Doing Women-Blanket-Basket: Persisting in pleasure despite it all

<p><em>Doing-woman is “to want to be a woman.” You must be affected by the other and distribute the small and the humble throughout your body. To be a woman is not as fundamental a position as its opposite, to be a man, so instead of thinking of it as a thing to discard, each person must travel toward their inherent feminine plurality, the overflowing feminine existence within. One also needs a biological awareness of being a woman and discern with one’s energy the woman within one’s connections with other objects. I want to be reborn as a woman of another identity every day. In my text, I am a girl today and reborn an old woman tomorrow. I was a blade of grass today and tomorrow will be born a hunting bear. I want to be reborn as a color, a pattern, an image, or a small sign. I am not one woman but a multitude of women, not a woman here but here and there, a woman who makes the here a here-less there. To want to become a woman inevitably leads to empathy on a level of pure energy.</em></p> <p>Doing is an active verb. Here, by saying “doing,” following the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, I attribute a headless quality to this verb and recognize movement in being. In doing, there is no subject-head that judges the depth, good and evil, and fixates orders. Instead, there is a body-mind – mind is not just in the brain – spirit of “women” that do, generate (life), and keep going in tandem with others. Others here might well appear in blankets or baskets or more. So, we shall explore “doing blanket” or “doing basket” as in doing women in the words of Kim Hyesoon, through doing-art by Seulgi Lee who was born and grew up in South Korea and has been based in France since the age of nineteen. Please let us note that if there is anything identified as Korean here, that it is simply for the doing of it – making it plural – as for doing the other, being “Ixcatlán,” “basket” or “blanket” as Seulgi Lee being or rather doing women must be “affected by the other and distribute the small and the humble” through her body. If this “leads to empathy on a level of pure energy,” I would also let us recognize it as the pleasure of doing, despite of all that tends to oppress it or make it impossible, which the artist evokes again and again…</p> <p> </p>