Art on fire, p.1
Art on Fire, page 1
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Art on Fire
Yun Ko-eun was born in Seoul in 1980. In 2004, the year she graduated from university, her short story ‘Piercing’ won the Daesan Literary Award for College Students. In 2008, she received the Hankyorek Literature Award for her novel The Zero G Syndrome. In 2010, she published a collection of short stories entitled Table for One, and in 2011 her short story ‘The Sea Horse Flies’ won the Yi Hyo-seok Literary Award. Her novel The Disaster Tourist was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2020.
Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Princeton and Harvard.
Scribe Publications
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2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 223w, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA
First published in Korean as 불타는 작품 by EunHaengNaMu Publishing Co. in 2023
Published in English by Scribe 2025
Copyright © Yun Ko-eun 2023
Translation copyright © Lizzie Buehler 2025
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.
978 1 915590 90 9 (UK edition)
978 1 964992 19 8 (US edition)
978 1 761386 38 1 (ebook)
Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.
scribepublications.com.au
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1.
Nine years ago, the photo Canyon Proposal was taken on Bill Mori’s mobile phone.
Bill was a photographer based in Las Vegas, and at the time he was so popular that his clients had to book at least six months in advance. The couple that had scheduled a four-day photo shoot starting 15 June in Grand Circle were his three-hundredth booking. Canyon Proposal was shot on 16 June, at four in the morning. For a while, people assumed that this couple were the subject of Canyon Proposal. But they couldn’t have been — they hadn’t even met Bill. Bill Mori’s three-hundredth booking, the couple who were supposed to meet him in the Grand Canyon, had cancelled suddenly, right before their scheduled date.
Bill felt a surge of fatigue when he learned about the cancellation, but soon realised that this would allow him to take an unexpected break. His accommodation was paid for, and he’d already driven the five lonely hours to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. The sudden freedom hit him as he was about to wilt under a wave of exhaustion.
Bill went to bed early and woke up before four on 16 June to drive a distance away from the lodge. He wanted to take pictures of the stars. There was a hidden stargazing spot, somewhere that didn’t show up on public maps of the park, and Bill was the only person there. He stayed for two hours. The period between 3.00 and 5.00 am is a time for loners — too late for the night owls, too early for even the earliest of risers.
The stars weren’t the only thing that made it into Bill’s camera frame that morning. Leaning out of his camping chair as he peered into the slowly brightening dawn, he saw a dozen or so elk cross his line of sight. Bill hurriedly snapped pictures of the scene, alternating between his phone and his camera. He was careful not to disturb the elks’ secret world. Enthralled by the animals, Bill didn’t notice the scene that was unfolding above their antlers.
Only at the end of a relaxing four days did Bill look at the photo he’d taken on his phone and discover unexpected guests within its frame. He thought he’d just taken a picture of a group of elk, but there they were: two people at the edge of a cliff, above the tangled bramble of elk antlers. A woman in a wedding dress and, in front of her, a man on one knee.
It was the kind of photo where, even though you couldn’t clearly see their faces, you knew their expressions. The woman’s veil hung over her shoulder, fluttering gently in the wind. It looked like a sprinkle of white snow, or silver netting. Moonlight illuminated the couple. The darkness in the picture looked a lot more impressive than it had in reality.
It wasn’t unusual for Bill to witness a proposal. He’d seen several in the Grand Canyon alone. He had clapped vigorously in congratulations and even, at one proposal, grabbed a prop that was about to fly away in the wind. As a wedding photographer, he had helped couples plan their proposals, too. But the proposal that Bill had accidentally captured made a strong impression even on him. Later, in an interview, he said:
‘If you’re awake at 4.00 am, you either haven’t gone to sleep yet or you woke up really early. I was the latter. I don’t know which group these two belonged to, but look at their clothes — that’s not something you can put on in a few minutes. They must have been awake all night.’
Bill zoomed in on the couple as much as he could. He’d taken the photo from quite a distance, but the subjects were certain to recognise themselves. Bill uploaded the picture to Instagram with the caption:
‘Canyon Proposal, June 16, 4.00 am. Looking for the couple that proposed on the Grand Canyon’s most beautiful cliff.’
Within a day, the photo had a huge number of comments. Bill’s photos had never before garnered this much attention. Viewers were captivated by the anonymous proposal that took place while they slept. Some went to the place they thought the picture had been taken and snapped copycat photos. The spot was nicknamed ‘Shooter’s Point’. There were lots of cliffs near the centre of the canyon, but Shooter’s Point was no longer just another one of them.
Of course, some people didn’t get the photo at all. This was advertising, they said. These people claimed that Bill’s photo was staged from the beginning. Bill was a professional photographer, after all. And it was true that he gained many more customers in the aftermath of Canyon Proposal. Soon, Bill had to post on his website that he was booked until the end of the following year. To counter the rumours, he added, ‘I don’t work that hard to promote my business.’
