Artist's Statement - You first man

Back to exhibition

Sunday 4th August 2002.
I've been in Korea for 5 months now. It's a pretty interesting place, but it's not really how I imagined it. I want to remember the small things, like the heat of summer, the stink of rotting kimchee that permeates everything, and the smell of the factories in the morning. Shiwah is a dirty little town: full of dust and grime and littered with pornography. I think that I live in the grottiest place in Korea….but I kind of like it. It is a real part of the world where people work and raise their children. Many who I talk to would love to live in somewhere like NZ away from the motorways and billowing factories.

Sunday 11th August 2002.
I got up early this morning and decided to go call-girl card hunting. I have worked out where there are some really good ones….on some seedy little side streets near the Sincheon subway station. Even though it was raining I got lots of good ones. I am collecting them to make some sort of art work when I get back to NZ.

Today I walked past a school and the ground outside was littered with soft-porn cards… I have over 1000 of them now.

Thursday 22nd August 2002.
I get up at 6am to teach an early morning class. I walk to work and this is the time when I usually find most of the cards…they are still in the car windows from the night before. This morning I was tempted to get some good ones from a car window in front of the school, but I didn't because there was a woman watching. It was a good thing that I didn't, because she turned out to be a mother of a kid in the class! I'm sure that most Koreans wouldn't understand why I am collecting them.

Sunday 8th September.
At 4pm I went into Seoul with Felicity. We went to a cool medicine market in central Seoul. I was most disturbed by the cages of animals ready to be sold. There were rabbits, ducks, chickens and also a cage of very unhappy feral looking cats.

Just around the corner is one of the red light districts….We walked down the side streets at about 7pm, and already the girls were out in their fluorescent windows.

After walking past the prostitutes we had dinner then headed for the Jongno district, which is extremely busy at night. We were going to find another singing room, but first we decided to find somewhere where we could sleep later. After wandering around the back alleys of old Seoul for over an hour, and finding several men only saunas…(which I guess were actually brothels) we talked to a nice old man who offered to drive us to the nearest JimJiBang (an all night bath and sauna where you can sleep.)

Twenty minutes later we knew that the nice old man wasn't giving us a lift to the sauna, but was on his way home. When we complained he got his wallet out and offered us 100,000 won for something he didn't specify but we guessed… After some arguing and shouting (by us) he turned the car around and we eventually got safely to Seoul Station.

Sunday 8th September 2002.
This weekend was Mr Kim's birthday, so we all went out… first eating, then singing, then to the big new nightclub in Shiwah. The highlight of the night was seeing 50 Russian girls file out onto the stage wearing little more than number tags and wriggling to techno music with a look of complete boredom on their faces.

I often get mistaken for being Russian here. Two or three times a week a car will pull up to me when I am walking to work and ask me if I am Russian. The men are always extremely embarrassed and apologetic when I answer them in English.

Thursday 24th October.
When I was walking home from work tonight (I always walk home, even at 4am…it feels very safe here in Korea.) There had just been a big thunderstorm and it was very cold. I walked past a huge pile of call-girl cards. The guy who puts them in the car windows had popped into a shop to get out of the sudden shower and left them there. They were sopping wet…they are drying on my floor now. It beats scrabbling around cars early in the morning trying not to look too furtive.

I've actually stopped taking them recently because I think people have started to recognise me (they probably did right from the beginning. It's not like I blend in or anything.)

Greg is going to give me his collection. (He has been collecting them for a slightly different reason!) Felicity collected some for me as well. I think I have about 3000 now. That should be enough… .

Maree Prebensen.