LOV

LOV explores memory and displacement, reconstructing the past through diverse images. It reflects the tension between freedom and confinement, presence and absence, shaped by love experienced across distance.

Project Description

Raised in a mythical land occupied for nearly 50 years by a repressive dictatorship government and their laws, covering up all beauty and life. Their actions were rooted in hate, killing, and the denial of freedom. Despite the immense government pressure, I lived in a place full of grace. At every stage, I fought for basics but remained full of love and intimacy. The people I grew up with lived as freely as they could, we learned love and life beneath the surface of sadness. This is the land that shaped my being, life, and memories. Diving into an unknown shore was part of our life—a necessity for survival in a worsening situation. The youth faced economic and cultural chaos, and immigration became a decision that could make us fall out and drown. Some chose to stay, knowing they would sink, even without diving. Suddenly detached from my hometown, I opened my eyes to a place that felt like someone else’s life. In a land of freedom, I felt the same as before: free where I wasn’t, and now confined in liberation. Ever wonder what it’s like to drown? There’s an uncanny peace in the water, whispering softly to let you in and swallow. I dove to see but found my lifeless body on a shore. Barely able to move, but remembered the day we walked through the snow-covered mountain, with no one around but love.

LOV is about the act of remembering. It deals with the detachment that follows migration and the pain of leaving behind everything that created me. It revolves around finding myself in a different river while sinking. All I can see is the mirage of where I came from—a place so far that it appears grainy and blurred. As the past fades into a distant frame, I keep swimming toward the shore. My only guide is the thought of a landscape that feels unknown to everyone here. It seems like a hallucination, but it’s not. If a land is a mirage, then I, too, must be one. I attempt to recreate my brain’s archive in a different landscape. It feels like an unknown language. I return to these fragments of my past. Rearranging them is like writing sentences in the language of fractured remembrance. Each frame, like a word holding its own meaning, alludes to something that was. Yet anyone can read the sequence based on their past and the shore that they have come from. This way, there is not a single sequence.

LOV employs a variety of mediums and approaches, evolving like a practice that reshapes itself—much as each stage of immigration and life experience reshapes identity. Black-and-white medium-format images simulate memories of my hometown in a different land, questioning whether borders exist in memory. Hand-colored archival photographs apply artificial tints as a meditation on the act of remembering, emphasizing the reconstructed and subjective nature of recollection. Super 8 film stills, taken from one of my short videos, convey experiences of war and displacement, capturing the paradox of feeling emotions tied to a place you are no longer in—experiencing them in a land where those emotions are absent. Low-resolution, grainy bitmap images mark a recent departure in my practice, experimenting with form, scale, and medium while continuing to explore memory, absence, and continuity. This shift in my work functions like a silent letter in a word—subtle and easily overlooked—representing the artist’s vision becoming more abstract and less realistic over time, reflecting the prolonged absence from my hometown and the extended process of migration.

Together, these fragments form a visual language of remembrance, where each frame carries its own meaning yet invites personal interpretation. LOV embodies the tension between presence and absence, freedom and confinement, past and present, and the ongoing search for identity in the space between memory and lived experience—all shaped by the presence of love, experienced through distance.