Your presence is the education I want

Curated by Sophia Park

Artists: Eunwoo Nam, Zi Yi Wang

December 1 - December 8, 2021 

Your presence is the education I want addresses collecting as a practice to explore the physical manifestations of memory for those living in diaspora.

Memory and the way it is affected touch every aspect of our lives. Memory is slippery, complex, untrustworthy, personal, and holds political consequences. What is remembered mixes with what is close and present, and further entangled with the narratives wound around us by dominant political and social forces. For those living in diaspora, memories of what was once home become distorted. The collection of memories itself becomes complicated by new lived experiences and different rhetorics of history and power that sometimes are at odds with each other. How do we hold on to memories? By what means do we collect and preserve them? Is the collection of memories a bulwark against distortions, a form of celebration, an exercise to inform the building of another home, or a method of resistance to the inevitability of change?

Eunwoo Nam’s video installation disorients by placing memory in a state of flux. He questions whose memories and experiences are allowed to be remembered in what way, as well as his relationship to memories that are not his own. Zi Yi Wang’s installation of five works presented in symphony with each other are deeply tied to her own navigation of the tensions that exist while living in diaspora. The objects are assemblages of objects collected in New York, where she lives and works, yet are linked to her experiences from home in Sichuan, China.

Both artists are linked by their fondness for collecting, yet each tackles a different understanding and formation of memory influenced by their personal experiences. They are navigating feelings of loss for a home that perhaps never was and objects imbued with hope for a future that is perhaps to come.