Thinking of FKA Twigs’ 예측가능한 소녀(predictable girl), hearing that MoMA bookstore is opening in Korea, that Frieze is planting a new foothold in Seoul, that a curator I admire has staged an exhibition celebrating Margiela’s latest line—today again, I reconsider Seoul. In 2025, Seoul feels like a second Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo. A good era. One thing remains the same: when I was young, no celebrity or professional ever wore glasses. To wear them was to believe you could never belong to those important worlds. No one is kind to a woman deemed unbeautiful. When I finally turned twenty and could take off my glasses, even that was not enough. And yet, five years after LASIK surgery, the world has shifted. Traumas, too, grow old with me, their force fading.
Spatial sense is much the same. Important and fascinating things once seemed to happen only in New York, Paris, Tokyo—places I could not physically reach, and so could never fully claim as mine. They say the door is not locked, just knock—but those inside have little reason to notice who waits outside. You have to introduce yourself, make friends, carve a seat at the table. Or, if lucky, seize the sudden opening, the fleeting door that time and space unfasten. For me, Seoul was often like a crowded bar tucked at the edge of the land, a place to quietly pick out the last, strangest, most worthwhile thing left behind. Perhaps that’s why, when I could finally go to New York in 2022, I was so elated. Even after confirming that I was nobody there, I feared nothing—because I was on new ground. But new doors lead to new doors, new stairs to new stairs, until eventually I wanted to find my place here, too, even while promising myself one day I would return to New York.
Seoul, Seoul, Seoul—the land I hope to pass through freely. When will I make my place there, as in America? Could I have done something in Seoul? Should I have taken that magazine job for 300,000 won, or stayed on as a shop manager in Pangyo? I shake my head. None of that was what I wanted. And look now. What truly matters cannot be done without so-called international sensibility, without experience. Scan the list of those chosen—it shows its patterns, save for the exceptional few. I sow seeds suited to the ground I have chosen. As the most personal can be the most creative, it is from the most local that one reaches the world. The answer, always, is the same.