Joo Yeon Park's 'Fold, Hexagonal' Explores Language and Translation Through Visual Forms

Joo Yeon Park's project 'Fold, Hexagonal' investigates the challenges of accessing others' languages, proposing that such barriers can foster imaginative realms around words. This imaginative space encompasses visual and bodily engagements with language, alongside the physical dimensions writing inhabits. The title's 'Hexagonal' references the endless hexagonal chambers in Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Library of Babel,' conjuring an unbounded linguistic environment. Hexagonal shapes are arranged on folded, lined paper, mirrored and broken by multiple reflections that shift their orientation and scale, hinting at the decay of Borges's library. Sentences detailing the folding, reflection, and refraction of lines, diagonals, squares, rectangles, and hexagons are crafted using English letters constrained into squares meant for Korean syllabic blocks. These create grammatically accurate but nearly illegible structures, with their inscription process delaying comprehension. Walter Benjamin's concept of 'pure language' is envisioned through a translational act that remains in perpetual flux, a translation echoing the endless progression of a fold. The article was published on June 5, 2018, by ARTMargins Online, with content accessible via MIT Press under a subscription model.