In Search of Wholeness with BTS

A long time ago, before I was a writer, before I was an ardent fan of the K-pop group BTS, I was an undergraduate art student. I spent my days in a cold building in the northeast of England manipulating photographs, wax, muslin, paint, collages, and knives. I was making work about memory and identity, and, somewhat appropriately, spent much of my time groping around in the dark, figuratively and literally—developing photographs in a darkroom, or experimenting with slide projections in an abandoned university administrative office I’d claimed for myself. I can’t remember what I took so many photographs of, only that I’d enlarge and blur them, then cut out details, and mummify them in squares of wax melted into long muslin rectangles that I then hung from the ceiling like fly strips or funereal party streamers.

At the time I was influenced by the work of the artist Christian Boltanski, specifically his installation works spanning the late ’80s and ’90s that he made, in his words, not “about the Holocaust but after the Holocaust,” and, more broadly, on the themes of loss and individual and collective memory. These haunting works often featured stark altar-like arrangements of re-photographed archival portraits, single black-and-white faces enlarged to the point of blurring into extreme chiaroscuro. The portraits were illuminated by bare light bulbs attached to black electrical cords that trailed along the floor of the exhibition space like sleeping Medusa hairs—the mechanics and artifice of these works on full display. To a viewer, this invited an unsettled, constantly shifting experience that alternated in focus between the individual images and the collection of images in concert with one another; between immersive communion with these unknown souls and objective appraisal of the artifact; between light and dark.