The small format work, specially made for the Ulysses exhibition in Atelier Augarten in Vienna in 2004, is typical of the artist’s way of working.

Emblazoned on rough, clay-textured paper in upper case letters is the title of James Joyce´s masterwork. A restless, zigzag line joins the two edges of the sheet of paper and allows a topographic situation to come into existence. However, it is still unclear what kind of landscape it is: is it a hint of the banks of a river or the road to Dublin taken by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? Are we talking about the coast of ancient Greece, or Ireland?

The title of the composition gives some information – Koo Jeong-a called it, ambiguously, Thinking of U from the Eastern Coast. The Martello tower in which Stephen Dedalus lived in Ulysses is on the East coast of Ireland near Dublin. The ambiguity of the title also allows other interpretations. At the time the work was made, Koo Jeong-a was in New York – and let her thoughts wander over the Atlantic. Whether she was thinking about a person or Joyce’s famous novel, the possibilities of the phonetic articulation of the letter U remain open.

Heike Maier, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)