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 molcule 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 Iceland. I looked up out of the window of my bedroom in the 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 my parents 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 ways of thinking in my case, 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, staying in northen Iceland in the 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. It is the default. I used to think people with blue eyes were from the sea. Then, I started to see the colour of water from the people I met in Iceland when I visited there for the first time, knowing there is no colour in the water. The colour of warm and hot water is the same as that of cold water. The water of my tears, sweat or mucus doesn’t look different from the things 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.

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…”

vibrating animal (2018)

This little adorable piece is called ‘vibrating animal’, made with fur and feathers with a piece of leather from my wallet with a vibrating motor inside. While researching sound, voice and gender in coursework back then, I tested how to mute vibration. The overall shape is meant to look like a weird animal inspired by a poem by Else Lasker-Schüler.

Lovesong (1943)
Else Lasker-Schüler

Come to me in the night – we’ll sleep, twined close, held hard.
I’m all alone, awake, so very tired.
Long before dawn, the song of some strange bird:
With me, and with itself, my dream still sparred.
Flowers are blossoming where waters spring,
Your eyes lend immortelles their colouring…
Come to me in the night, be shod with seven stars,
Be swathed in love, come late into my tent.
Moons climb aloft from heaven’s dusty coffers.
Like two rare beasts we’ll sleep the sleep of lovers
In the high pass behind the firmament.¹

Ein Liebeslied (1943)
Komm zu mir in der Nacht – wir schlafen eng verschlungen.
Müde bin ich sehr, vom Wachen einsam.
Ein fremder Vogel hat in dunkler Frühe schon gesungen,
Als noch mein Traum mit sich und mir gerungen.

Es öffnen Blumen sich vor allen Quellen
und färben sich mit deiner Augen Immortellen …

Komm zu mir in der Nacht auf Siebensternenschuhen
In Liebe eingehüllt spät in mein Zelt.
Es steigen Monde aus verstaubten Himmelstruhen.

Wir wollen wie zwei seltene Tiere liebesruhen
Im hohen Rohre hinter dieser Welt.²

연가 (1943)
엘저 라스키 쉴러

밤에 오시오 – 우리 함께 꼭 붙어 잡시다.
깨어 있으니 외로움에 몹시 피곤하구려.
어두운 새벽 낯선 새 한마리 노래하는데,
꿈은 아직 제 자신과, 또 나와 씨름하고 있었고.

꽃은 당신의 눈 같은 색으로
모든 봄이 오기 전에 피어나는데…

일곱 개의 별로 된 신을 신고 밤에 오시오,
사랑을 내 장막으로 늦도록 둘러쌉시다.
달들이 하늘의 탁한 몸통에서 떠오른다오.

두 마리의 희귀한 동물처럼 조용히 사랑합시다,
이 세상 뒤 키 큰 갈대숲에서.³

1. https://www.timothyades.com/else-lasker-schuler-1869-1945-lovesong/ ↩︎
2. https://www.deutschelyrik.de/ein-liebeslied-1943.html ↩︎
3. 슬픔에게 언어를 주자 – 세계 여성 시인선 (2016), 아티초크./ Let’s give sadness a language – Anthology of the works by world women poets (2016), Artichoke. ↩︎