Doubts about the authenticity of the photo were eventually dispelled for an unexpected reason: the scene Bill had captured wasn’t a proposal. As it turned out, by the morning of 16 June, the woman in the photo had been missing for a week. Bill learned that the woman was named Lina. She was in her late twenties and ran a wedding dress shop in Los Angeles with a friend, and she’d disappeared while on a business trip to Las Vegas. He learned this, of course, at the same time as everyone else, from the same public sources. But people still asked Bill what else he knew.
It was Lina’s friend and business partner who had recognised her upon seeing Canyon Proposal. The friend said that there was no reason for Lina to be wearing the wedding dress, but that without the dress she wouldn’t have been able to identify her. The friend had designed the dress, and Lina was supposed to be delivering it to a customer. According to CCTV footage from the hotel where Lina was staying, she’d left the premises in a blue romper, carrying two large bags. The dress, which Lina was meant to bring to another hotel only eight hundred metres from her own, reappeared in the Grand Canyon a week later. When the friend saw Canyon Proposal, she immediately recognised the clothing, the disappearance of which had sown such confusion: an all-too-familiar dress with a thin veil stretched over the shoulders, out of place in an unfamiliar environment.
The friend submitted dozens of pictures of the dress as evidence to the police, who sprang into action. They obtained records showing that on the afternoon of 13 June, Lina had rented a car just outside the hotel under a false name and entered the Grand Canyon through the North Rim. Someone else had been with her. It was surprising enough that someone meant to deliver a dress in Las Vegas had ended up in a canyon hundreds of kilometres away, but even more unusual was the fact that she’d gone to the North Rim. The South Rim was easier to get to from Las Vegas. Lina may have had a reason to go north, but it was hard to imagine what that might have been, since two days later, at 6.00 pm on 15 June, she was spotted passing through the East Entrance of the South Rim, just as the sky was beginning to turn towards the blue of evening. There weren’t many places for people who entered the park at that time to spend the night. The police received several tips about accommodations and campsites in the area where Lina may have stayed, but no useful information. It was impossible to grasp the entirety of Lina’s journey within the South Rim. It was as if she’d chosen to travel from one blind spot to another, vanishing in between. Rumours spread about what kind of person Lina was, but no one could confirm the identity of the man on one knee in front of her. They didn’t even know if the two had been travelling together.
Canyon Proposal began to be known as ‘Canyon Disappearance’. Since he’d taken a photo of a missing person, Bill had unintentionally become a witness to a potential crime. People asked Bill if he was aware of this, demanding that he answ
er for himself.
‘Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up,’ Bill wrote in a cryptic response on Instagram, ‘but a comedy in long-shot.’
People criticised Bill for plagiarising Charlie Chaplin. As malicious comments piled up, Bill posted again: ‘I didn’t know anything at the time. I thought it was a proposal — that’s what it looks like in the photo. Maybe it isn’t really a proposal, but no more information has been revealed. What judgement can you make from a distant silhouette? I didn’t even look at the photo on my phone until a few days after I took it — I’m not a witness to anything. Even if I had known it was an emergency, what could I have done? I took the photo at fifteen times magnification — I was at least thirty minutes away from the couple by foot.’
Some viewers sympathised with Bill’s statement, but most criticised his weak, indifferent tone. Some people said that it looked like the woman’s arms were tied behind her back. The picture kind of did look like that, once you heard the claim, but it also didn’t. People listed the actions Bill should have taken, ignoring the fact that he hadn’t noticed the couple in his photo until later. He could have called the police, they said, or notified the place where he was staying. He could have honked his horn, turned the lights on and off. ‘How could you post something like this?’ they asked angrily. ‘Did you think about how Lina’s friends and family might feel?’
At first, Bill tried hard to defend himself, but after reading several articles about Lina’s disappearance, he felt it would be inappropriate to continue talking about the case. Lina’s father was revealed to be the founder of the stationery company Waldmann, and apparently a huge amount of time and energy had been put into the case. Detectives contacted Bill, and, under pressure, he deleted his Instagram post. But its contents had spread far enough to evade complete erasure.
The police asked Bill to cooperate with the investigation by coming to the police station as a witness. A few days later, Bill posted again on Instagram: this time, a black square. It was four in the morning, and Bill couldn’t sleep.
‘It wasn’t me,’ the caption read. ‘Bill Mori did not take that photo.’
In short, Bill claimed that the photograph had been taken on his mobile phone at 4.00 am on 16 June, but that it was ‘Robert’, not Bill, who had taken the picture. Robert was now going to serve as a witness, Bill said, and he would submit his mobile phone as evidence if necessary for the investigation. Bill wasn’t his mobile phone, he said, asking his followers to think about the two as separate entities. In his confession, Bill failed to explain why he had pretended to take the photo.
