Art on Fire, page 3
I could feel his eyes on my shoes, as if he were going to report me for not wearing sneakers. I wanted to tell the man that I was a pedestrian delivery person, that it was natural for me to walk to my destinations, but I shut my mouth and held out my phone to show that it had only taken eight minutes for his order to arrive.
‘Even on foot, Shake Shack can’t be more than four minutes away,’ the man said. ‘You went too far! I can’t believe it. You went to 107 first. I can see it all on the screen!’
He held out his mobile phone to show me, but all I could see was a dot. Car, motorcycle, bike, feet … no matter how I travelled, on the app, I was nothing more than a round blue dot. Would this man have reacted differently if the map showed the locked back door, the footpath closure, the tree disinfection trucks on the street, the broken elevator — everything that made it difficult for me to get to his apartment? I didn’t want to explain myself to someone who was treating me as if I were useless, a broken computer mouse. It would be best just to apologise and leave. But an apology wasn’t what came out of my mouth.
‘Your hamburger was going to get cold at some point,’ I said. ‘And your shake was going to melt. If you wanted a piping-hot hamburger and an ice-cold shake, you should have gone to the store yourself.’
The man flushed violently; even his neck was red. He looked so threatening, I wished I could take back what I’d said. What would have happened if he hadn’t opened the front door to the building and gestured for me to leave? Thirty minutes later, I got a notification on the Bballi platform informing me that I’d received the lowest possible rating for my delivery. It was Mr 1903’s right to give me whatever rating he wanted, but it was also my right not to put up with his nonsense, so I called the Bballi support centre and asked for my rating to be corrected. The voice on the line told me that the company wasn’t able to change ratings.
‘But I was so fast,’ I said. ‘I was basically running. I got there in eight minutes — why did I get the lowest possible rating?’
The employee’s voice grew a little clearer.
‘The delivery speed wasn’t the issue,’ she said. ‘The problem was your attitude.’
My attitude? I kept protesting, but to no avail. As soon as I hung up, my phone buzzed with a notification informing me that there was a ‘special offer’ for delivery people. My phone was still ready to go; I hadn’t bothered to turn off Bballi notifications.
I didn’t want to move, but it turned out the delivery request was from a Chinese restaurant only fifty metres from where I was standing. Was it that building over there? My fingers automatically accepted the request. At the entrance to the restaurant, the hostess asked, ‘How many in your party?’ When I said that I was there to pick up a delivery order, she asked me to wait outside. The food came out three minutes later. Assigning a jjajangmyeon delivery to a pedestrian delivery person must have been a system error, I thought, resisting the urge to run. My pace grew faster and faster until I gave in. It was jjajangmyeon — I needed to hurry, or the noodles would get soggy.
I left the food at the entrance of the apartment building and sent the customer a text, as requested. Over the next two hours, I took four more orders. I hadn’t planned on doing this, but the orders were always nearby. Just a slight distance from me, then a little bit farther, then a little farther than that, until I was getting requests from three hundred metres away, and found myself quite far from where I’d started. I was getting paid a higher rate than normal due to the cold; I just couldn’t stop making money. Despite the temperature, sweat dripped down my back and was slow to evaporate. From the street, I could see apartment lights turn on one by one. Streetlights, LED signs, lights I hadn’t noticed before — suddenly they were all flashing. I saw someone carrying an insulated delivery backpack. Would the hamburger from earlier have stayed hotter if I had one of those? I turned off Bballi notifications, but I wasn’t living in an on/off world. That was the moment I got the call from the Robert Foundation.
‘Is this the writer An Yiji?’ asked a polite voice. It was Director Choi, the Korean head of the Robert Foundation. At the time, I didn’t really know what the Robert Foundation was, so I listened to Director Choi suspiciously, as if he might be a spam caller. After hanging up and doing a few Google searches, though, I realised my dream had come true.
It was raining heavily the day I was supposed to meet him. Director Choi had heard that I worked at an art school and offered to meet me there, but I’d quit that job several months earlier. When I said I was happy to travel to meet him, the farther the better, Director Choi suggested a restaurant two hours from my house.
It wasn’t rush hour, but the subway was full of people in black puffer coats. I was one of them. I played Tetris in my head while swaying to the rhythm of the ten-car hunk of metal transporting us. When people wearing the same colour of clothing stood next to one another — poof!
‘What do you mean, poof?’ Director Choi asked. The game wasn’t anything special, but since he’d asked, I had to explain, and he listened to my answer so intently that I didn’t know when to stop. I kept talking.
‘You know how when you play Tetris, if you get a complete line of tiles, those tiles disappear? What I do is make people on the subway disappear. In my mind, of course. If I erase other people, I create a space that’s all my own. There’s a cheat code, too. In the winter, ninety per cent of people are wearing black — poof!’
My explanation ended just as the menu arrived. Director Choi seemed to be the same age as my father. Maybe it was his slow and polite manner of speaking. He ordered a two-hour multiple-course meal for us.
