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?
As technology becomes more accessible, we are living in a society embedded with digital media, and it is getting harder to ignore the fact that humans hold two separate bodies, in both physical and digital society. Those two concepts are constantly interacting even
without you noticing. Digital media has been quietly substituting the social constructs and interactions that humans built in the physical realm. Digital copies of photographs become memories, text messages become conversations, and various social media spaces claim their territories in the digital realm to build their own society within the digital society. While we are moving forward to this new era of being digital, does it make us naive to give into the idea that digital media will last forever?
While it seems like time flows in a linear line in the physical realm, the temporality of human beings seems to be a dot in an empty space, being ever so static, everlasting and independent in the digital world. However, do humans truly believe that within this digital realm, the concept of ageing would magically stop functioning anymore? Or do they simply hope to believe? We love to believe that we have tamed transience, that we are entering an era no longer constrained by it. We can digitally transform everything, and we believe that it is true. We can easily summon texts written two thousand years ago, revisit places we have never been, speak to simulations of the dead, and trace the history of almost anything by simply visiting digital archives. We imagine a future where consciousness might be stored, bodies augmented, ageing deferred—a life extended beyond its natural limits.
This may appear like a promise of permanence, but does permanence always have to be the end goal? Why not embrace fragility? Everything ages and dies. Servers fail. Data corrupts. Platforms vanish. What seems infinite is often temporary, dependent, and unreliable. Even in this unprecedented digital age, the struggles over power, class, community, identity, and narrative have not diminished.
However, When everything appears retrievable, nothing feels unique.
When everything seems eternal, nothing feels valuable enough to cherish.
Let’s continue our discussion further, even though this conversation will age and die eventually.
About THA Team
THA(Temporal, Human, And) is a collective of a curator, designers and a researcher, specialising in the concept of caring in relation to ageing and dying. Our aim is to understand human temporality to contribute our research to build a more inclusive, caring, and intergenerational community within the Royal College of Art.
Curator & Writer
Seoul / London
junlee1317@gmail.com