My cute story about the “comma” begins in early 2024 at the Frans Masereel Centrum, where I spent five weeks on a residency.

One day, I decided to try letterpress printing to create advertisements for my company, “gran tools supply,” which designs and produces sculptures that can be used as functional tools for working grandmothers. I struggled to figure out what to include in the ads, aside from the company name and my phone number. Then, while exploring hundreds of drawers and boxes of letters, I discovered commas. When I found them, I felt they were meant for me. They resembled the farming tools I created for grandmothers and symbolized a pause, a break.

In my quick and somewhat haphazard research about the history of commas, I came across a few fun facts: one being that they were invented out of the necessity for pauses in text, and that their shape evolved from a dot, which signifies a full stop. Then my brain inflicted a temporary dyslexia, leading me to read the rest of the text like this: the shape of a comma derived from “a dot = full stop,” with a little pointy head sticking out, anchored to the ground. My mind is filled with vivid imaginations of commas, the round part vibrating, with their pointy ends stuck to the ground. Is that pointy bit a foot or a tail? To me, it felt like a foot, but I found that too anthropocentric, so I asked ChatGPT, which told me it was a tail. I did not like the answer.

Yutnori is a traditional Korean board game that has been played for over six centuries. Its board reflects the moon cycle, the four seasons, and community interactions. The game is typically played on New Year’s Day by two teams. Right on time for the 2024 lunar new year, I made a Yutnori game board that pits “Team Tail Comma” against “Team Tail Foot.”