08/04

I have about had it.

Where do they all get off? What profit can be gained from this?

I don’t want to continue spreading my secrets or misgivings in public, yet I must be made known. I wonder what I can do with my private record. It’s safer, even, than the faults of my mind.

My compromise today is to write about my experience with directors generally, so as not to put unwanted pressure on any one of them. Please don’t start a rumor that this is about a director, when in reality it’s far more general. Well, whether or not I choose to release this, I’ve left it to a higher self.

Sometimes, these directors fear being honest with me. They may remain professional, providing measured responses to my questions. However, I’ve often noticed that they don’t speak to me with the same freedom as they do to my colleagues.

When I began my acting career, I was still a child and not so famous, but it was when these energies were maintained from set to set that I began to suspect an encompassing pattern. Don’t for­get that I trained for acting before I became a singer, which should express the ambiguity of my allegiances. Nonetheless, I’m still working to make myself known beyond my voice or likeness. I rec­ognize an inverted privilege in this struggle.

One way I’ve tried to make directors take me seriously is to challenge them. I’ll respond incisively to one of their soft com­ments, cutting deep into the show’s themes and, if I’m lucky,

reading too deeply into an idea that is better than the one they presented. Similar to music, great stories occur when the observer takes on the narrative with the logical fullness of the world, as a symphony conjures an army from sound. When the observer treats a character like the real thing, and the artist treats the observer with the same respect that they give themselves as a cre­ator, then something magical happens. The artist becomes con­tent to withhold what both agree is present, such as the thoughts and conversations occurring in characters outside of depicted scenes. This trust allows the observer to complete these gaps, thereby leaving the artist more time to create a larger, more com­plex epic. The art becomes a life.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly bold, I will even say something like, “I don’t understand why my character would do this?” having already prepared a steady list of reasons. If a director were to respond with, “I could explain this to you. However, I’m the writer and you should trust me,” or something to this effect, that’s when they’ve fallen into my trap and are asking me to strike with my daggers. I’m of course speaking figuratively! I’ve only committed violence to my brother, and it was deserving.

For example, I might say to a director, “Until this point, my character has acted consistently and become angry when pres­sured or accused. By having her acquiesce here, I recognize that it’s convenient for the plot. I’m sorry, however this action has created a new character who I fear the audience won’t believe during the sixth episode when the character returns to their stubborn self. I sense that you’re reaching for a recognition of her powerlessness in this situation, yet that’s what’s so special about the woman

you’ve created. How am I to act this? My most natural reading of your script is to laugh in my enemy’s face until eventually accept­ing their terms with the implicit promise that I will turn around later, when it’s convenient, and close this door for good. However, even this action seems incomprehensible, because in the previous scene I let a far worse offense happen when it would’ve been less inconvenient for me.”

By then his amusement would move to frustration before finally recognition. One must balance these concerns with either naivety or playful aggression, because their egos can become bruised in much the way my own (or my character’s) was, and we’re all humans committed to our best effort. I don’t mean for this to sound manipulative, in fact, when I first experienced this event, my behaviors were entirely sincere. Repeating this proce­dure in future work has become the road to my truest self. Placing it on this page is a confessional prayer. Yes, my admiration for the director informs my treatment of him, including my willingness to scold him, because I want to make it clear not that I’m formida­ble, rather, that I’m taking his universe so seriously that I find his treatment of my character to be offensive to his project.

Here’s a thought, I once had an angry partner tell me that I had cheated on him in his dream, which is a common story, itself uninteresting. I was offended, and not because he’d thought ill of me, as that was only his insecurity, but because he lacked the imagination to think that the version of me in his dream wasn’t any more than an expression of his fears. Put another way, I was offended because in his dream, he hadn’t asked me why I chose

to have the affair, or wondered what mysteries I harbored in his heart.

Am I selfish, manipulative, measured? Or am I seeking to be in control of something which is only natural to want, and as I progress in this way, which is not a freedom gifted to everyone, I’m merely becoming closer to a self-possession that can teach others about how presentation is manifestation, or about the way that my own gifts can invigorate others?

Sometimes I fear that all your praise is not justification. Though I would be lost without you.

