[News Culture] “Nguyễn.”
The name never comes out quite the same way twice. Each attempt seems to bring it closer, only to make the distance from the original more apparent.
That gap is where writer and director Kim Insun’s “Decaying Apple Jam” begins. Rather than treating mispronunciation as a minor linguistic mistake, Kim uses it to examine what happens when memory, affection and good intentions fail to preserve another person exactly as they were.
Selected for the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture’s Artistic Creation Support Program, the production is Kim’s first solo work presented under her own name. It runs from Aug. 7 to 9 at Post Territory Ujeongguk in Hapjeong, western Seoul, with performances at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.
A Name That Would Not Stay Still
The work grew out of an encounter in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 2018, where Kim met a local person named Nguyễn.
The surname is widely used in Vietnam, yet it rarely settles into a single pronunciation or spelling in Korean. As Kim worked to reproduce the sound, the name began to lose its apparent stability. It became something shaped by accent, translation, memory and the mechanics of the mouth.
That experience led her to a larger question: What does it mean to call another person by name?
A name can acknowledge someone’s presence and affirm a relationship. Yet the act also exposes its limits. The tongue slips. Memory edits. Familiarity creates confidence where accuracy may no longer exist.
“Decaying Apple Jam” makes those small failures visible. The difficulty of producing an unfamiliar sound, the body’s repeated corrections and the urge to hold on to a fading connection all become part of the performance.
What Preservation Cannot Save
The piece moves through five sections built around fruit, decay, souvenirs, orange juice and the repeated reading of Nguyễn.
An apple darkens once its flesh meets the air. Sugar and heat can turn it into jam, extending its life while changing its form. Preservation delays loss, but it does not abolish it.
Kim uses that process as a model for memory.
Relationships rarely remain intact. They persist instead through fragments: a smell, a taste, a photograph, a souvenir or a name remembered incorrectly. A messenger profile image may become the last fixed version of a face no longer seen in person.
In the section devoted to Nguyễn, pronunciation becomes strenuous and exposed. The effort to form an unfamiliar sound is no longer hidden inside ordinary speech. The pauses, tension and repeated failures are treated as evidence of the distance between one person and another.
Giving Decay a Sound
The production also draws sound directly from the apple.
Copper and zinc electrodes are inserted into the fruit, generating a small electrical charge that is amplified into sound. What begins as a measurable signal soon becomes open to interpretation. It may resemble a biological pulse, the noise of deterioration or a voice the listener wants to hear.
The effect raises a pointed question: How quickly do people turn neutral data into a story?
A second image gives the work its mathematical framework. The curve y=1/x approaches zero endlessly without ever reaching it. The distance keeps narrowing, but contact remains impossible.
For Kim, the asymptote offers a precise image of memory. A person may keep correcting a pronunciation or trying to reconstruct an old relationship, yet the original remains just beyond reach.
Respect, Control and the Politics of Naming
Although the project begins with foreign pronunciation, its deeper subject is the ethics of recognition.
Learning to say another person’s name properly can be an expression of respect. But the desire to master that name can also conceal a different impulse: the wish to fit the other person neatly into one’s own system of language and understanding.
Kim does not romanticize the effort to “get it right.” Instead, she examines the power imbalance between the person who names and the person being named.
That tension gains force in performance. On the page, a reader can pause or return to a passage. In the theater, the artist’s breath, silence, hesitation and mistakes unfold in shared time. The audience also encounters the physical transformation of the fruit through heat, smell and texture.
What the Jam Leaves Behind
By the end of the performance, discarded apple flesh has been cooked into jam.
The transformation does not restore the fruit, nor does it preserve it forever. It simply gives what remains another form.
As the lights dim, the jam in the pot and the residue of an unfinished name occupy the same space. Decay is no longer presented as disappearance. Forgetting, likewise, becomes less an act of erasure than a process of rearrangement.
A lost relationship may survive in a profile image, a travel souvenir or a mispronounced name lodged in the body.
At its strongest, “Decaying Apple Jam” is not merely a work about failing to say Nguyễn correctly. It is a study of the imperfect ways people remember one another—and of the violence that can enter language even when it begins with care.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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