Book Talk: Solitary

Art Sonje Center is pleased to present Tyler Coburn’s book talk on August 20. Solitary (co-published by Art Sonje Center and Sternberg Press) is an experiment in site-specific writing, produced at a wellness center in Hongcheon designed as a mock prison. To make this book, Tyler Coburn commissioned nine contributors based in Korea to spend time in solitary confinement at the center, where they produced texts using the materials on hand. For this very first launch of Solitary, Coburn will be in discussion with Kyungmook Kim, Woochang Lee, and Jiwon Yu about their experience of the site, their contributions to the book, and their broader engagement with such topics as solitude, incarceration, prison letters, and collective writing.

Tyler Coburn
Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York. He has presented work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Kunsthalle Wien; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. Coburn is the author of three books: I’m that angel (2012); Robots Building Robots (2013), published by the Center for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; and Richard Roe (2019), published by Sternberg Press. His texts have appeared in e-flux journal, Frieze, ArtReview, DIS, Mousse, LEAP, and Rhizome.

Kyungmook Kim
Kyungmook Kim is an artist who works in various formats and media including film dramas, documentaries, video art, and video installation. He debuted with the short documentary Me and Doll-playing in 2004 and has produced several films, including Faceless Things in 2005, Stateless Things in 2011, and Futureless Things in 2014.

Jiwon Yu
Jiwon Yu is a curator, writer, and translator/interpreter based in Seoul. Her practice explores such topics as labor at the intersection of the attention economy and platform capitalism; gender representation in popular media and visual culture; and materialist approaches to the curatorial.

Woochang Lee
Woochang Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Seoul National University, studies fiction and intellectual history in 18th century Britain; his doctoral thesis is on Samuel Richardson’s fictions and British “early feminist” discourse. He also writes about the language of debates in contemporary South Korea