Anyways, sharing these sentiments with directors lets them know that they may freely criticize me in pursuit of our shared goals. And in every other way, this criticism is generative, further blurring the line between myself and my characters, between my characters and the audience, and enabling the encounters that I hold so dear. Nonetheless, a few criticisms offered to me during a project may slip through my mask and wound me. I regret this and put care into not revealing the shame to my coworkers. Still, I’m frustrated by the whole affair and would prefer to be less cal­culated. Why must I be so calculated? That this is the way of our business is not a sufficient answer.

For a more direct example, there’s a particular show filmed a few years ago called My Mister. It was a very difficult project, though I’m endlessly grateful for it. The perspective granted from our cast’s found family has meant maybe as much to me as my pride after wrapping the production, which is significant because it’s possibly my finest performance as an actor. Those people left a

legacy in my mind and deserve to be honored long after they’ve left my life.

Part of the following anecdote is untrue, rewritten here to clar­ify more about my feelings, or perhaps more closely aligning with my memories of the events while they were transpiring, rather than the actual event. Yes, all of this did happen, insofar as it’s the right way to express myself. As for the facts of the matter, each person would have their own story, so please don’t retrace my steps. Please don’t bother them, either.

In case you haven’t seen the show, or in case I’ve forgotten, I played a lost young woman who worked for a wonderful boss. Our relationship grew over time into something beside a romantic tune. However, our relationship was built upon deceit. I had wire­tapped his phone because the company’s CEO was covertly pay­ing me to get him fired. I would probably describe my character as a stalker who routinely infiltrated my boss’s privacy. Between this and the kind way he treated me, I grew to love him more deeply and to torture myself with greater violence.

The longer this charade went on, the easier it became for me. As I listened in on him and continued to break his privacy, the more it became clear that I was the horrible one, which comforted me.

I believe I was thinking something like this, ‘If there’s no pos­sibility of what I secretly desire coming true, then there’s nothing to lose. And the more I fall for you while continuing to behave in this way, strangely, the easier it is to set myself aside. And yet, maybe this ease has to do with my feelings, which only grow stronger as they displace me. It feels so natural to continue down

this path that can only hurt us. However, the closer I get, the more I won’t be able to act in my own interests anymore.’

I’m not sure why I’m restating my character’s motivations, possibly because it’s empowering to write these words in a void, when acting is only a sculpture in time, freely gestured yet funda­mentally silent, like falling leaves on a tree that wants us to know that winter is coming. Even that metaphor is too forced. Trees want only of themselves. What it’s really like is uttering a truth that everyone has successfully ignored. Is this doing good in the world? I’m aware that the story has certain parallels with fans’ relationships with celebrities.

Sometimes you ask us what we meant by a decision in a show. While no actor wants to ignore the refined motivations of our character, we actors often resent being asked such a question in an interview, because it has been our work to let words rest in search of greater expressions. Yet what is a greater expression than admit­ting to myself in a secure diary that, at best, I only managed to understand her by casting my shadow on first a mirror, and then on a doorframe, like a sundial to another dimension?

There’s an inevitable tragedy to ‘My Mister.’ My character was always going to betray that man named Dong-hoon. Or rather, she had already betrayed him, and the plot was for him to discover the depths of her scheming falseness. In the meantime, could she explain her actions and allow him to forgive her, for her to forgive herself, and maybe most alarmingly, for me to justify her?

Without spoiling the ending, it seems significant to me that the answer was none of the above.

Eventually I’ve learned that my, Ji-an’s, profoundest duty is to portray all realities. For example, that I’m both the worst, least deserving of kindness, and that I’m also capable of the sort of goodness reserved for a saint. At any given time, both directions would be lived in, until a final decision seals me forever, proving the tangibility of other paths. The strangest part was that, even though one path led towards heaven, letting go of the others was somehow sending me to hell. Perhaps it sent hell to me.

These complicated, often impossible emotional games are the most interesting thing for me to encounter in art, because where else does art feel so real? When we encounter things in life that are truly challenges for us, it’s because there’s a paradox at war with fate, and we must eventually accept this fated contradiction, which brings with it the foreclosure of various doors as we move towards maturity. Maybe this acceptance of narrowing opportu­nities is maturity, I say now that I’m no longer in my twenties, now that I’ve finally understood that I was never mature.

