Jun Haeng Lee
Temporal, Human, And... approaches ageing and dying as temporal and cultural conditions, while involving personal experiences from various backgrounds.
The contributions gathered here contain memory, fragility, dependency, and transformation of ageing and dying, and illustrate each contributor’s understanding into the visual presentation, which includes photographs, paintings, videos, poems and essays. While reflecting on their entire life’s journey with the Timeline of Life, contributors present their thoughts on how their lives are affected by their society and culture into a simple diagram. Rather than presenting ageing as a linear movement towards an ending, the works in this zine consider it as a site of contested meaning. One in which bodies, environments, and cultural structures are not passive backdrops but active forces that determine whose ageing is seen, whose is mourned, and whose is made invisible. To age is not simply to pass through time; it is to be sorted by it. The social categories that organise a life in productivity, dependency, and decline do not merely describe ageing: they produce it. And yet those categories outlast the bodies they classify, mutating into new structures of exclusion long after the individuals they named have gone.
Humans love to categorise everything, even ourselves. We divide the lifespan into birth, age, and death. However, this division is not innocent. These categories carry moral weight: they determine who is considered productive, who is considered a burden, who is worth caring for and at what cost. Even within ageing, further distinctions are drawn: active ageing, successful ageing, and dignified dying. Each term encodes assumptions about what a life well-lived looks like and who fails to achieve it. Stereotypes and phobias do not simply mirror these categories; they enforce them. They persist and expand because they are useful to the structures that produce them. The question is not merely what we should keep talking about, but who has been prevented from talking, and why.
While our physical bodies reach the end and disappear eventually, those categorisations keep existing. Stereotypes, phobias, and even emotions like fear, love, and care are born, age, and exist even after it seems like they are disappearing. They often expand to the end and birth new concepts. Understanding the temporality of human beings is constantly shifting and goes beyond our intentions and its starting point.
Now that we sit down and discuss, what should we keep on talking about, especially related to ageing and dying?