Na Mira: Hotel

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College

30 W. Dale Street, Colorado Springs, CO 80903

January 10–April 19, 2025

Admission: Adults: $10, Military and seniors 55+: $5, Students, teachers, kids under 12, and members: free

Review by José Antonio Arellano

Before crossing the curtain that separates the darkened room exhibiting Na Mira’s Hotel from the rest of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, I could hear a song playing from within the gallery. It sounded vaguely familiar, at the edge of my recognition and memory. I had not, in fact, heard it before; my phone identifies it as a Korean pop song from the mid-1990s. Perhaps the generic conventions of pop music can prompt such a false sense of recollection. Or maybe my mind is unable to experience novelty without searching for familiarity.

An installation view of Na Mira’s *Hotel*, 2022, transistor radios, mirrors, and two black-and-white films projected on perpendicular walls, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Paul Soto, Los Angeles.

I prepared for this initial encounter by reading about the history of video art. I revisit Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose brilliant poetry and video art serve as inspiration and points of spiritual dialogue for Mira. These readings helped establish an art historical framework. While entering the darkened gallery, though, my sense of place became disoriented. The lack of light limited my perception of spatial boundaries. I stumbled onto a bench before turning to see Hotel.

A detail view of the one of the transistor radios in Na Mira’s *Hotel*, 2022, transistor radios, mirrors, and two black-and-white films projected on perpendicular walls. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

In the dark, I began to discern two transistor radios to my left and right, highlighted in the red hue emitted from overhead spotlights. Even though the color red is not as visible in the dark (something about the eyes’ rod cells not being as sensitive to longer wavelengths), the exhibition’s curator, Katja Rivera, later tells me that Mira requested that these red spotlights be removed, further limiting sight as an epistemic source of orientation.

I cannot help but try to get my bearings through a mental schematic as I turn to face Hotel, situated in the corner of the gallery. I draw a diagram in my notes, which my wife later renders into a schematic.

A diagram of Na Mira’s *Hotel* based on José Antonio Arellano’s notes, courtesy of Kristina Arellano.

“Why rectangles?” I ask the work. If these were squares instead of rectangles, I could mentally fold them to create a three-dimensional cube. In my mind, I add time as a fourth dimension and recall those animated gifs of four-dimensional cubes (tesseracts). I imagine walking into the tesseract, a portal to somewhere else.

When I get home that day, I happen to open Mira’s The Book of Na to page 179 and am startled by this journal entry: “they give me a question i cannot answer: WHY IS IT A RECTANGLE? i toil at the edges but i don’t like to determine things.” [1]

Na Mira, *Hotel*, 2022, transistor radios, mirrors, and two black-and-white films projected on perpendicular walls. Image by José Antonio Arellano.

Experiencing Hotel felt familiar and new, like watching a sci-fi movie from the 1980s—both outdated and prescient, anachronist and transformative. This impression was due in part to the video medium and Mira’s allusion to the postmodern building designed by John Portman, Jr.: the Bonaventure Hotel. The bottom right-hand rectangular space shows a projected video of a woman running counterclockwise into a circular hallway characteristic of Portman’s postmodern design, now over fifty years old.

The Bonaventure is one of the late Fredric Jameson’s most memorable examples of a then-new type of space that embodied the cultural expression of the political economy. Something felt different in the late 1970s, argued Jameson, for which the term “alienation” no longer sufficed. The new postmodern “hyperspace” exceeds “the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually.” [2] This hyperspace leaves the human subject unable “cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” [3]

Mira reactivates what Jameson describes, which, unfortunately, remains all too relevant. For Jameson, art of the 1970s and 1980s registered a temporal erosion of what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Symbolic Order (which includes language, laws, and cultural norms). [4] A sense of temporality involved in linguistic meaning appears to break down. Were you to experience this breakdown, you would be left with the visual materiality of the signifiers you are currently reading, which would no longer appear as words but as shapes that you experience in an electrifying nowness detached from the past and the future.

As video art came into prominence during the late 1960s, with the increased availability of recording technology, “time” became a significant dimension of the aesthetic, further emphasizing the importance of performance in art. The waning of meaningful temporality could suggest the waning significance of the fragmented subject, but that is not what occurred in postmodernism. The subject’s participation became more vital, indeed crucial. Postmodernism’s “virtual narratives” and the “dynamic paths” of buildings like the Bonaventure Hotel, writes Jameson, necessitate beholders “to fulfill and to complete with our own bodies and movements” what the art could not. [5]

Just as subjectivity was being affectively fragmented, collective identities were being advanced as identity politics came into heightened prominence and urgency. Artists activated the affective intensities of the breakdown of signification. Art of this era (including novels, poems, and films) dramatized, again and again, how history haunts the present and how the present embodies history not as knowledge but genetically carried through our blood. Narrative seances appear seemingly everywhere in the literature of this time, dramatizing how colonial traumas continue to haunt the present. If time has flattened into a compressed three-dimensional circle, one could poke a hole through it, allowing the past and present to touch.

