April 2009.
I recently asked my mother about her trips to this one river many years ago, where she stood quietly for hours by the riverbank—walls of fog surrounded her tiny frame, waiting and hoping for my father to appear from the other side through thick clouds of mist. Or so she had hoped. And there she kept waiting. 17th Parallel. The river is a poignant reminder of her youth, the fog her faithful friend. My mom was the prettiest girl in her school—her red scarf in winter, her little orange bicycle on windy afternoons, her thick black flowing hair, her silky light skin, her not-so-lucky life. I wish I could have known her back then. I wish I could have been her friend. I’m mesmerized by the beauty of her youth, the strength of her hope, the river where she stood—with its walls of fog and the passing of time.

August 2009.
Almost four decades after my father’s helicopter coming down in flames during the 1971 Operation Lam Sơn 719 in Laos, I came across an NHK TV Documentary program featuring Please Yuko, Tell me where you are, from your mom and Please Tell Me - Hiroshima, The Recalling Messages of the Atomic Bomb. Over fifty years after the 1945 nuclear destruction, part of the old Fukuromachi Elementary School in Hiroshima was opened to public as a peace museum. In 1999, during renovation, hidden messages inscribed on charred blackboards and soot-covered walls by the hibakusa (A-bomb victims) were revealed. Only 460 meters away from ground zero, the school became a rescue station and temporary shelter for the hibakusha, while its blackened boards and walls were message boards for the burnt victims desperately wanting to find their loved ones. Watching these documentaries I thought a lot about physical and intangible walls that had divided people and nations, about my mother waiting in vain near the 17th Parallel during the 1973 P.O.W. swap between North and South Vietnam, and about my father not being allowed by North Vietnam to cross the river and reunite with her. On each side of any walls, visible and invisible, a silent space stands in between historical and personal memories. This silent space is called ma in haiku and eastern cultures, only to be understood without being spoken. As beautiful as the ma concept is, this space sometimes gets lost between the lines we read in history books with statistical data, memorial walls, and packaged tours’ pamphlets. With the passage of time, personal memories of the most traumatic conflicts of our 20th century also have faded away and many stories gone untold. I researched and gathered stories and memories shared on the online forums of many communities: hibakusha, post-1975 Vietnamese war refugees (a.k.a. ‘boat people’), Cambodian war refugees, exiled Tibetans, North and South Koreans, and people that were separated by the Berlin Wall and the Cold War in Europe. Their messages were then written, engraved, and rubbed with powdered pigments on children blackboards hand-crafted from reclaimed wood—while some were embroidered on hand-stitched satchels made from reclaimed army tents. These gestures allude to the mental and physical scars that war permanently leaves in people’s psyche and bodies. While the project raises the question of whose stories can be told and through which means, the writing on chalkboards and the mark-making and remapping in Chung’s cartographic works attempt to reclaim the narrative, whether from state-sponsored history, politically-driven historical amnesia, or in popular culture productions — shifting our victim position to one with agency. As a whole project, Scratching the Walls of Memory aims to amplify the voices of those not being heard, contribute to the rewriting of histories as told by the people, and pay tribute to those who lost their lives in conflicts around the world, most of the time senselessly and convolutedly.

Related Exhibitions:
New Cartographies | Asia Society Texas Center, Houston | 2018-2019
When Things Fall Apart | Trapholt Museum, Denmark | 2016
Demarcate: Territorial Shift in Personal and Societal Mapping | San Jose ICA, CA | 2016
Disrupted Choreographies | Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France | 2014
Thread | Museum Arnhem, Netherlands | 2014
California-Pacific Triennial | OCMA, Newport Beach | 2013
The Map as Art | Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO | 2012
Scratching the Walls of Memory | Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York | 2010

◀︎ ▶︎ All Projects