135 WHY

Ask Koreans Who Do Not Ask

Seon Seung Hye, Curator (Seoul Museum of Art)

Hanna Hildebrand presents a paper in which 135 questions starting with “Why you?” are written, questions to be asked to Korean people. While staying in the Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon, she wrote the 135 questions in English and then translated them into Korean. The Korean pronunciation of the translated questions is written with English spelling. Of the 135 questions she will ask Koreans, there are many unexpected ones. She asks about trifling things she discovered in Korea, and to Korean people who do not ask them often, her questions can be strange. They wonder why she is so inquisitive. They can understand what she asks when they listen to her questions asked with her poor Korean pronunciation, realized when paying attention to the questions one by one. Whether the questions are meaningful or not is of no importance. What’s important is the question of why Korean people do not ask such questions more often. Hidebrand’s work in Korea is currently underway. She overdubs the Korean urban scenes she videotaped with her questions uttered in Korean. Dubbing street scenes with an artist’s narration has been done many times before: her attempt to ask questions in Korean, not English, the international language, can be highly appreciated. I praise her will to challenge: three months is ridiculously insufficient to learn Korean. Her attitude is quite contrastive to that of other expats who would not learn Korean despite staying in Korea for many years. Hanna Hildebrand is a young Italian female artist whose world is under construction. As young artists often do, she is a nomadic artist who has lived and worked in many overseas residencies including the Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon where she stayed and worked for three months. Korea is the second Asian country she stayed in, after Japan. If possible, she wants to complete her work again in Korea.