‘Did Robert steal your phone?’ comments asked. ‘Or did you steal his picture?’
Now it wasn’t just anonymous social media accounts questioning Bill. Bill’s business was in crisis, too. He had to cancel several bookings and give those customers their deposits back. Bill had often used the Grand Circle for his photo shoots, but it had become somewhere completely unfamiliar. He went back to Shooter’s Point, but the site was now so overrun by visitors that it required security. Bill stood under the craggy rock and looked at the spot where he had parked his car and taken pictures of the stars and the elk. He stayed at Shooter’s Point for nearly two hours before returning to his hotel. That night, he posted, ‘Robert the dog will now explain everything.’ He stopped updating his website, his Instagram account, and his Facebook page.
Now Robert, not Bill, was in charge.
Soon after, a witness to the disappearance appeared at the police station. The police never released the witness’s name, but people believed it to be Robert. They said that Robert was Bill’s apprentice, that Bill regularly claimed Robert’s photos as his own. The identity of someone suspected to be Robert was posted in an online forum and then deleted. Las Vegas police mentioned that they had obtained an additional photo as evidence — the media took this to mean that the second photo proved something definitive. Even so, the police didn’t release it to the public.
When the witness appeared at the police station, walking on all fours, tail wagging, no one gave him a second look. They were waiting for Robert. No one at the police station had taken Bill literally when he called Robert a dog. It took them a while to realise that it hadn’t been an insult — Robert really was a dog.
The person who came in with Robert introduced himself as an acquaintance.
‘Not the owner,’ asked the detective in charge, ‘but an acquaintance?’ The detective was flustered to learn that the witness was a dog. And the person who’d shown up with him wasn’t even his owner!
The man introduced himself as the manager of the lodge Bill had stayed at, the closest lodge to Shooter’s Point. He had first met Robert half a year earlier. For six months, the manager had fed and more or less housed Robert, but he couldn’t say that he was Robert’s owner. The detective thought back on what Bill had told him. Hadn’t he said that Robert wasn’t an ‘ordinary man’? Maybe this is what he’d meant. Had this dog really taken the two photos in question? Had Bill lent his mobile phone to a dog — and not even his own dog, but one he didn’t know? Had Robert stolen the phone? Later, when the detective asked Bill about this, he said that all he knew was that the dog had touched his phone. The dog had been mingling with all the guests at the lodge; he wasn’t being constantly watched.
‘Robert is good at communicating,’ the manager said. ‘People usually aren’t saying anything that smart, so he basically understands them. Robert!’
As soon as the manager called his name, Robert ran into his outstretched arms. The detective stared as Robert yawned.
‘Let me ask you,’ the detective said. ‘As someone who knows Robert, do you think it’s really possible that he took the picture?’
‘Bill already told you,’ the manager said. ‘Robert took the picture.’
‘Doesn’t Bill strike you as a little suspicious?’
‘I don’t know what kind of man Bill is. All I know is that this is definitely the kind of thing Robert would have done. Robert is famous for his photography — at least, he’s famous among the guests at our lodge. Of course, he doesn’t take a phone out of his pocket and snap a photo right away. But I’m sure he took this picture. The button just has to be in reach of his paws.’
‘Well,’ the detective said, ‘this isn’t the first time we’ve had an animal as a witness. We’ve had cats and dogs, parrots, iguanas. Their testimony has been very important. But what can Robert testify to in this case?’
He rubbed his jaw with both hands and looked at Robert.
‘What can you do, Robert?’ the detective asked. ‘Is there something you want to tell us?’
Robert glanced at the detective and scratched his ear with one paw.
‘Just to confirm,’ the detective said to the manager, ‘you’re saying that this dog took the picture.’
‘It’s not that difficult for him, as far as I can tell,’ the manager said. ‘Do you want to see? These are some pictures that Robert took with my mobile phone. Some were taken at night, some are of sunrises, of travellers, campfires.’
‘Do you know how many animals there are like Robert in Nevada alone?’ the detective asked. ‘One hotel has a cat that plays the piano whenever a guest arrives. There’s an eagle that cooks meals for its family. An elephant that knows how to drive.’
A colleague walking by joined the conversation.
‘My dog will sometimes text suspects in the cases I’m investigating,’ she said. ‘I have to send them apologies.’ When no one laughed, the colleague handed over her mobile phone as proof. The detective rubbed his face again and looked at Robert.
‘He’s a papillon, right?’ the detective asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ the manager said. ‘When I found him, he was injured, so I got him treatment, and after that, he started coming to the lodge to sleep and eat. The park ranger said he’s probably not a purebred, but he sure looks like one, right?’
‘I heard that papillons are smart,’ the detective said. ‘The third-smartest breed of dog.’
‘That’s not the point,’ the manager replied. ‘Not all papillons can take photos like this.’ He pushed his mobile phone towards the detective.
