Mongolian mark

The Mongolian mark is a thumb-sized birthmark on Yeong-hye’s upper left buttock, but its importance in the narrative exceeds its physical scale. Recalled in an ordinary conversation, it becomes the seed of Mr. Cheong’s artistic vision; seen directly, it unsettles his expectations of sexuality; later, it becomes the focus of a wish for bodily identification that cannot resolve Yeong-hye’s dreams. The mark links an actual feature of her body to the book’s floral and vegetal imagery, while exposing the difference between the meanings he projects onto her and the experience she expresses for herself.

Appearance and Discovery

Mr. Cheong first hears about the mark while bathing his son. As his wife helps the boy put on his underpants, he remarks on the child’s birthmark and asks when such marks fade. She replies that she cannot remember when her own disappeared, then recalls that Yeong-hye still had hers at twenty. When Mr. Cheong is surprised, she describes it as a small blue mark and wonders whether it might still be there. The remark supplies a specific fact about Yeong-hye, but its consequence is not merely biographical: it gives the artist an image around which his attention begins to gather.

When he later sees Yeong-hye’s bare back and buttocks, he locates the thumb-sized mark on the upper left. Its pale blue-green color resembles a faint bruise, yet he recognizes it as a Mongolian mark. He had wondered how it could have remained after so many years; now, instead of treating its persistence as a simple anomaly, his perception shifts toward associations with something ancient and pre-evolutionary, or with photosynthesis. The mark appears to him more vegetal than sexual. That change matters because it interrupts the erotic expectation attached to the body he is observing and connects the birthmark to the book’s imagery of plant life.

From Mark to Image

The remembered conversation becomes the origin of Mr. Cheong’s image of a blue flower on a woman’s buttock, its petals opening outward. The mark and the imagined flower are not identical, but in his mind they become bound together. From that association comes a larger composition: naked men and women covered in painted flowers. The birthmark thus functions as the small, concrete detail from which the artist’s elaborate visual conception grows.

In the sketch, the faceless woman is nevertheless, to Mr. Cheong, unmistakably Yeong-hye. He imagines her body and marks the place of the birthmark with a small blue petal. He also recognizes that the man embracing her is himself. The image therefore does not turn the mark into a neutral artistic motif: it places Yeong-hye’s identifiable body inside a scene shaped by his desire and self-insertion. The connection between the mark and the flower gives his fixation an aesthetic form, but it does not make that form a shared understanding between them.

The Recorded Image

The mark also determines the structure of Mr. Cheong’s completed video. He works through the rendering process overnight, smoking a pack of cigarettes before finishing a piece with a running time of four minutes and fifty-five seconds. It opens on his hand painting Yeong-hye’s prone body, then fades out on the Mongolian mark. A later image of her face, so shadowed that she is almost unrecognizable, fades away as well. The mark is therefore not incidental decoration at the edge of the work: it is the point on which the video deliberately ends its first movement.

Mr. Cheong titles the master tape “Mongolian Mark 1—Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day.” His decision to keep the video silent reinforces his effort to present the images as if they existed in a vacuum, in a soundless harmony he associates with something primeval and eternal. Yet the ending redirects attention from the whole painted body to one particular bodily feature. The mark’s placement in the video’s final fade gives it the force of a signature, while the title carries that feature into the work’s public identity. As soon as the piece is finished, Mr. Cheong is already preoccupied with an image he believes he should never try to capture, which he privately names “Mongolian Mark 2.”

Contact and Divergent Meanings

In a later intimate exchange, Yeong-hye turns her attention to the mark and says she wishes she could transfer it onto her tongue. Asked why it has lasted, she explains that she once thought everyone had one, until she went to a public bath and realized she was the only one. Her account makes the mark part of her own history of noticing bodily difference, rather than only an object seen and interpreted by Mr. Cheong.

He holds her at the waist and strokes the mark, wishing he could share it and have it branded onto his own skin. His desire to take it into himself echoes the earlier artistic impulse to attach the mark to an image of Yeong-hye, but here the wish is explicitly one of bodily identification. Yeong-hye’s response turns elsewhere: she asks, barely audibly, whether the dreams will stop now. The exchange leaves the difference between their concerns unresolved. For Mr. Cheong, the mark concentrates artistic fascination and a wish for closeness; for Yeong-hye, it accompanies a question about her dreams that he cannot answer.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, the mark changes register without losing its material specificity. It is first a remembered birthmark, then the source of a blue-flower image, then the focal point of a recorded work, and finally the object of touch and attempted identification. Its persistence allows Mr. Cheong to treat it as a sign of something ancient or vegetal, but Yeong-hye’s own comments keep it grounded in a bodily difference she discovered for herself.

The mark’s recurring role also clarifies the limits of Mr. Cheong’s vision. It helps him make art and gives that art its title, yet the image he builds around it remains his construction of Yeong-hye, not an account of her inner experience. When she asks whether the dreams will stop, the mark cannot bridge that gap. It can gather associations and intensify attention, but it cannot tell him what she dreams or make their meanings coincide.