And as she listened to him struggle in his own life, her tragic impulses taught her about his desires, and his kindness taught her about the generosity of the world. Specifically, all this time she had wondered what made people capable of a general agreeable­ness that could not be sincere to her. Since, until then, no one beyond her grandmother (and a garbage man, and maybe her cousin) had ever cared for her, what should’ve been a simple understanding became delayed over years, until this obvious fact of life was buried.

Finally, in what I believe to be an emotional climax, she under­stood the twin impulses of shame and kindness. The first, shame,

is a feeling which she assumed was ruling the world. Yet standing strong besides, or perhaps inside, the totality of shame finally revealed itself. It was the shattering of a self-inflicted myth that she’d been seeing the world upside down, and it became possible to understand the overside of shame in a man whose kindness was finally believable.

One day, Dong-hoon is humiliated by something so great and breaks down, asking ‘Why, why, why!’ accusing the world of cruel senselessness. She used to wonder if kindness was a form of acting to get what you want, and as she stalked him and listened through his wire-tapped-phone, he revealed how he hated himself. He did so in the privacy of his own home so as not to make anyone worry. I can relate to these thoughts.

Her whole life, she was convinced that to get closer to some­one was an unbearable danger, because witnessing them express the self-hatred that she felt looking in the mirror would cause her to project her own misery onto them, leaving them both worse because of it. However, she was wrong.

Her revelation was that, rather than her self-hatred reflecting onto him, it was her love for him that reflected back onto herself. She saw that he should forgive himself, meaning she might forgive herself.

I once said that this drama expresses “that there is this kind of reality. How should we live?” I like the way that I phrased this.

My realization about her character brought tears to my eyes and reminded me of childhood. The universality of pain in others paired with the reality of this man is what finally convinces her that sincerity is possible. This is to say, we become kind when we

can see. And of all the things I hope to accomplish as an actor or a performer, it’s the pureness of this truth that’s my guiding star. If we’ve been lucky as children, it damages our soul when we eventu­ally learn that harm can be done with intent.

How does this relate to fans? On my end, honestly, I’ve received nefarious rumors and even death threats. Sasaengs have scared me. Naming them would be providing the attention that they don’t deserve.

I’ve also witnessed true joy and friendship emerge around me, which has been a blessing surpassing art. I’ve often thought, ‘I should be paying you.’ Alternatively, I could try to give fans their due credit. Our art is made the moment my work encounters you. It’s yours more than my own.

Shall I write more abstractly? Ji-an was the least like the real me of any of my characters. Maybe like fans, I had to understand her as a stranger from inside of myself. In this way, she was also the most like me.

There’s a scene in ‘My Mister’ that encapsulates all of these pages of thoughts. I still have the creased lines of my script, which simply says to ‘break down and cry.’

I’ll try not to spoil the context, and in doing so, I believe it will conserve the sort of mystery that I’m after whenever I think back to that night of filming. In person, I was given many directions on how to escalate the scene, and which way to bring myself to the floor, how to extend the tenderness inside of my sobs, and all of the rest. I spent weeks building up the courage to honor the other actors as well as my own character, trying to plan various avenues or even wondering, ‘Shall I remember the way I lost a family

member who desired to leave, or what it was like discovering a pet suffering pain in silence?’ I decided against both of these options, though I was indebted to that sorrow.

The scene called for emotions that were drawn from love, and a great burdening shame accompanied it. In that moment, I was supposed to release two complimentary tensions. The first was that my boss Dong-hoon was someone who I believed didn’t care for me, after my young lifetime of people letting me down, and really this person cared more than I could understand. Or more than I deserved. This was the second tension, that I did not deserve his love, because without exception whenever someone loved me, it brought them pain. These conflicting emotions were a concert of joy, pain, and shame that became combustible under a suppressed love which for the last twenty-odd years Ji-an hadn’t the courage to release.

These thoughts were all coursing through me and growing as wails in their intensity. Braving the release of them proposed to have the opposite effect, meaning that it could pierce the hole of an infinite body. Despite this, the pressure continued to bruise me. It felt like things would never be okay again, yet I could’ve gone on like that, continuing to sob.

After I heard the words ‘cut,’ there was nothing else I wanted to do except continue crying. I didn’t break the momentum for a long time and was unmoved by the crew’s worry.

