Hye-Ryoung Min: Re-membrance of the remembrance

Hye-Ryoung Min: Re-membrance of the remembrance by Aline SmithsonMay 17, 2017

©Hye-Ryoung Min

During an artist residency at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, photographer Hye-Ryoung Min had the chance to revisit the early documentations of her life in written form. She brought twenty seven years worth of diaries with her to the residency and had the unique opportunity to reconsider her past, one journal at a time. The experience provided her with the time and quiet to honor each of the seventy books and create a conceptual project that allowed for deep consideration of the what once was in order to ready herself for the future. The resulting project, Re-membrance of the remembrance, uses still life, ephemera, and new capture to create a reinterpreted personal legacy and history. The work is accompanied by an exquisite artist’s statement.

Hye-Ryoung Min is a South Korean photographer living and working in NYC. She received her MPS from School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her work explores the intersection between human relations and the inner self. Whether she is observing the mundane lives of strangers on the street; the comings and goings of her neighbors as seen through the windows of her home; the fleeting expressions of her niece or the evolving landscape of a city; the more than seventy diaries which she has kept over the past twenty six years, Hye-Ryoung continues to find in different subjects a reflection of her deeper self.

She had solo exhibitions in different galleries such as Gallery Lux and Gallery Comma, in Seoul Korea. Among other group shows, her work has been exhibited at: The Bronx Documentary Center; NEWSPACE Center for Photography; the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography; The Center for Fine Art Photography; Griffin Museum of Photography; Seoul Museum of Art; GoEun Museum of Photography in Busan; Sejong Art Center in Seoul; Photoville, and also invited to the international photography festivals in: Korea; France; Japan; Albania; Malaysia.

She has been awarded En Foco’s New Works; Conscientious Portfolio Competition; Seoul Photo Festival Portfolio Award; Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards Finalist; The Print Center International Competition Semi-finalists and others.

Among others her works have been published Huffington Post; Conscientious; Photographers Quarterly; Houston Center for Photography; L’Oeil de la Photographie; iGNANT; Medium; New Direction at Detroit Center For Contemporary Photography; Lenscratch; LensCulture; Feature Shoot; Nueva Luz; Foto Visura; aCurator; Photographs Do Not Bend and Hey, Hot Shot! OSMOS; Photo Dot; Monthly Photo; Photo Art; Harper’s Bazaar; ELLE; GQ; VOGUE; W; ELLE Décor; Art Now; Nobless; Heren.

©Hye-Ryoung Min

Re-membrance of the remembrance

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it”

Two boxes tightly sealed were left hidden from my sight and transferred to new places between moves in my mother’s house. Although they were in my home country, their weight and the trace of times gone past persisted in those seventy diaries kept in the boxes, which never stopped chasing me across the Pacific Ocean. A desire lingered to look far back into the paths I’ve come through, as I have climbed up a number of slopes and now arrived at a rolling hill. It didn’t seem like I could continue walking forward without facing what was left behind me, regardless of how it was shaped, what kind of scent or odor it had, or whether there were unbroken thorns underneath a thick layering of dust.

My journey of tracking back twenty seven years into my past started at a hundred-year-old barn in the middle of the forest at Byrdcliffe Woodstock residency, where I could almost hear the sound of the spider weaving the spider web. The diaries I’ve written since I was twelve were read one by one.

©Hye-Ryoung Min

Sitting on the hill, on the way to my forties, I begin to realize all that which makes me who I am now: people who have stood next to me and people whom I’ve had in mind; poetry and words that consoled and remedied my wounds. The stories written only after dawn, the dialogues transcribed into the margins of textbooks during class and confessions proffered during bus rides, the more insistent scribbles jotted down in cafes, on benches, on airplanes or standing on the street all tumble within me and unexpectedly call forth the memories. Never-to-be-forgotten but kept buried and unresolved emotions, someone who won’t be able to receive my forgiveness any longer, questions that have never been spoken, and promises that I might find answered only in a different life time were flapping away with their heart and soul as if for the first time arising only to once again hide in the dusky forest, or disappear under the tree trunk, or vanish among hundreds of spider webs or a crack in the wardrobe. I found myself trapped in those pages and unable to take even a single step away or go elsewhere.

©Hye-Ryoung Min

Each one of the diaries required a long walk after its reading. On the way back to my studio, I collected a tribute to dedicate to each diary. This took the shape of a stone, flower, leaf or sometimes a piece of bark. Once read, those diaries went back to sleep on the floor in the middle of the studio with the tribute placed on top. Their voices felt conspicuously calmer and more tranquil after taking off the heavy winter dust.

©Hye-Ryoung Min

These photographs are visual diaries dedicated to my written diaries and evidence of those times coursing through me once more, where my expectations mingled with regret, compassion collided with fear, and scars ached and lingered. They are an act of earnest yearning, consolation, forgiveness and resignation. Facing myself in the moments of brooding light I met the gleaming shadow of my past re-membered into my new diaries.

In the words of García Márquez, my life, which was fallibly set down in younger years was re-visited and re-cast in photographs, as if with one more reinterpretation so that I would move forward with the memories of the memories that I made.