003 Other Tongue
December 6 - 23, 2025
Accent Sisters, 89 5th Avenue, #702, New York, NY
Opening Reception and Bilingual Poetry Reading: December 6, 6-8 PM
Artists:
Jenny Jisun Kim, Liyoun Kim
Snow is falling
눈이 내린다
Snow is coming down
눈이 내려온다
Snow is shuttering
눈이 닫힌다
The eye is shutting
Roland Barthes said that a language is simultaneously the product and the instrument of the speech. While the statement is true within the perimeter of the ontology of languages, it also points to a methodology in interpreting languages in motion - translation. The science of translation treats languages as “instruments,” in quest of an end product as accurate as possible in representing the mother tongue. Ironically, all translations are uncertain and inaccurate, rendering a perfect correspondence impossible, which establishes the art of translation: the process itself as a product that is confusing and open-ended.
In collaboration with Accent Sisters, “Open Kitchen 003 - Other Tongue” showcases examples from a unique exercise of recursive translation as well as its self-analysis and pictorial illustrations by Jenny Jisun Kim (artist, translator) and Liyoun Kim (poet, writer, and graphic designer). As a research duo, the two place the traditional translation system in question, exposing the flaws, omissions, and alternatives which are often overlooked, and detail how human emotions and subjective judgements play a key role in different translation processes. If translation is a possessional transfer of two agencies, Jenny Jisun Kim and Liyoun Kim, utilizing their expertise in the art of language and painting/drawing, each impersonates one language to perform and enact their push and pull. As the duo explains in their statement: Translation inevitably produces both loss and excess. This linguistic multiplicity becomes the foundation for an intermedial translation that probes the abstraction, fragility, and expansiveness inherent in both language and image as sign systems.
In this collaboration, the recursive translation cycle becomes a method of abstraction itself. As segments of Liyoun Kim’s poems move back and forth between Korean and English, meaning drifts—reconfiguring across shifts in structure, time, mood, agency, spatial logic, and sensory tone. Rather than correcting these deviations, the duo treats them as material. Each drift generates a constellation of “force words” and “image cues” that form the basis for a drawing. In this way, translation and drawing operate as parallel abstractions, where loss, excess, and subjective interpretation are not obstacles but generative forces that reveal how language transforms as it moves between tongues, minds, and mediums.
[Special thanks to Accent Sisters for making this project possible]
Installation photos by Jeffrey Jin and Liyoun Kim.
Event and opening photos courtesy of Sono Kim and Accent Sisters.