At this character’s lowest moment, amid the sort of suffering that frames a lifetime, I’d never in my real life wanted to be some­one else more. And if there’d been a possibility of magically

switching lives with her, I would’ve done so. I was closer to her than to myself.

In hindsight, I’m glad that my wish wasn’t granted. My life is too rich with people I adore, still I may wonder.

It was embarrassing to clean myself up after the scene. The crew knew to give me space. They told me later that it had brought many of them to tears, and that I should be proud of having brought this out of them. I remind myself of this in an effort of persuasion.

However, I didn’t feel proud of this moment. I was channel­ing Lee Ji-an, a character, and doing so with an intensity that before that scene I was wrong to feel sure of. I’d like to say that it was her crying, and that I lost time and disappeared. Honestly, that seems like the most congruent scenario. If that was when I’ve been most convincing as an actor, I’d believe it. I shared a part of me that I couldn’t express and perhaps still can’t. They say that acting is a performance that involves practicing and learning to trust your intuition. It requires watching people and responding in ways by an imagined self, alongside other characters also devel­oped by thousands of previous choices accumulating together. What happened in that scene was not acting, even though it appears that way for everyone else.

It wasn’t acting for me, and I’m the one who knows the differ­ence. These events all happened within my life to be written here as digressions or extensions of one story. I who sing, act, and per­form for a living, but also as someone who lives and has gone through my own struggles and can bank them. I’m the only

person in the world who could’ve done that scene. That isn’t to disparage or brag about myself, it’s only to name the truth.

There must be an expression for the moment I was in. ‘Acting’ doesn’t recall the spiritual quality of that place which seems to refine perceptions and their memories, and which feels real in the same way seeing your name on a sheet of paper or hearing your voice in a recording proves something of the impact you may have outside of yourself. Because this experience was real by a process of simultaneous excavation and aggregation. Ji-an had a reason to sob, and IU the performer, and Ji-eun the person, and myself in the moment, and my identity in the past, and even now in the future as I fondly remember that strange time when I broke com­pletely open in front of others on a set that was less than a set, and at the same time, a set that was not a set but rather a real street where people walked, lived, worked, and wept amid streetlamps. My scene affected others later within the show, and then in the millions of souls who stumbled upon this episode during the mys­terious turmoil of their own stories.

What does that word mean, ‘million?’ I don’t have the capac­ity to know. This is all to say that I wasn’t proud, because it’s too meager. I submitted myself, and lived that scene, and still carry the weight of that injury, and much more.

Sometimes I have dreams where I’m sobbing and don’t know whether it’s because I’ve experienced something tragic, perhaps that moment playing over again, or if I’m practicing a style of communication for you.

There were additional moments in that show as well as many other projects where I’ve experienced the wordless phenomenon

that’s between acting and living yet seems to encapsulate both, like seeing your reflection when you don’t intend to in a shop window, or waking up in a hotel after a long time of sleeping at home. If I succeed in illustrating this, you will say, “I thought I understood, though it’s only now feeling it that I finally can!” And you’ll think with comfort, “I’ve been here before by myself, and deep down I was convinced, secretly, that I was the only one!” How much further does it go? We could build the world on this feeling. In a way, we are building it now.

This diary I’m writing sometimes reminds me of papers I wrote in high school, just before my current life began. It starts with a thesis like, ‘In this essay, I will argue that love is the root of all motivations.’

When one acts well, writes well, and sings well, the passion behind the act is love, just as the written object becomes a creature with a singular motivation. That’s why I wrote Love Wins All, which is a ballad about ballads.

When people say that ‘love makes no sense,’ what they’re really saying is that it doesn’t operate on our reality’s laws of cause and effect. Neither can love be measured. Rather, love is the glimpse of a higher reality imparting itself upon our plane of exis­tence. What is the opposite of a black hole? In light of this flash, this divine inspiration, or possibly the reality of other souls, all actions may be evident, but they’re not explained. To do so would be to search for a target behind the center of the sphere. That is why, when you look for the source of love, you’ll find everything else.

