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. Facing myself in the moments of brooding light I met the gleaming shadow of my past re-membered into my new diaries. Two boxes with over seventy diaries tightly sealed were left hidden in my home country but never stopped chasing me across the Pacific Ocean. A desire lingered to look far back into the paths I’ve come through, and I couldn’t continue walking forward without facing what was left behind me. My journey of tracking back twenty years started at a hundred-year-old barn in the middle of the forest at Byrdcliffe Woodstock residency. I began to realize all that which makes me who I am now: people whom I’ve had in mind; poetry and words that consoled my wounds. The stories written only after dawn, the dialogues transcribed into the margins of textbooks during class and confessions proffered during bus rides 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 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. During my residence at Byrdcliffe, I devoted many hours to creating a series of self-portraits. Subsequently, having returned to NYC, I carefully chose specific pages and passages from the diaries to anchor a series of still lifes. For the final component of this project, I traveled to Korea to re-visit particular locations that held significant meaning for me in my diaries. I searched for the time and space that might still be there or possibly vanished.