When the bread arrived, he picked up a roll and said, ‘I come here for the bread. That’s life, isn’t it? The main course isn’t everything. Sometimes you make decisions based on the bread rolls … Eat up while it’s still warm.’
When he cut the dark, pebble-like roll in half, hot steam rose up from the middle.
‘Right after you graduated from college,’ Director Choi continued, ‘you were one of the four winners of the Young Artists of the Year Award. That year was really competitive. And you’ve all been quite active since then, haven’t you?’
‘Everyone except for me,’ I replied.
‘Do you know why you haven’t been working?’
‘Well, my lack of talent.’
‘You’ve had bad luck,’ Director Choi said.
‘Really?’ I said saltily. ‘I wasn’t aware.’
‘The organisation supporting you went under, didn’t it?’ the director said.
‘It was a difficult time for everyone. A bunch of companies went bankrupt. I just didn’t realise it was going to affect my ability to exhibit my art.’
‘If the organisation hadn’t gone bankrupt, you’d be making art like we all expected.’
At that moment, the first course came out: a beautiful plate of pink prawns covered with bright-yellow flowers and green sauce. After briefly admiring the food, I returned to our discussion of my unfortunate history.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ I said. ‘But the past is the past.’
‘The organisation was shut down when it was acquired. The financial problems it was facing kept getting worse, and the acquiring firm decided it wasn’t worth the expense,’ Director Choi said. ‘But do you know what company acquired it?’
‘Uh, I’m not sure …’
‘Waldmann Stationery.’
‘Okay.’
‘They’re the owners of the Robert Foundation,’ the director added.
There weren’t any open windows nearby, but it felt like a cold wind was blowing over us. Plates from the first course disappeared, and the second course arrived: colourful cold pasta.
‘This means that the Robert Foundation has been influencing your life for a long time,’ Director Choi said.
‘In a negative way, right?’
After we shared an awkward laugh, I reached for some bread. He did, too, and our hands collided. We both gestured for the other to take a roll first, but neither of us ended up taking any, distracted by the arrival of the third course.
‘It was just like this,’ the director said. ‘Your situation at the time. We both forgot about the bread because of the third course. It was a timing issue: for you and for the bread.’
By now, I was starting to feel irritated, in part thanks to the way Director Choi was talking. He spoke slowly, inserting frequent pauses between words, and considering that he was likening me to bread, who’d be able to stay calm for long?
‘So you’re not here to apologise to me, a stale bread roll?’ I asked.
‘Give us the chance to make it up to you,’ the director said. ‘Give the Robert Foundation a chance.’
I was the one setting boundaries here. Maybe I was just small fry to them, but it felt like this kind of thing happened to me too often. The world didn’t work like this, did it? Someone who hurt me tells me to smile, and then everything’s alright?
‘Of course, that’s not the only reason,’ Director Choi continued. ‘The Robert Foundation is careful. It takes a very long time for us to choose which artists to sponsor. We consider the whole person. We are looking to sponsor artists around the world … Anyway, I’m rambling. Let’s eat while the food is still warm.’
‘I’m still thinking about how you view artists like bread,’ I said. ‘What happens if the artists get hard and crusty?’
The director laughed loudly and said, ‘There are a lot of ways to salvage old bread. That’s what the Robert Foundation does.’
He handed me a picture. It was of my most recent painting, Hangover Relief, which I’d posted online two months earlier. This wasn’t my past — this was my present.
‘Robert left you a heart,’ the director said.
‘Robert?’
‘Our president.’
Director Choi pointed to the image of a dog on his business card. I laughed, thinking it was some kind of joke, that the director was mocking his boss. Of course, I know now that the director was just telling the truth.
‘Robert is interested in your work,’ he said. ‘I myself was intrigued when I read an interview you did nine or ten years ago; the way you talked about your situation then was quite similar to how you describe it now. You said you were waiting for a life where you had a backyard and a dog. Do you remember the interview I’m talking about?’
‘I think they were asking me if I liked animals,’ I said. ‘So I said it would be nice to have a yard, with a dog.’
‘It’s funny, because, you know, Robert is a dog with a yard. You’ve been invited in by a dog with a yard. Your words planted the seeds for reality. Was there a particular reason you answered the way you did?’
‘Well, at the time, my biggest concern was buying a house. Nothing’s really changed since then …’
My answers to the questions from the interview were as follows:
I’d like to have a dog.
With a yard, if possible.
I’d treat the dog well and live there with him.
When I pulled up the words in my mind, they transformed into the following:
A house with a yard was my dream, but there’s no hope for it now.
If I had a dog in the yard, what if the dog liked me?
I would have succeeded earlier if I’d had the kind of life that included a dog and a yard.
I can’t tell if it’s a dog running around in my yard, or me running around in the dog’s yard.
I was twenty-six, twelve years ago, when I became one of the four nominees for the Young Artists of the Year Award. At the time, I believed that the story of my life was going in a completely different direction. But when I look back, I can see that I’d already passed the final page of good luck. Like there was some misprint on the paper, I was thrust into a dull sense of anxiety and uneasiness.
