Open Kitchen 003 - Other Tongue

2025/12/06- 2025/12/23

Snow is falling

눈이 내린다

Snow is coming down

눈이 내려온다

Snow is shuttering

눈이 닫힌다

The eye is shutting



Roland Barthes said that a language is simultaneously the product and the instrument of the speech. While the statement is true within the perimeter of the ontology of languages, it also points to a methodology in interpreting languages in motion - translation. The science of translation treats languages as “instruments,” in quest of an end product as accurate as possible in representing the mother tongue. Ironically, all translations are uncertain and inaccurate, rendering a perfect correspondence impossible, which establishes the art of translation: the process itself as a product that is confusing and open-ended.


In collaboration with Accent Sisters, “Open Kitchen 003 - Other Tongue” showcases examples from a unique exercise of recursive translation as well as its self-analysis and pictorial illustrations by Jenny Jisun Kim (artist, translator) and Liyoun Kim (poet, writer, and graphic designer). As a research duo, the two place the traditional translation system in question, exposing the flaws, omissions, and alternatives which are often overlooked, and detail how human emotions and subjective judgements play a key role in different translation processes. If translation is a possessional transfer of two agencies, Jenny Jisun Kim and Liyoun Kim, utilizing their expertise in the art of language and painting/drawing, each impersonates one language to perform and enact their push and pull. As the duo explains in their statement: Translation inevitably produces both loss and excess. This linguistic multiplicity becomes the foundation for an intermedial translation that probes the abstraction, fragility, and expansiveness inherent in both language and image as sign systems.


In this collaboration, the recursive translation cycle becomes a method of abstraction itself. As segments of Liyoun Kim’s poems move back and forth between Korean and English, meaning drifts—reconfiguring across shifts in structure, time, mood, agency, spatial logic, and sensory tone. Rather than correcting these deviations, the duo treats them as material. Each drift generates a constellation of “force words” and “image cues” that form the basis for a drawing. In this way, translation and drawing operate as parallel abstractions, where loss, excess, and subjective interpretation are not obstacles but generative forces that reveal how language transforms as it moves between tongues, minds, and mediums.







Curator’s bio:


Phil Zheng Cai (American, b. Shanghai) is a curator and writer based in New York. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BA in Social Science, and received his MA from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He has held posts at Mary Boone Gallery, Phillips Auctioneers, and is currently a partner at Eli Klein Gallery.


Cai’s curated exhibitions have received critical acclaim. His curated exhibition “(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography” was reviewed by Hyperallergic, Musee Magazine, Asian American Arts Alliance AMP Magazine, and many others. His curated exhibition “Alienation?” was reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail. He has participated in panel discussions and talks at institutions such as the Asia Society Museum New York, the SCAD Museum of Art, Columbia University, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, among others.


Cai’s writings are regularly published. His exhibition review “The Estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley at CHART Gallery asks if we still want to play” was recently published in WhiteHot Magazine. His interview with Bojan Stojcic “A Mirrored Interview” was published in IMPULSE Magazine. His exhibition reviews “A Proposal to Live with What Had Been There - Cynthia Gutiérrez at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil”; “Enacting Disassociation - Jean-Luc Moulène Solo Exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery”; “Life as an Invitation - Yoan Capote Solo Exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery” and critical essay “Take a Step: Phil Zheng Cai on the Opening of M+ Museum” were featured in the Widewalls Magazine.


With an interest in philosophy, he translated the book “The Story of Philosophy” by James Garvey into Chinese, and it was published by Shanghai Yuandong Press in 2020. His critical text “Everything can become an NFT, is it true?” was published by the New York Time T Magazine China. His essay “Nomad Photography” was published in the Parsons MFA Photo thesis catalog in 2024.


Cai’s curatorial initiative Open Kitchen focuses on systematic critique, providing recontextualized commentaries following the traditions of institutional critique, highlighting the non-severability of framework and context. Its most recent exhibition “Open Kitchen - Fusion” was reviewed by IMPULSE Magazine. Its interview series “Open Kitchen Negatives” examines the concepts, origins, and ramifications of “missing parallels.”


Phil Zheng Cai currently works and lives in New York.


Artists’ bios 

Jenny Jisun Kim

Jenny Jisun Kim is an artist and translator based in New York. Her practice moves between painting and translation, examining how the two mediums inform and transform one another. Through this dialogue, Kim explores the indeterminacy of language, the fluidity of meaning, and the abstraction of image. Her paintings translate the generative and dissolving processes of meaning into visual form, while her approach to poetry translation draws from the openness and expansiveness of painting. She recently presented her solo exhibition, Verses on Oxherding, at Al Held Foundation, Boiceville, NY, and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY (both 2025). Kim received the Charm Agency New Translator Prize for her English translation of Dolki Min’s short story Settled and Solid, and the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship for her translation of Jaewon Che’s poetry collection How do u want me?. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.


Liyoun Kim

Liyoun Kim is a poet, writer, and graphic designer based in Seoul and Berlin. Her work explores how images are formed and perceived through language, how the agency of a medium interacts with the image it produces, and the complexities inherent in the act of seeing. She is interested in the relationships and movements that emerge as material and immaterial images, sensation and substance, form and matter intertwine and transform one another. She is the author of the poetry collection Transparency Blend Space (Munhakdongne, 2022) and the essay collection Soft Material (Springdays Books, 2025), and has received the Munhakgwa Sahoe Emerging Writer’s Award and the Moonji Literary Award. Her solo exhibition New Hands (2023, Re:flat) examined the exchange, emergence, and loss that occur between the image in poetry and the image as treated in visual media. She runs the graphic design studio Lay Poetry, and has collaborated with clients such as Hyundai Department Store, SM Entertainment, Yangju Minbokjin Museum of Art, and ODRE NYC.