About

Gana Art presents 《Lost Things Wait to Be Found》 (in Korean, “Lost things are not found by themselves”), a group exhibition of artists who explore how memory is reproduced through records and images. Today, records are produced and stored more easily than ever. Yet because anything saved can be retrieved at any time, much of it piles up unopened, never lost but no longer in its place. The exhibition likens these leftover records to lost property: just as a lost item returns to its place only when someone finds it, a record becomes memory only when someone looks at it again. The four artists, Kim Sora, Nozomi Suzuki, Lea Belooussovitch and Choi In-young, seek out objects and records that no one looks at anymore and, each in their own visual language, reveal the moment they return as memory. Kim Sora has explored the history of women's labor and migration through photography, sound and installation. Here the artist presents a series that follows letters left by Korean nurses sent to West Germany in the 1970s and records of women workers from the industrialization era, layering personal time once hidden beneath official history over present-day landscapes. Nozomi Suzuki sees long-used objects as holding the memories they have lived through, and coats their surfaces with photosensitive emulsion to print the scenes and people they would have seen from their original place. Lea Belooussovitch redraws news photos of disaster scenes on felt in blurred colored pencil, turning images that flash past on a news screen in seconds into drawings that demand long looking. Choi In-young, born and raised in a fishing village in Taean, has recorded the fading of what is closest in life, such as family and hometown. Using objects from everyday life, including fishermen's nets, family videotapes and things abandoned in the yard, the artist holds on to traces of disappearing landscapes and people. Every record these four artists handle has either served its original purpose or been left with no one looking for it. Though not its owners, the artists look at it again and turn it into art, carrying other people's time into their own work. Records do not exist only for those who left them. When someone entirely different looks at them later, they are reshaped into a new memory, different from the original. 《Lost Things Wait to Be Found》 places viewers, too, in the role of those who discover and examine these traces, in the hope that the lost things in the gallery will once again become part of someone's memory.