Introduce him in a word?
I’m sorry. That’s a little awkward.
It isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds.
He came to see me last night.
Not for the first time, either.
I’m sick of it, frankly.
When he turns up out of nowhere like that, he tells me stories I’m not especially curious to hear.
He was once a mask, cast from the dead face of an ancient Roman.
At some point he was the armor of a Danish king, murdered most foully.
Once, he was very nearly caught by a scholar in Germany.
So it’s an exorcism?
Something like that, but no. He isn’t a demon, after all.
He just puts me in a bad mood now and then.
Apparently he sometimes lingers in old photo albums, too.
And in mirrors?
Of course. In mirrors as well.
Surely you’ve heard of the curse of two mirrors set face to face, reflecting each other forever?
Please don’t tell me he looks like a corpse.
Why wouldn’t he? There are plenty of corpses.
Corpses dead of disease. Corpses that drowned. Corpses crushed to a pulp in accidents!
I’m joking. That’s only once in a long while. He seems to do it only when he’s bored.
You might find that side of him a bit childish.
It sounds like something out of Ovid.
It does. He’s cunning, you see. He never reveals his true form. Not to me, at any rate.
Yesterday he said something rather funny.
He claimed that, by nature, he points to the very essence of life. So he says.
Not so simple after all, then?
That’s how it is between the ghost and me.
Minseo Shin is an artist who works between Seoul and Paris. Since 2024, Shin has been affiliated with the ED APESA doctoral school at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, studying the ghost as a code that resists definition. Shin’s experimental practice takes images and texts apart and puts them back together.
