Free I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-Ha Kim

professionally, but a few looked into the camera like first-time extras. Each time that happened, he felt annoyed. C continued to wait for his friend, sometimes as a member of the audience, other times as the actor.

    When that game got boring, he started envisioning the work he was going to show in the exhibit. He only had a vague concept: a piece that combined video and performance art. He didn't yet have a specific theme or a technique he wanted to employ. His ideas alternated between the grandiose, morphing into environmental art like Christo's draping of a Pacific island, and his reality, where he only had two camcorders and a Mac. He had gone back and forth between the Pacific Ocean and his apartment studio three times when a woman walked into the opposite café. He still remembers how the wind fanned up her long, straight hair and let it float back down again, like water from a fountain. He squinted, tracking her with his eyes. She sat down at the bar near the window facing him, her coffee on a tray. She was wearing a thin leather jacket and shorts, and he could
make out her legs through the picture windows. He kept watching her.

    She was different. It wasn't that she had a unique sense of style or that she had bad posture. He wondered what it was that made her so attractive. Only when his ignored cigarette dropped ash into his coffee cup did he figure out her secret. She was a perfect actress. She didn't look in his direction once. She just sipped her coffee in the sun, delicately. She didn't read or rifle through her purse or touch up her makeup. She looked like she was concentrating on projecting herself through the windows, the screen. Her only movement was to caress her hair that fell over her shoulder each time she lowered her head, then flip it back.
    "Sorry, were you waiting long?" His friend appeared. C's eyes had started to sting because he was so engrossed in the voyeuristic game of watching the woman behind two windows. His friend was a curator at G gallery in Insa-dong, which was putting on this exhibit. The curator sat down and followed C's gaze across the street. C was unable to tear his eyes away.
    "Why is she over there?" the curator clucked. He went across the street and escorted the woman to their table. It was surreal. He was shaken, the way he always feels when he sees a TV ad where a tiger leaps out of the screen. The woman was now sitting across from him, having walked through the screen and the lens of the camera. He was a little embarrassed.
    The curator introduced them. "This is Yu Mimi. I assume you know who she is." The two nodded in greeting. C had heard of her. People had talked about her performance art at a few gatherings. But it never occurred to him that he would meet her like this, so he sat back quietly and let his friend talk.

    "We invited her to perform on opening night because we want to open with a bang. We think it'll be a nice mix, because we're mostly exhibiting video and installation," the curator explained, glancing at C as if he were uncomfortable with the way C was staring at Mimi. She was pale up close. Smoky eye shadow contrasting with her pearly skin gave her a decadent beauty. She looked to be around thirty and somehow reminded him of Judith. Judith, who wasn't interested in anything, and Mimi, who seemed so confident and self-assured, didn't have anything in common on the surface. Was it her scent? Her posture? The way she looked at people? C couldn't figure it out.
    The curator rambled on about the exhibit's purpose and significance, but Mimi looked bored. Her aloof demeanor effectively canceled out the grand aim of the exhibit, and the curator became flustered. At the end of his spiel, the curator asked whether she would do him the honor of performing on opening night. She looked like she would refuse, but she assented readily. The curator looked at C, surprised by her agreement. C felt like he had to say something to fill the silence.
    "That's great. It's going