Holding the memory
2021, Sueno 339
We live with memories. Sometimes a smile is made on the face of a good memory, and sometimes a bad memory darkens our minds, but that's how we live with memories. Memory means that each person retains the impression or scene that people have experienced and recalled it. During the process of capturing and keeping the memory, we edit our memories consciously and unconsciously with a wide variety of complex standards such as individual tendencies, experiences, and knowledge. It wraps beautifully, distorts, cuts and puts them in a subjective form in each person's mind. People who have the same experience at the same time and place may have different memories. As such, memories are incomplete and travel around our minds in various forms. As psychologist Elizabeth Loftus said, memories are more like clouds and steam than something that can be held.
The three artists who meet in this exhibition metaphorically represent various processes of editing and capturing memories. They intentionally tie up memories and emotions, draw them beautifully like fairy tales, collect small pieces of broken pieces and make them into new shapes, and keep them distorted. Through various pieces of memory, I hope that visitors will have a time of reason for the way they each put their memories are contained.
In 2020, we face the unrealistic life that we couldn't imagine very embarrassingly into reality. There are also many changes that cause anxiety. It makes us wonder what memories we will have in the future.
Sungmi Lee usually works with fragments of broken car glass that she picked up at the scene of a traffic accident. Pieces of glass with scars and traces of unhappiness are reborn as transparent and beautiful objects due to acts close to the her intentional performance. However, unlike the firm touch, even small shocks cause cracks and sometimes shatter. The sections of memory are added, split, and recombined like glass fragments, creating a new past. Memory paints brilliant patterns as traces of the wound being healed.
Sungmi Lee’s new work for this exhibition, "A bag of memory," separated the types of memories and captured the feelings of the memories, just as she separated recyclables from plastic bags. Over time, the emotions embedded in that memory will change and the weight and density of that memory will change.