I rarely go home any more. Like David Yun, I grew up the son of immigrants in the suburbs of the Midwest and fled as soon as I could. Each year, however, is marked by a visit at Christmas and this return always includes the ritual of pouring through family albums with my sister. In recent years, however, this ritual has changed as I have grown older, and the people and places portrayed in these snapshots grow less and less familiar. Some people have died, a few have been ostracized from the family, and others have just simply just faded away. And yet these photographs remain. What I’ve begun to realize is that in many ways these pictures have not been serving to spark past memories and relationships, but rather, these snapshots have replaced the memories themselves.

Through this process, the effect that these family photographs had on my own understanding of my past has become tangible for me. A shirt that I had always remembered as my favorite only became so as I grew older and formed my own sense of style. Likewise, memories of a high school friend I have since fallen out of touch with only remained with me through the few pictures of him I still had. It is this line between the experienced and the imagined that Yun’s latest series of works, entitled i don’t know where i’ve been, call into question. Comprised of related but unique bodies of work, the show is organized by the three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory: Encoding, Storage, and Recall. Each of these elements highlight the tenuous relationship between memory and imagination in their own way.

Drawing connections between memory and imagination is not a new idea. In his work Theaetetus, Plato remarks that memory’s inherent problem is that it is a present-tense representation of an absent thing. In describing this, he gives the analogy of someone trying to identify and step into a set of their own footprints they had previously set in a slab of wax. The initial act of stepping into the wax mold to create the footprints is necessarily separated from the act of trying to identify them later on by a duration. Then it follows that, upon returning to these footprints after some time, one could encounter two missteps. Firstly, the footprints may have been damaged or erased, leaving only trace markings behind for the individual to identify. Secondly, the person, separated from the exact details of which footprints may be theirs, could easily place their feet into the wrong footprints.

In making this analogy, Plato deftly points out the fact that a memory is always a referent to something that does not and can no longer exist. The temporal space between an experience and its recollection is precisely where the first element of this project, entitled Encoding, takes us. In this series of what could loosely be called photographs, Yun takes found photographs and digitally manipulates them, by erasing out most of the background leaving the photograph’s subjects and a hint of their location behind. The effect is something which simultaneously evokes a sense of melancholy and guilt. Melancholy arises when one wonders who the subject is and the circumstances leading up to and following the decisive moment captured in the picture. The guilt arises from the voyeuristic feelings one suddenly gets as he realizes that he has been casting his gaze at the innards of someone else’s memories.

In erasing the background the photographs are stripped of their context, and yet, at the same time they seem strangely familiar. The effect of creating such a dynamic is to incite the viewer to wonder why exactly the image seems vaguely familiar. While the work itself does not provide an answer to this question, it does arouse compelling question: Have we all been indoctrinated into a global culture of images that has rendered the specificities of our personal memories moot? Take for example the work Encoding No. 1 (The Cruise). At first glance, the image seems unremarkable. The snapshot quality of the image is undeniable. And yet as look more closely at the image, the woman depicted in the photograph draws us in. Her expression is an ambiguous one. The smile is somewhere in between earnest and forced but more likely something in between. Her pose is at once calculated and natural—calculated in the sense that it is a pose contrived specifically for the purposes of the photograph but natural in the sense that it is a pose that we are accustomed to seeing (and re-enacting) in vacation snapshots.

David Yun
Encoding No. 1 (The Cruise)
2009

Then there is the missing background. Yun leaves behind enough clues for us to interpolate where she might be. Her heavy coat and wind blown hair suggests that she is likely in a cold weather locale. She rests her elbow on what seems to be the railing of a ship. But the point Yun is making is that she could be anywhere. Even though we have no idea who this woman is or specifically where she is, we can fill in most of the blanks, we can step into her footprints in a way that is uncomfortably easy. But what are we to make of the figure in red visible through the railing? With so much of the image obscured, her presence is obviously intentional but what could it possibly represent? For me, the inclusion of this figure represents the multitude of simultaneously lived experiences that necessarily accompany the process of making memories. This figure represents the outside and by association us, the viewer. By implicating us in this act of erasure we are forced to ask ourselves, what is our part in this all, leading us next phase of memory making, storage.

