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Death is often suspended. Facing a corpse (or a posthumous work) does not necessarily mean reaching the end, just as the end does not become the end until it is declared so. There is often a long, long stretch of time before that declaration is made. One could put it this way: while death as an “event” occurs only once, this singular event endlessly repeats itself.

We call the time of this repetition and deferral “mourning.” Then why are some deaths deferred for so long? So particularly long? The question could be rephrased: why do some mournings fail to come to an end? 

Hwang Yezoi asks herself: Why do I go to meet Aglaja Veteranyi? The exhibition Something Like a Soup: I Set Out to Find Aglaja Veteranyi is her response. The exhibition attempts a layered suspension of death.

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Aglaja Veteranyi was born in Romania in 1962 and ended her own life in 2002, in the clear waters of a lake in Zurich, Switzerland. In 2021, the only book she wrote during her lifetime, Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta (1999), was published in Korean for the first time. As its title suggests, there is the story of a child who died in a boiling pot. More than twenty years have passed since Veteranyi’s death, yet for some, her death is present. If one were to ask why her death keeps replaying itself now, an answer might be that her life and death have only recently arrived here. But ……

The dead novelist.
The suicidal woman.
The circus child raised on the road.
The writer who learned to read and write only in her late teens.
The person without a mother tongue.
The child who was forced to boil inside the polenta because she “stabbed scissors into her mother’s face.” Are these, ultimately, versions of “I”—or of someone we know far too well? Just as her life was a rehearsal for death, are not certain lives here also ongoing rehearsals for death?

This might be a reason why her death is still being suspended even after two decades. Information about Veteranyi’s life and death is desperately scarce. And so the “end” is postponed once more. The book held in one’s hands, unread, becomes an urn that marks the beginning of the end rather than its conclusion.

In the summer of 2025, Hwang Yezoi traveled to the Swiss Literary Archives to get closer to Veteranyi’s life and death. Access to the Veteranyi archive required approval from her living partner, Jens Nielsen. Permission was granted. Before meeting Nielsen in Berlin, Hwang traveled to the archive and to the lake in Zurich. There, she read unpublished manuscripts, photographs—both taken by her and of her—drawings, and marginal scribbles left behind by Veteranyi. She was told that the lake was extraordinarily beautiful. She went and verified this for herself. In yet another country, she later met the man who remembered Veteranyi.

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Hwang also visited the ground where Veteranyi had once been buried. There is no longer a grave with her body. The moment her foot touched the ground, rain started to pour down heavily. Inside the suffocating silence of the archive, Hwang had managed to take several photographs of the materials, but the downpour at the cemetery soaked the camera. The device survived, yet water seeped into the film stock, leaving stains behind.

The photographs displayed in the exhibition include these blemishes—the traces left by soaked film.

The images we encounter here in the exhibition however, do not show Veteranyi herself, nor her death, nor what she left behind, nor even the direct experiences of the photographer who traveled to meet those remnants. What we see instead are images that have drifted away from all of these intentions—images of the present.

To take their present form, these images passed through countless decisions, rising from the gaps between them. In this process, no contingency remains pure chance. The photographic events that unfolded before the camera—the photographic moments—are not “naturally” transferred into images. They exist only between image and text (captions, this essay, the artist’s statements).

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If one were to say that photography is a medium that touches death, it is not because it preserves traces or taxidermies past time. Rather, it is because the relationships formed through photography—those among subjects, places, events, the moment of photographing and being photographed—remain suspended until the very last instance of decision.

Photography is a medium that postpones endings. There are those who stand before the camera for this suspension.

The artist once told me that people become less ferocious in photographs. That may be so. After all, Hwang Yezoi approaches both “death” and “growth” as photographic subjects and speaks willingly of “collaboration” with others. Yet this pacifying quality of photography may not belong so much to the personal capacity of the photographer as to the nature of the medium itself. Those who stand before the camera are placed in an awkward position.

They do not know whether the “now” in front of the lens will later appear as an image or be concealed, and thus they stand unsettled—yet they still choose to remain there. It corresponds to the fact that the figures in Hwang’s photographs tend to choose promise over coincidence, gazing over avoidance. Photographer and subject, and the very act of photographing, enter into quiet complicity. This is not a struggle to grasp a fleeting moment of life. Rather, it is the deliberate renewal of a starting point that moves closer to death.

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Death is inevitable but commonly perceived as unexpected—even when it has been calibrated and predicted to the finest degree. This holds true even for those who spent a lifetime imagining and preparing for death only to finally “complete” it, or those who lived under daily updates of a death sentence while waiting for its “execution” to arrive tomorrow. Thus death is postponed—sometimes briefly, sometimes for a long while. The end begins, then repeats itself again.

Those who circle around this postponement stand before the camera, and someone else places them there. Hwang Yezoi’s summer journey to meet Veteranyi, her practice of situating friends and colleagues in front of her camera, and the resulting images all partake in the same decision: to protract something that has already ended—or something already destined to end. This choice resembles the work of mourning that refuses to conclude.

1        Pierre-Louis Fort remarks on the striking moment when Beauvoir, having been absent at her mother’s deathbed, later revisits and re-enacts that instant through the act of writing about her death: “If we accept the equation ‘corpse = end,’ we could say that the end arrived with the mother’s passing. Moreover, as we have already considered at various levels, this end is a double end. (…) Yet this is not the case at all. The insertion of death into a work does not constitute an end—the end of the work, or the end of the mother. On the contrary, the end shifts into the ‘beginning of the end,’ but into the beginning of the end that is the closest to the ultimate conclusion.” (…) “Hesitation already implies that the end has been foretold, but for a long time it has been refused despite its imminence. Even when death seems to have arrived—in other words, even when the mother has died—death is still not acknowledged. It remains at the beginning of the end, lingering on an indeterminate threshold.” — Pierre-Louis Fort (trans. Yu Chi-jeong), Mother and Daughter: Writing of Mourning (Seoul: Munhak gwa Jiseongsa, 2024), 96–98.

2        In the same book, Fort analyzes texts written by Marguerite Yourcenar, Simone de Beauvoir, and Annie Ernaux on the deaths of their mothers and proposes the distinctive structure of the “mother–daughter” relationship. Considering that the long-standing analytical framework of literary history has been the “father–son” paradigm, we might now attempt to trace a genealogy of the “mother–daughter” relation.

3        Bae Suah, the translator, mentions the origin of her translation by noting that she was recommended this book while working on a short story. She titled her “Translator’s Note” with the word “Because.” In that sense, I too seemed to want to answer with a “because.” That is—because…. — Bae Suah, “Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, Because,” in Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta (Seoul: Workroom Press, 2021), 205–222.

4        Aglaja Veteranyi, trans. Bae Suah, ibid., p. 125. 

5        Hwang Yezoi, Something Like Soup (2025). The words were drawn from this work.