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As we travel...
Apr. 22nd, 2019 02:24 pmToday, I'm flying from Fukuoka, Japan to Minneapolis. The rest of the family is off to Scotland - I'll join them in a couple of weeks. As part of that endeavor we're in the Seoul Incheon airport, all of our first times in Korea.
Today's visit to that airport has been defined by a powerful work of performance art.
I am not presently counting the Korean Dunkin Donuts with an animation of King Kong clinging defiantly to a giant donut as performance art. But of course you would be free to do so. I believe that to be an entirely separate installation, much like the string quartet lustily playing "A Whole New World," from Disney's Aladdin, just a few feet in front of my wife and children's departure gate.
The piece of performance art I mean was of a different, more cryptic character. After your humble narrator sat on an otherwise-unremarkable toilet in the men's room, I spied a pair of signs of the kind frequently found in Asian airports:
In the unlikely event that you can read the text scratched into the bottom sign, you're already a bit confounded. It reads, "It is not what I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."
"What part of not squatting upon the toilet seat is it that defines this anonymous scratcher?", you might be thinking. I certainly was, at least after I deciphered the message. Or perhaps, "is s/he a rebel that *does* squat on the toilet seat and is defined by that?" Or "do they mean something other than squatting? The diagram is fairly aerobic-looking."
I was pondering all this as I flipped the toilet lid up and down, looking for the way to flush in the airport's unfamiliar and plausibly automated environment.
And behind that toilet seat, I found a single carefully-wadded sock, white with multicolored stripes.
I leave the interpretation to my distinguished readers.
Today's visit to that airport has been defined by a powerful work of performance art.
I am not presently counting the Korean Dunkin Donuts with an animation of King Kong clinging defiantly to a giant donut as performance art. But of course you would be free to do so. I believe that to be an entirely separate installation, much like the string quartet lustily playing "A Whole New World," from Disney's Aladdin, just a few feet in front of my wife and children's departure gate.
The piece of performance art I mean was of a different, more cryptic character. After your humble narrator sat on an otherwise-unremarkable toilet in the men's room, I spied a pair of signs of the kind frequently found in Asian airports:
In the unlikely event that you can read the text scratched into the bottom sign, you're already a bit confounded. It reads, "It is not what I am underneath, but what I do that defines me."
"What part of not squatting upon the toilet seat is it that defines this anonymous scratcher?", you might be thinking. I certainly was, at least after I deciphered the message. Or perhaps, "is s/he a rebel that *does* squat on the toilet seat and is defined by that?" Or "do they mean something other than squatting? The diagram is fairly aerobic-looking."
I was pondering all this as I flipped the toilet lid up and down, looking for the way to flush in the airport's unfamiliar and plausibly automated environment.
And behind that toilet seat, I found a single carefully-wadded sock, white with multicolored stripes.
I leave the interpretation to my distinguished readers.
