The following is from Kyung-ran Jo’s Blowfish. Kyung-ran Jo made her literary debut in 1996 when her short story “The French Optical” won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest. She is the author of five story collections and three novels. Her novel Tongue was published in English by Bloomsbury in 2009. She is also the recipient of the Hyundae Munhak Award and the Dongin Prize, among others.
“If she had to leave a color behind”
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The city was the color of oxidized blood. She was standing before the sliding doors, which opened and closed, closed and opened. She didn’t step outside, nor did she retreat back inside. It was almost sunset. She thought she’d heard something.
A faint purple-navy streak across the sky. A blackbird was flying by; maybe that was what had drawn her outside. The bird was an especially vivid black, flapping its wings with majestic conviction. She looked up as it glided away. It was four thirty in the afternoon, a Thursday. The breeze was coming from the west. In the high-rise across the way, lights turned on, one after another. The curved pale-gray wall around Gyeongbokgung Palace darkened. The city would glow brighter as the night grew darker. That was what a city was—a place so blinding that nobody could see you cry. She knew more about these things than most.
The gallery was so bright that her eyes burned. The light didn’t shine down so much as it splintered coldly, like radium. People in their finest gathered under those lights. She didn’t like coming to galleries. Often a gallery was filled with exaggerations, with falsities. This time she was hoping for something different. She wanted to fill the space with objects that were closer to the truth. With things that were true but couldn’t be readily seen or felt, like silence. For all she knew, this was a quality impossible to capture in sculpture. It was time to do something she’d never done before. Before it was too late. The more challenging the better.
It was the opening of her exhibition.
The gallery was a rectangle. On the table in the middle of the room were silicone peels reminiscent of cast-off snakeskin. She had made the peels, which were seventy-nine by twenty-eight by twenty-four inches, by molding silicone to different parts of her body. She’d laid the pieces in the form of a person in repose and stitched some of the parts together with thread. When the small, bright overhead light was turned on, shadows appeared where the silicone overlapped, accentuating the contours. Skin left behind after someone had wriggled out. A needle sparkled in a sharp sliver of a line between the torn knee and thigh. For a moment she recalled the times she’d spent in her cold studio, repeatedly pasting and removing silicone from her body. She had called this work Sew Me. She had thought it would be more powerful to display the work on a regular table instead of in a display case. Some might see this table strewn with the remnants of a person and think it was a desk, while others could see it as a dining table. A display case would simply and inevitably bring a coffin to mind. She hadn’t wanted it to be so obvious at first glance.
At the press preview, she had been asked about her invitation to exhibit at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. An art collector in Tokyo expressed interest in purchasing one of her works at the conclusion of this show. It would be her biggest sale since last year’s biennial. During the press preview, she felt calmer than she had ever been. Some journalists might write that her career had taken off or that she was becoming internationally known. It wouldn’t matter if someone judged her exhibition a failure. Only I can judge this show, she thought. She had accomplished something difficult, something beyond her own expectations. When judging yourself, you are more accurate the more detached you are. She was unflappable, though she did feel a tad on edge all afternoon, worried that someone would ask her what she was working on next.
She didn’t have the courage now to step back into the gallery. Wineglasses and champagne bottles glittering like crystals, subdued praises and smiles, lights shining down. The only thing missing was her.
The curator came up to ask if she was waiting for someone. She shook her head and said she was fine. The curator held out the master key for the elevator that led to the gallery director’s top-floor office. The curator suggested she take a moment for herself in Director Hyeon’s office and have a cup of tea. Director Hyeon’s office was filled with art, a small gallery in itself. She liked sitting at the walnut George Nakashima dining table and looking out at the gentle slope of Inwangsan. She nodded at Director Hyeon, who was inside the gallery greeting guests. She wanted to stay where she was even though it was cold. Right now she wanted to stand here, just outside the doors. Or was it just inside the doors?
A gust of wind. Tears fell from her eyes, surprising her. She swiped them away with her palm. It was odd to cry at a happy moment. Her emotions flared; she was tense. She thought about it again. “I’m ready now,” she murmured. “I’m done thinking. Thinking isn’t acting. Right now should be the beginning of the best, most beautiful story. A story so short that it might end as soon as it begins.” Her tears grew hotter, then stopped. Director Hyeon was beckoning her over. She smoothed her clothes. She wasn’t often the star of the show, but today would be the most spectacular of such times. She had made the right choice to wear a fitted white shirt without any jewelry. Her white shirt would gleam like chrome under the metallic lights. The most beautiful of all colors, if she had to leave a color behind.
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Excerpted from Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, translated by Chi-Young Kim, to be published on July 15, 2025 by Astra Publishing House. Reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2010 by Kyung-Ran Jo Translation copyright © 2025 by Chi-Young Kim. Originally published in 2010 by Munhakdongne as Bokeo in the Korean language. This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).