Whenever a character does something bad, there may be an impulse to explain it in another way. As discussed with my Ji-an in ‘My Mister,’ there comes a time where it becomes clear to the audience, as well as to my character, that I have reverence for the great Lee Sun-Kyun’s Park Dong-hoon. And yet, I continue to make questionable decisions, often to directly hurt Dong-hoon. The easy way out is to consider Ji-an as a monstrous character. After all, I’ve killed a man in my past and am trying to surmount debt through a series of conniving, selfish behaviors. It seems the only person I care for is my grandmother. However, there’s another way out.

I don’t mean to state the obvious here. It’s clear even early in the show that my character is to be empathized with, this notion is layered intuitively in everything from my character’s music to the same few turtlenecks I wear each day, which endearingly sug­gests how Ji-an is hiding her desperation. What’s strange is that I continue to behave in this way despite your sensing Ji-an’s innate goodness, as if you’re screaming through the screen at me to behave, if not for everyone else, then for myself. However, the clever thing about Won-seok’s work is that, in this moment, the drama is about why I’m elongating my suffering within an inevitable arc.

The answer has something to do with the shape of self-discov­ery, containing tensions that are internal. Every character must possess inward logic. I’ve tried to place this feeling into my fans with mixed effects. Characters that aren’t guided by love, whether it’s because they’re too evil or generically good, are too flat to carry someone through the river of a great work which leaves them in a

new location from where they started. I wonder if you can pro­ceed from this. In the case of whether a character lacks proper motivation, what then does it say about the artist, or the logic of the world that the artist created?

While I’m interested in what being guided by love means in the realm of music, I haven’t reflected on the use of, let us say, more immature narratives that don’t properly take love into account. Maybe it’s in fear of an unintelligent audience that pre­fers something simpler than the permutations of real life. Maybe it’s because people find comfort in stories that reflect not what they’ve lived, but what they can predict, because an illusion of understanding is enough to get to sleep.

More likely, in addition to the above, there is an ungenerous urge in the artist. These urges don’t appear out of nothing. Rather, they must reflect another sort of failing, possibly that of an unkind world, or a wounded self, or even a desire for control. This fantasy bends all characters to the whim of a creator, instead of the reverse where a character, once created, seems to live on despite their writer. In this case, the character has such a refined presence that if their creative desires were to be respected, they would go on in such a direction far beyond the page. By then the character is a real creature, and deviations from reality are felt as glitches of their presence away from the being we know exists.

Though I would never admit this in public, I believe that most art fails to cross this threshold into the willing reality that musi­cians occupy. I once heard the phrase, ‘Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.’ If everything I’m saying is famil­iar, it’s only proof that these words were never necessary.

Yet there must also remain space in a created being for surpris­ing themselves, just as a melody must develop in unexpected, nonetheless inevitable ways. By this extension, the audience should also be surprised by the vitality of a character’s choice. Which brings me all the way back to myself, or my character, that boy, or you.

I think that the perfect artistic act is to create a child. If I were to speak in metaphors, many stories call this to mind. Frankenstein designs a new creature, whereas Don Quixote is the reincarnated image of his written will. The myth of our heritage is that Dangun was both the grandson of the Heavenly Lord and the child of a bear who had become a woman, of equal parts god and animal. I’ve wondered if any of these perversities are wrong, yet here I am writing in my diary with the gestating image of a fan who lingers in my heart.

Due to fame, my work imparts my consciousness upon the world. Is it a stretch to imagine, somewhere out there, that my life created a personality? While I was playing around like a giddy child in the sun. I’ve had egotistical daydreams shift to nightmares about this possibility, which I may admit to myself here.

No, I know that it’s not just a possibility, and that numerous people exist in orbit of me. When in reality we all come from nothing, that is, we’re all burning with matter that appears to have come from nowhere else, and so, like the universe, the only con­clusion is that we each underwent an immaculate conception from nothing into something. It seems immoral to influence the germination of stars to the extent that it erases what is unique in us.

The nightmare was that I’d written upon someone’s face a mask of myself, and then everywhere I looked, there was myself possessing the bodies of others. My pale skin and wide eyes looked out of proportion, neither borrowed nor stolen but rather endemic, like I had made camp in a forest. I remember thinking, ‘How could I?’

Say what you will about the soul. There has never, in the entire history of humanity, been room for two.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to try my best to make it worth their while, until they may look away and are dislodged. The truth is, I’ll never understand their love, I may only show them who I am. Nonetheless, deep down, do I hope that they’re earnest?