This Moon in Your Throat

This Moon in Your Throat examines the relationship between repressed emotion and the body in the lives of Koreans in the U.S. Moving between night portraits, still lifes, and collage, the work gives visual form to haunting and historical pressure.

<This Moon in Your Throat>

Archipelago names a group of islands separated by water yet held in relation. I take that structure as a way of thinking about diaspora. For me, it also names a condition of the body. In Korean diasporic life, the line between the personal and the collective often remains unstable. The same is true of time. The past does not stay behind the present, and identity does not stay contained within the individual. This Moon in Your Throat begins from that instability and asks how history, memory, and feeling move across bodies, generations, and geographies.

Night is the stage of this project. Darkness gives me the visual and psychic condition for the portraits. I photograph my subjects in near darkness, using the weak glow of televisions, refrigerators, phone screens, and other domestic devices to reveal their faces and bodies. Because the long exposures require stillness, I guide my subjects toward a state of rest and release. Some of them wipe away tears during the sitting. In these images, the light of domestic technology becomes part of the portrait’s meaning. The portraits show how inner life is quietly exposed and shaped by the dim light of contemporary capital.

These portraits are shaped by my understanding of Han. I think of it as something haunting and intergenerational, shaped by grief, resentment, sorrow, and historical injury. It lingers in gesture, silence, vigilance, and bodily tension, passing through family structures, social expectation, and historical memory. Inspired by Jung’s concept of the shadow, I think of the portrait process as a form of shadow work carried out through the camera. The portrait session becomes a space where repressed feeling can surface without needing to be fully explained. In this way, the portraits bring Han and the anxiety inscribed in diasporic Korean bodies into view.

The still lifes and collages extend these concerns through different forms. In the still lifes, I use Korean icons and familiar objects, then turn them, displace them, or make them difficult to read. The collages come from my family archive. I cut photographs by hand and reassemble them into new images. Through that process, family history returns as rupture, repetition, substitution, and haunting. What seemed settled becomes unsettled again.

Across portraiture, still life, and collage, This Moon in Your Throat follows the point where collective history becomes intimate and where inherited feeling takes form in the body. It understands diaspora as a condition of dispersed but persistent relation, where oceanic, temporal, and psychic distance remain active within everyday life. The project asks how photography can make those distances visible without turning them into separation.