I didn’t realise at the time that I’d already reached the limits of my success. I only knew where I stood in comparison to my fellow artists — friends I’d known since we were teenagers. When I started an art school, my friends began to call me Director An, but running the school drove me further from the world of my dreams. When I closed the school after seven years, my friends told me it was time to spend the money I’d made and focus on painting again, but I’d barely saved anything. I wanted to make art, but I still needed to earn a living. At one point, I was afraid that everyone except me would become a famous artist, but that wasn’t the most nerve-wracking thing. The real shocker was when one of my friends — supremely talented, with big dreams for himself — suddenly announced that he was preparing for the civil-service exam. This sent shockwaves through our friend group. Everyone started to lay down roots at jobs that had formerly been part-time. So few of us even identified as artists anymore. As we all grew busier, I almost forgot that I was a painter. I had started to casually work on my own projects again a year before my art school went under, but was posting them online without any real expectations. That was how the Robert Foundation took notice of my work.
It was only after our two-hour, ten-course meal that I realised I was being interviewed. According to Director Choi, Robert liked to eat multiple courses, and including conversation, his meals ended up taking an hour and a half, if not longer.
‘How painful the meal would have been,’ Director Choi said, ‘if you were the kind of artist who’s so stingy you put leftovers into Tupperware containers as soon as you finish eating. Or if sitting for this long made your back hurt.’
The Robert Foundation’s guidebook included the motto ‘Robert: embarking on a search for a pawprint that will transform a world of darkness, one inch at a time.’ The book spent multiple pages explaining the Robert Foundation’s efforts to discover unique artists. I was one of the pawprints they had supposedly ‘discovered’. Honestly, it was hard to believe. Why me?
Director Choi told me to trust Robert’s discerning eye. The Robert Foundation had supported a total of twenty artists over the past seven years, most of whom described their four months at the Robert Museum of Art in Palm Springs as a ‘significant opportunity’. The Robert Foundation remained one of the most impressive lines in their resumes, and its influence continued to radiate throughout their careers. Seed money, a ladder that had helped them climb down from the edge of a cliff, a turning point, divine intervention, winning the lottery … This was how artists described the program.
I was the first Korean artist to participate, and they had translated the long guidebook for me. The most important part was found on pages nineteen to twenty-three.
Financial Support
Necessary travel, including round-trip airfare and car rentals
Comfortable accommodations, independent studio
Unlimited meals
Weekly stipend of five hundred dollars over sixteen weeks (total of eight thousand dollars)
Materials (up to two thousand dollars)
Interpretation, translation, and exhibition planning services
Artist Expectations
First twelve weeks: creation of at least one work of art inspired by Q City, located near the Robert Foundation’s headquarters
Weeks thirteen through sixteen: exhibition of artist’s work
Last day of exhibition: incineration of one piece by artist, to be chosen by the Robert Foundation
Incineration?
I wondered if ‘sale’ had somehow been mistranslated as ‘incineration’, or maybe there’d been a printing error. But no — they really did mean that the art was to be burned. It wasn’t a metaphor.
There have been intermittent cases of deliberate art burning. A museum in Naples was burning one piece a day at one point to protest the government’s indifference towards arts and culture. Artists have incinerated their own work for similar reasons. Some even burned originals after turning their art into NFTs. However, I had never heard of art being burned in a program that supported artists. I had assumed, of course, that the Robert Foundation would purchase the artwork to be burned before destroying it, but Director Choi said that the Foundation did not purchase art.
‘So will I be donating my work?’ I asked.
‘Not exactly,’ the director said. ‘Rights for the work belong to the artist, and the art is burned with that understanding. Burning art is an important part of the program, so we ask for our artists’ voluntary participation. You have to agree in order to take part in the program. Do you?’
‘Hmm …’ I said. ‘This is interesting. And a bit distressing. A while ago, I was an artist in residence in the Netherlands. Participants were supposed to donate a work at the end. Of course, I chose which piece I donated. But we don’t get to choose which piece burns?’
Director Choi said that he understood my concerns, but that the artist’s distress was the point of the burning. Such distress, he said, kept the exhibitions going. The fact that a newly created piece of art was to be burned by the artist upon the conclusion of the exhibition excited even the most unenthusiastic museumgoers. Some of the Robert Foundation’s artists had cried. Their process remained in video form, and in memory, but the art itself disappeared.
‘Your residency in the Netherlands was three weeks, you said? How much art did you make during that time?’ the director asked.
‘Maybe twenty pieces?’
‘And you got two hundred dollars for materials.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘We’re always doing research on other residencies,’ the director said. ‘The program you were in was great. But the Robert Foundation operates on a much larger scale. Our program is much longer, with better space for artists to work in; the piece that gets burned is just one of many created during the residency. But I don’t know if it makes sense to compare. All I can say is that the Robert Foundation’s residency will help your career.’
