I was born with my mother buried inside of me — disappeared by many violences, but especially the violence of my birth.
A daughter is sometimes called a thief. In the Korean dictionary, there are multiple idioms that say this. She is a beautiful thief. She steals from her mother. Her mother encourages this. She knows what violences her daughter has ahead of her.
Poet Kim Hyesoon writes, a Korean woman is full of holes. Each hole buries a woman disappeared by violence. As a Korean American woman, I too carry these women in holes of my own.
My grandmother disappeared in the midst of the pandemic. To grieve, I searched for her in my photographs. I was shocked by how few I had. This absence helped me start to notice the figures in the margins.
These are women whose movements are controlled by the hungers around her — often working, cleaning, or carrying food. They are laughing, dancing, poised, or bored. I became obsessed with finding them all, unsettled by the fact that despite what I was finding now, my lens had been focused elsewhere. I had embarrassingly waited for so many of them to leave the frame.
What does it mean to be visible and invisible at the same time? To be seen repeatedly can be its own form of erasure. How can we be visible without being seen as marginalized or other?
These images were originally cut from a collection of my own photographs, as well as photographs taken before the Korean War from our family archive.
