Learning To Live
“and the one who is afraid of dying, never learns to live.”
– Amanda Mcbroom
'The project entitled Learning To Live is my response, and reinterpretation of a song from my childhood memory called 'The Rose' by Bette Midler. Since the late 80’s, precisely after the Seoul Olympic on 1988, every citizen eligible to obtain passport, and some of them started to travel outside of the country. For that reason, there were many options to study the English language. Learning English through pop-songs was one of those. Even though I was living in Seoul and I did not speak English at all, I heard that song and the translation of the lyrics because my mother listened to the cassette tape on her way to work and on her way to back home after she picked me up from school. During my early years of elementary school, the lyrics were scary for me. It seemed to be about love and life. I did not know what is love was, so I didn’t really care about that part, but there was a quite depressing part about life for me as a child; “and the one who is afraid of dying, never learns to live.” That sounded to me like ‘you won’t be able to learn how to live forever and ever.’ How can a human being not fear death? I remembered this song during two years when I kept on hearing news about people who lost someone. It made me look at the rose garden more carefully. Before I really observed the rose, I thought of the rose as a flower that fades away very slowly. But I realised that roses do not last longer, some parts that start to bloom while the other ones are dying – coexisting together with one root; unlike flowers like cherry blossom, just like our life does. Hence, on this project I tried to investigate the beauty of the roses, without cutting them, rearranging them, or nipping off withered leaves; just as they are in the middle of their lives. Now I know that life and its end is not a matter of ‘being afraid,’ it is something that we all have to inevitably accept. But sometimes, I don’t know how to do it since I am still learning to live.' – Ahn Jun
