I suffer pompholyx eczema by immune overreaction. Blisters appear on my hands and feet, which at times become quite serious depending on my condition. The hand is a part of the body in which is mostly disclosed to others, second to the face. It may sound exaggerated, but the hand is a part of the body that is almost never silent and continues to restlessly make actions. The motions of the hand is a complex mixture of conscious and unconscious. When we consciously create things, or write things, we use our hands. Since I’ve had my obsession towards hands with my pompholyx eczema, the most fact that interests me is that the hand does not represent conscious movements, but also abundant amount of unconscious movements. For example, we use verbal languages when we have a dialogue with others, but there are also non-verbal languages (gestures/expressions), which among many are made by movements of the hand. There are many occasions that we perpetually move our hands when we speak, but when we think back, we do not remember it at all. My assumption is that these are not only unconscious behaviors, but are also connected to the inner expressions inside us that ourselves are not aware of. It interests me that although the hand movement would be an indirect language compared to that of the verval, it could be an unconscious yet direct expression. 

One of my conscious hand movements are to apply embroidery on the surface of photographic prints. Throughout my previous works, I have continuously sewed on patterns and texts on various images of landscapes, portraits, and found postcards. Hand-sewing to me is a conscious methodology of healing pain, and continuously maintain my behaviours. I felt curious and wanted to know further the area of unconsciousness within this behavior I have continued. I sew on the image, and add another dimension to the image in 2D. By repeating this ceremonial movement of sewing, I sometimes enter the state of unconsciousness, and end up encountering shapes that I never initially thought of. The process of hand-sewing has become a way of expression that I must continuously follow and discover. 

The images in the Finger Play series can be interpreted as a form of society. I rendered these images from the media around me in my daily life. I collect and select the variety of hand movements by females that scatter in newspapers and magazines. And then, at times, well-planned, or at times improvisationally, I intervene into them with the various forms of sewing. 

The behavior of hand-sewing is a repetitive movement of pushing into the paper (or normally a fabric), and then pushing out from the backside of the paper to the front. This movement can be referred to the behavior of writing words and sentences, as to expressing one’s thoughts. (*1) The movement of pushing down the pencil to the paper, or punching the keyboard in to write sentences, could be described as pushing “in” as an action, yet simultaneously pushing “out” as an expression. For me, the movement of hand-sewing is how I push “in” my scattered unconsciousness on the surface of the photographic image, which at the same time is synonymous to pushing “out” towards the outer society I belong to. 

We all restlessly use our hands to express, create, and communicate. Hands are the memory of an individual, and is a non-verbal way of social expression. For me who has a disease to my hand, the practice of sewing the surface of a print seems to have made my “hand” or the “movement of my hand” to become a verbal language itself. Finger Play is a body of work that allows my unconsciousness to appear and accumulate as hand-sewings on top of the images of the female hand that appear on the media as collected silent cognitions, and through my practice of hand-sewing and intervention of my hand, the notions of female hands in the media become deconstructed. All this process is an inevitable and playful behaviour to continuously output my expression and interpret my way of communicating with the society. 

Embodying the symbolic patterns I learned from the society as hand-sewing, I put my hand inside the hole I opened in the image, and rediscover the gap between society and myself. My experiment of images will continue, for me to establish the relationship between myself and the society. 

Jinhee Kim