Mira’s inverted word shapes projected on the wall subvert our conditioned ability to read. A mirror on the floor, though, appears as a portal to a different space. Through this looking glass, shapes appear as words: “Night,” “Intersect,” “Queen,” “Cull,” “Hole,” “Subrosa…” I remain in the gallery long enough to hear the transistor radios play an offputtingly mechanical recitation of the 54 or so words in English and Korean. The list includes references to Korean shamanism and the deity Chilseong.

By inverting words, rendering them illegible, and using video footage that we could characterize, following Hito Steyerl, as “poor image[s]” that “ten[d] toward abstraction,” Mira presents the edges of ideas in their “very becoming.” [6] The edges of this becoming are not always traversed, even as our cognition cannot help but reach after concepts. Hotel incites a thrilling, vertiginous experience of “negative capability” that we temporarily inhabit until we can’t. [7]

I’ve read everything I could find concerning Mira’s work. I know that one of the projected videos shows a teddy bear, which Mira came to associate with Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese occupation of Korea. [8] A video showing railroad tracks alludes to Cha’s uncompleted video project, White Dust Mongolia. Mirrors reference shamanistic rituals.

I could link the signifiers to referents via a one-to-one relationship. Such a pedantic linkage, though, would ignore the play of signification that appears to be the point of this visual performance. Hotel awakens a sense of apophenia, the phenomenon wherein one perceives meaningful connections everywhere. The negative version of this experience could be linked to the early stage of schizophrenia. Carl Jung’s “synchronicity” offers a more positive account, in the meaningful convergence of the psychic and physical spheres.

Reflected in the mirror, a shape appears to invoke quotation marks and the logic of citation, and I consider Mira’s work relative to Cha’s. A figure runs into the hallway counterclockwise away from the viewer. Seen through the mirror to my left, the direction is reversed. The mirror chiastically reverses the visual logic, thereby creating an implied central point of convergence. “Chiasmus” means “crossing,” and references the resemblance of such crossing in the Greek letter chi (x). Cha and Mira are running to each other. X marks the spot of their conjunction.

“Hotel is a portal,” I think, as my mind takes off. I recall a Platonic dialogue describing the soul of the world as two circles moving in opposite directions, crossing at a point like an X. I think of the Platonic solid cube representing “earth” and add another dimension, time, to the cube, creating a tesseract. I recall Matthew McConaughey portraying a pilot who learns that NASA built a space station that launches him to a wormhole, a hole in space and time, transporting him to a blackhole that leads him to a tesseract. The space station is filmed in none other than the Bonaventure Hotel. I recall McConaughey portraying a detective who chases after rapists and describes time as a flat circle. I punch through this circle and mourn Cha’s life and the conditions of her death.

So, there I was, as we tend to say, experiencing a fever dream of boundless signification. I revel in this ability to connect this to this, that to that, everything everywhere all at once in the eternal now. “Hello, darkness, my old friend,” sing Simon & Garfunkel through the transistor radios. What the hell is the sound of silence? “What is the color of nothing,” my daughter asked me that day, of all days. I am rendered static in my awe, reveling in the trip, but neoliberalism has gotten worse, and LA is on fire. Maybe I need to keep going through the looking glass to understand how we got here and thereby imagine where we should go. The danger of the eternal now, though, is that linear temporality is rendered irrelevant, and, with this irrelevance, causality and blame appear beside the point.

José Antonio Arellano (he/him) is an Associate Professor of English and fine arts at the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Chicago. He is currently working on two manuscripts titled Race Class: Reading Mexican American Literature in the Era of Neoliberalism, 1981-1984 and Life in Search of Form: 20th Century Mexican American Literature and the Problem of Art.

[1] Na Mira, The Book of Na (Wendys Subway, 2022), 178.

[2] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1990), 44.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on the Purloined Letter," Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink (W.W. Norton, 2006), 11-48.

[5] Jameson, 42.

[6] Quoted in Cathy Park Hong, “Portrait of An Artist,” Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2021), 158. “Portrait of An Artist,” presents an emotionally devastating account of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s rape and murder.

[7] With a phrase that took on a life of its own after he created it, John Keats once described an aesthetic capacity he termed “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” I invoke Keats’s phrase to suggest that Na Mira invites us to inhabit this way of being at the edge of cognition. Quoted in Steven Knapp, Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (Harvard University Press, 1993) 32.

[8] Lara Mimosa Montes and Na Mira, “Na Mira’s Trance-like Encounters with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.” Frieze, www.frieze.com/article/na-mira-lara-mimosa-montes-245. See also “Na Mira by Katie Kirkland,” BOMB Magazine, bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/04/19/na-mira-interviewed/. My thanks to Katja Rivera for pointing me to these sources.

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