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Are babies from the night? Are we all from the night? The night feels like the absence of the day, but it is not empty. It is in black, but it is not blank. It is full of wonder, the beginning of the new.
I wondered if babies are from the night because I learnt the eyes of newborns are like the night. When their morning begins, their eyes will show the colours, whether they are reflecting the sky, or the earth and the mountains of the day. I didn’t think about this before, when I just knew the eyes with stars that are sunburnt. Meanwhile, if we can take a peek at the colour of the day in the eyes of our morning, where is the cat staring at? The cat that I knew closely got yellow eyes.

One of my ultimate dreams could be to go anywhere. I guess ‘going places’ sometimes means being successful. My definition seems to be a bit different from it. If I can go anywhere I want, it would be a success.

One of my tutors, whom I also consider one of the significant beings in my artistic journey, went back to the opposite side of life a few years ago. She left her will to be scattered to the sea near the main airport near Seoul. I guess that is one way to be able to go anywhere. Water can go anywhere in any form. We will eventually be there, travel, talk, laugh, hear, on the planet, and to and from the stars, with a part of a molecule of water. My dream will inevitably come true at any time, in any form. So, I don’t have to sweat over it.

Floating on the lukewarm water in the swimming pool, I looked at the afternoon sky in the winter time. The clouds keep forming shapes here and there and then flow, repeating it over and over. It is a shape of water.

There are certain scenes I remember and recall from time to time. One of the scenes is me looking at the clouds flowing. I looked up, while floating on the water, seeing the shape of the water in the early winter in Akureyri. I looked up out of the window of my bedroom in Seoul in the middle of summer, thinking if it’s okay to do this without doing something more productive, remembering other times I did this. Once, I looked out of the window in my flat in Edinburgh with someone close to me at that time, thinking if this would be a waste of time, remembering the time I was looking up out of window at the apartment in the mountainous area that of my back then lover, thinking this is much more worthwhile than any other things, because this is the thing I used to do a lot when I was a child spending many hours alone while family members are out for works. I used to think the clouds were telling me where I could go in the future.

While observing the shapes of the water, I was thinking about blue all along. The colours are a way of thinking, and the theory I recently met insisted that the conception of the colour blue was developed relatively very late in (at least) Western languages. I strongly wanted to disagree with the idea, with no reasonable references, but with my feelings and emotions. However, seeing northern Icelandic wintertime, it seemed to be so obvious that the blue is a default environment. It was felt like the air that we couldn’t sense in our everyday perception. Everything is just blue, day and night; The sky, the water, the mountain, the snow. The people have it in their eyes, reflecting everything around them. I used to think people with blue eyes were from the sea. Now, I started to see the colour of the water in people’s eyes, knowing the water had no colour. The colour of warm water is the same as that of cold water. The water of my tears, sweat, or mucus doesn’t look different from the water in nature. My outward colour is different from the blue, and the only reason would be the light (hence, the darkness as well).

A poet wrote, ‘The boy came to me and released two fish through my neck.¹’ The fish swim around me, and every time its tail splashes on my heart, I feel pain and alive. I fall in love easily, so I have so many fish around me, all the forgotten fish, forgotten tears, forgotten emotions.

And I make a soup out of them from time to time. I make it very spicy and eat it while it’s still hot, blowing breath ho-ho on it. Things that were once splash around the heart, slipping down to the stomach to make me warm and become energy.

1. “The boy grabbed my neck-sleeve and put a fish in. / My heart became two white trout. / I swam through the blue water, following a school of three fish.” (Jin Eun-young, First love, from A Dictionary Composed of Seven Words (2003).) ↩︎

Tearfish
ⓒ Singer Jung
Originally written in Korean and English by Singer Jung
Translated from Korean by Soyeong Yoon
Design work by Grafik P.L-F
First published on the 24th of October, 2025

Language: English
ISBN: 979-11-995092-1-4

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Tracks 1 and 2 are made from recorded sleeping sounds -singing and talking in a sleep – using the Sleep Cycle application.

Track 3 is RGB music using Max/MSP, analyzing colour values into sound frequencies to generate sounds.

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“En myndin er í eðli sínu tvíræð og felur tvímælalaust jafnframt í sér sitthvað um…”