentric structure.
The research develops iconic translation as both a method and a critical position. Rather than following a structuralist approach to iconicity, the project proposes iconicity in relation to Bachelard’s material imagination, where poetic language takes shape through the gestures of matter. Alongside this, Sedgwick’s reparative practices of love offer a way to think translation as a process of returning to what has been split off, allowing a relation to the self to be revisited and reworked without being fully exposed.