Burning S(e)oul: A Body for Cremation

Abstract

Every year, there are over 70,000 fatalities around Seoul, with only two operating crematoria in the city, that is over 100 bodies a day each institution needs to process efciently. By May 26, it would have been six years since my grandfather was gone in those fames. Threading the remnants of mourning, Burning S(e)oul, in forms of a short flm, is a dialogue between “absences” of bodies and architecture. It is presented as a triptych along three parallel timelines divided into fve tableaux. Narrating the aftermaths of death, it refects the bereaved, the deceased, and the workers’ perspective along three mandatory days of grieving. Absence in this paradigm is not solely physical or emotional but rather phenomenological— what appears a quotidian existence of oneself is stripped of its corpse, reafrming that the inherent genius loci of the crematorium instead refect a broader infuence that institutions have experienced since post-war Korea. It argues that the systematized practice of death processing is an apparatus used to sever the genealogy of individual bodies from their role in afrming personal and communal kinships. Embedded within its architectural design, this alienation dismantles time by shifting the condition of death processes as an engineered state, rather than historical or material one. This detachment is emblematic of the country’s postwar trajectory, where rapid modernization prioritized efciency over continuity, severing longstanding rituals that once bond personal grief to communal memory. The friction between an engineered present and an inherited past manifest as a form of cultural desynchronization— one where the ostensibly modern remains haunted by the traditional. This shift extends beyond mere technical or practical concerns; it represents a deliberate method of assimilating a nonlinear societal modernization—one that in its pursuit of progress, distances itself from historical trauma. Yet this tension does not merely mark a transition; it accumulates as a generational melancholy, where the urgency of progress leaves grief suspended in an unresolved state, neither fully severed nor meaningfully preserved.