Installation view of 《MNEMOSYNE – A River of Memory》 © KOO HOUSE Museum
KOO HOUSE Museum presents 《MNEMOSYNE – A River of
Memory》, a solo exhibition by Duck Hyun Cho, through
November 20 as a special exhibition marking the museum’s 10th anniversary.
The exhibition begins with a photo album left
by Jin Ho-seop Okcheon (1905–1951), a collector of antiques. Amid the upheavals
of his time, the album preserves not grand historical events but the ordinary
days of a family. Recalling his first encounter with the album, Cho remarked
that it felt “as if the frozen river of memory had thawed and I were drinking
its waters.”
Through the artist’s hand, fleeting moments
captured in the photographs are revived across an extended span of time,
transforming a family’s private memories into scenes that visitors encounter in
the present.
Installation view of 《MNEMOSYNE – A River of Memory》 © KOO HOUSE Museum
The large-scale new work Palimpsestus,
presented to the public for the first time, takes the inquiry into memory a
step further. The term “palimpsestus” refers to a parchment on which the original
writing has been erased and replaced with new text. Just as new records are
layered over erased traces, memory does not simply restore the past as it was,
but is continually reshaped through erasure and overlayering.
While the photo drawings ask “What do we remember?”, Palimpsestus
poses a different question: “How is memory formed?”
The days preserved by a collector’s family now
reach us as our own memories through the artist’s hand. What will we remember?
And what does it mean to remember?
