Gayoung Lee

In The Could Have, Would Have, Should Haves, the voices of the undisclosed, Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his 2015 speech, and Korea’s current president Yoon Suk-yeol are silently articulated (left), and this is simultaneously interpreted by the artist into Japanese for Korean and into Korean for Japanese (middle). Then, these speeches are once again translated into English using simultaneous AI translation software, representing the axis of power in the Korean-Japanese relationship(right). The leftmost monitor, functioning as the source text, blurs the distinction between private/personal utterances and public apologies as the imagined 'translations' of apologies and expressions of acceptance that were never carried out is performed by the artist. Through the process of double translation, the work highlights the inherent challenges of translating geo-political apologies while delving into the fundamental nature of apology itself.