Storage, the second element of this collection of works, moves beyond photography and into the medium of video stills. Using found VHS home movies as his source material, Yun seeks out specific frames within these home movies where the image has become altered due to overuse, damage or age. The result is a set of images that are hard to categorize. They reside somewhere between photography and video, figurative and abstract, human and digital. In Storage No. 3 (Summertime) a male figure is obscured by layers of static. At first glance, we may or may not see the figure, but as we stare longer, he appears as does what appears to be a house in the background that he is running towards. The interplay between the tape’s footage and the TV screen provide another layer of mediation in which rainbow colored bands emerge. The bands not only obscure the image but begin to look like the results of a DNA test further linking the corporeal with the digital. In depicting this, the work suggests the way in which we process events, storing these immediate lived experiences into our database of memories, is far from a clear process, but rather filled with the static of everything that we have experienced, read, or imagined before. Likewise, these works ask us to not only look at what is in the frame, but also to ponder what is outside of the camera’s field of vision, what is omitted, what has been forgotten.

Formally, it may seem as though the works in the Storage series have undergone some sort of digital process to produce an abstracted image, however, Yun has simply paused the VHS tape and snapped a portrait. In a coming together of form and content, Yun astutely makes us aware of how duration necessarily impacts memory. Just as the VHS tape, the mechanism used to record these events, degrades over time, so to do the quality of our memories. The aesthetics of the naturally occurring fuzz in these video stills are reminiscent of the trademark blur found in many of the works of German painter Gerhard Richter. Richter’s blur serves to provide a distance from the realistic images these paintings portray—a distance that takes these objects out of the present and into an in-between place where we have the space to ponder them. The fuzz in Yun’s work seems to be functioning in both a similar way, but also different in that the open ended nature of the imagery behind the static forces us to question if we are really seeing what we think we see or if we are coloring our vision with our own particularities, our own memories.

David Yun Storage No. 3 (Summertime) 2009

Gerhard Richter Funeral (Beerdigung) 1988

All of these ideas come to a head in the third and final element of i don’t know where i’ve been, entitled Recall. This piece is a video installation in which two projectors, stationed at the opposite sides of the room, project onto a window pane that acts as the screen, suspended in the middle of the room. The effect of this is that the viewer is able to walk completely around the image which sometimes comes from the front projector, sometimes the rear projector, and sometimes both. The footage depicts a psychological narrative in which a young woman’s self-imposed isolation has reached a point where she lives almost exclusively in her head. She dreams of suicide or does she attempt suicide? The narrative follows a disjointed, non-linear arc leaving what is really happening and what is imagined intentionally ambiguous. The narrative is augmented by moments in which the imagery fades into complete abstraction, the window pane filled only with amoeba-like colored light that pulsate around the frame.

While Encoding and Storage ground their discussions on memory in found photographs and home movies, Yun chose to use original footage that he shot in Recall. The linkages to the past are not conveyed through someone else’s lost memories, but rather through a shifting of time within the piece. What seems to be a linear narrative at the start, quickly unravels as the woman is inside her bathtub, then outside, then back in the tub in successive shots. It is then that we realize we are watching as she literally recalls her own past. And at the same time, we do not know what is happening in the present tense, what is a recollection and what is simply imagined. This all adds up to a piece that illustrates just how tenuous the process of recalling memory really is.

We are constantly in the process of documenting our lives, our histories. But what was once a practice reserved for oral traditions is now is the job of camera phones, Facebook, and blogs. These recent technological advances have only made the convenience of remembering every detail, every event, every bookmark within our lives that much more at hand. And yet I’m left to wonder what the effect of this is. For I have realized how my own childhood photographs have come to inform my sense of self, who it is I think I am. These snapshots have made it easy to remember things as I think they should be, for the photograph exists to back up my assertion. But these records of my youth have not served to tell the truth, instead they have enabled me to seamlessly blur lived experiences with imagined ones. They leave open the possibility to create what happened just before and what happened right after. It is at the moment of realization that I understand why the works in i don’t know where i’ve been have stuck with me, for the simple fact that they’ve called into question everything I know of my past.

Ming Mui is an independent curator and writer based in San Francisco, California.

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