Lost Things Wait to Be Found

Gana Art is delighted to present Lost Things Wait to Be Found, a group exhibition of artists who explore the ways in which memory is reproduced through records and images. Today, records are produced and accumulated with unprecedented ease. Yet precisely because they can be retrieved at any moment, much of what is stored is never opened again. It has not vanished, but it has lost its place. The exhibition likens such records to lost property. Just as a lost object regains its place only when someone finds it, a record becomes memory only when someone returns to look at it again. The four artists in the exhibition, Kim Sora, Nozomi Suzuki, Léa Belooussovitch and Choe Inyoung, seek out objects and records that no one looks at any longer, and each reveals in their own visual language the moment at which these traces return as memory.

Kim Sora has explored histories of women’s labour and migration through photography, sound and installation. For this exhibition, she presents a series that follows letters written by a Korean nurse sent to Germany in the 1970s, as well as the records of women who worked in factories during Korea’s industrialisation. In these works, individual lives long obscured by official history are layered onto the landscapes of the present. Nozomi Suzuki regards objects used over many years as bearers of the memories they have accumulated. Coating their surfaces with photosensitive emulsion, she prints onto them the landscapes and figures they would once have faced in their original settings. Léa Belooussovitch transposes press photographs of catastrophic events onto felt in coloured pencil, rendering them as blurred fields of colour. Images that pass across news screens in a matter of seconds become, through the artist’s hand, drawings that demand prolonged looking. Raised in a fishing village in Taean, on Korea’s west coast, Choe Inyoung has documented the gradual disappearance of what is closest to her life: her family and hometown. Working with objects drawn from everyday life, such as nets once used by fishers, her family’s videotapes and things left behind in their yard, she preserves in her work the traces of landscapes and people that are slipping from memory.

The records the four artists engage with have all outlived their original purpose or been left with no one to seek them out. The artists are not their owners, but by returning to these records and translating them into artworks, they carry the time of others into their own practice. A record does not exist only for the person who left it behind. When someone else comes to look at it later, it is reconstructed in a form different from its original memory and becomes another memory altogether. In Lost Things Wait to Be Found, viewers also become those who discover and look closely at these traces, in the hope that the lost things gathered here may once again find their way into someone’s memory.