LIGHT AND SHADOW, 2011
22 framed triptych texts (70 x 36 cm)
Somtimes exhibited alongside Dictionary, Vocabulary, Maps (2011), A Textual Basis (2011), Leave Early and Come Back at Dusk (2011)
Light and Shadow lends its title from a memoir published in 1997 by the artist’s grandfather. The work consists of 22 framed triptych text panels where a selection of pages from the memoir in Korean are presented alongside their English translation, and the artist’s response to her grandfather’s writing about the Japanese colonial period, the Haenyeo Resistance Movement, and the Jeju April Third Massacre. Engaging the politics of translation and memory, Light and Shadow is an intertextual posthumous dialogue about notions of history and memory, affinity and distance, embodied knowledge and gender, witnessing and exile. The writings across generations, geography and culture, language and time oscillates between relating closely, contradicting, and supplementing each other.