Lee Ji Sun’s art life of research, ‘About the train’ 방향은 같지만 목적이 다릅니다

Images by Lee Ji Sun

The day has come. Many hours before the departure, everything was packed up already fully in the baggage standing over there, ready to roll. Nothing is in a hurry, but the one leaves the house little earlier than expected. Dragging the inflated luggage, the one takes the bus that has no determined place for passengers. The bus rides to the station where the train should be waiting. Yet the one not on the train, the journey has begun.

Certain number of chambers connected in a line one behind another, the train pushes out the noise of departure at the precisely scheduled time in its only destination. In the seats aligned in each wagon, new faces come to take their own places, all different from those whom the train had lately dropped off. Once the departing signal sounds and the doors closes, the long and heavy lump of iron starts moving and vibrates slightly. Motionless body finally gets departed, feeling the accelerating vibration and looking at the landscapes passing over the window.

Moving rooms, along the railroad tracks stretched out on the ground like the spider web, the train keeps running. Passengers stay still in their seats fixed forwards or backwards and leave their eyes into the passing scenes. The music sounding only in my ears serves to a metronome which would control the tempo of the journey reserved in the room.

The person on the other side is starting his/her voyage with a light smile to the humors of actors in the tablet screen. In the bag laid under my knees, there are a pocket novel to read by the time when ears get tired of music, a notebook always ready to be written and an agenda which allows me to temporally arrange inside the head, waiting their turn without order.

In each room of the train heading in the only direction, unknown people make a hazardous and ephemeral reunion, coming all from different places and lives. They share a few common connections that are the train and their simultaneous existence inside. Nothing more or deeper is counted. Each one puts out what he/she prepared for lunch to eat alone and spends the time in his/her own ways.

Some kill the time imprisoned by boredom and others give life to it making the best use of it. Bored children crying peevish or anonymous passengers pulling out their particularly strong voices add weight to the time limited in movements and locked up in the train.

Meanwhile, the train runs. In the final goal of transporting its travelers to the destined station at the planned hour, the train rolls the wheels. Slowing down in few stops, it sometimes adds late guests into this unnamed mass or extracts those who leave earlier, to whom no one asked why. Outside over the window, while shapeless landscapes lengthen and pass in one direction, only the far horizon maintains eye contact until I turn the other way.

Passengers fall asleep as if they are possessed by the moving image of colored layers in the frame of the window, and wake up back in a while. The body pulled down in the dream comes back and retakes the place where I’ve been borrowing in the room without the host. The time instantly taken into the dream with the body keeps running with the train, sliding quietly along the railway.

 

 

 

Contributor, Lee Ji Sun

Lee Ji Sun is a young Korean artist, who does activity in Paris, France. CultureM Magazine releases her art works images by drawing, writing, video, photograph in every month. http://leejisun.blogspot.kr/

이지선은 프랑스 파리를 중심으로 유럽에서 활동하는 젊은 한국여성작가이다. 회화, 비디오, 사진, 글 등의 다양한 매체로 작품활동을 하고 있는 그녀의 이야기를 컬쳐엠이 소개한다. http://leejisun.blogspot.kr/