The Woman Who Won’t Leave
The salesman told June Korea that she would never leave him. That she wouldn’t age, wouldn’t die. That she’d look exactly the same the last day he had her as she did the first. June was standing in a showroom in New York, looking at silicone women arranged in various poses, listening to the pitch, and something about it landed. He paid ten thousand dollars. He named her Eva.
A FedEx delivery arrived on the afternoon of Monday, December 29, 2014. A large box. June’s hands shook opening it. It was a Monday afternoon,
he said later. The day I met her. Eva, I said. Your name is Eva. Since then we have had an unnatural relationship—Eva and I.
What followed he documented in photographs. June Korea is an artist and photographer based in New York, and he shot everything: Eva eating at restaurants, Eva on shopping trips, Eva at a picnic in the park, Eva in bed. The images have the formal quality of a couple’s album—the same attention, the same framing, the same careful record of domestic intimacy—except that one subject has no inner life and the other has too much of one.
June described their relationship as simultaneously happy and lonely. We laugh together and cry together,
he said, we feel happy and lonely at the same time.
He knew that Eva felt nothing back. Whatever he felt, he was projecting it into a beautiful, expensive, perfectly still object. She would outlast him. She’s immortal in the specific way that manufactured things are: not living forever, just incapable of dying. She won’t leave because she can’t. Whether that’s a comfort or its exact opposite depends on what you think love requires from both sides.
What strikes me about the project is that June kept making photographs anyway. Documenting the dinners, the park, the ordinary choreography of a life shared with someone who shares nothing. Maybe it was conceptual from the beginning—a visual essay about loneliness and the objects we project desire into. Or maybe it started as something else and became art because the alternative, admitting you’ve organized your emotional life around a ten-thousand-dollar body that cannot answer you, is harder to sustain without a frame around it.
The photographs are good. Unsettling the way that posed figures in domestic settings always are, but tender too—June looks at Eva the way people look at things they love and can’t fully explain. He said from the start there would be no happy ending. That’s not resignation so much as honesty about what he’d signed up for, and when, and why.