Kevin Park Jung-Hoo
© Credits: In-bul (video still) by Kevin Park Jung-Hoo, 2025.
A Part of Me, Apart from Me by Kevin Park Jung-Hoo
Exhibition from January 31st to March 15, 2025
Opening reception on January 31st, from 5 to 8 PM
Artist Talk on February 22, 2025. Reception starting at 4:30 PM
A Part of Me, Apart from Me presents selected works from Park’s long-term project, the Aejang Project, which began with his father’s oldest memory: accompanying the artist’s grandfather to bury his one-year-old sister (Park’s aunt). Her body was buried in the form of “aejang”.
In Korea, aejang indicates both the traditional ritual of burying children who have passed away in their infancy and the grave itself. Infants who passed away due to poverty and diseases were, in the past, seen as bad luck. Thus, the tradition itself is designed to forget: the child is buried in the dark, at night, without the mother present, under a pile of rocks that will slowly dissolve away, becoming part of the natural surroundings. The body is usually wrapped in hemp; the smell of cannabis will help the “death messengers” find the lost soul and guide the child to a better next-life. These children were typically excluded from family trees. The phrase “burying something in one’s heart” possibly traces its origins to this practice. With Korea’s economic development, aejang has faded, much as those who experienced it chose to forget and focus on surviving the turmoil of their times.
Park contemplates the ontological relationship between heritage and a diasporic being, framing history as “a disappearance that does not disappear,” and ponders the possibility of consolation with his generational trauma, caused by both personal and historical narratives, by taking an active part in the processes of forgetting/letting-go – suggesting the act of grieving and acceptance as an act of embodied recollection and reconnection of the physical and temporal distance laid between heritage/history and a diasporic body.
A Part of Me, Apart from Me
Text by Prabhnoor Kaur - February 15, 2025
“What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
How do you know a memory is yours? Think of your first memory. What are you remembering: what happened or what you were told happened? And what, exactly, is the difference? Each time you tell a story about something that happened, you write over the memory of what actually happened with the memory of telling the story. In this way, maybe the only way to hold a memory close is to leave it unexamined, in a box, in the back of your mind. Maybe it begins dissolving, seeping out of the corners you relegate it to and into your bones. Maybe it doesn’t. Anything buried, with enough time, will begin to decompose. The worms will stake their claim and turn everything into dirt. The buried thing cannot be dug up, but when spring comes, it will reach towards the sun. Histories, secrets, and memories - these are forests we walk through.
Kevin Park Jung-Hoo’s work guides us through these woods, exploring how place and memory are fundamentally unstable categories. Both are subject to the corrosive nature of time. Instead of trying to capture the past, Park proposes an alternative: embracing the absence. In his film In-bul, the artist reinterprets the practice of aejang at the site of his aunt’s burial, engaging in a version of the ritual his father and grandfather performed, Park folds himself into that history without excavating it. In his photographs, the artist evokes the visual vocabulary of the aejang practice by printing the images on fabric – as if each image is captured only with the intention of forgetting it. Other photographs make use of film damaged by the x-rays of airport security scanners and heat of the Korean summer, collapsing “here” and “there” into a singular image. Throughout the show, there is a disavowal of linear time through superimposing the past into the present.
To try and remember clearly - that is, to try and pin the past to the present and examine it - is a paradoxical exercise. The only sure index of something past is its present absence. Park’s work articulates how the questions we ask of ourselves and our histories might have to be rhetorical. The closest we can get to our memories is to embrace the absence they leave in their wake. Perhaps the only way to look at the past is out of the corner of your eye.
© Credits: Kevin Park Jung-Hoo photographed par Sungjin Lee, 2024.
Kevin Park Jung-Hoo is a Korean-Canadian filmmaker and visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. His work reflects his experiences navigating multiple cultures, having grown up in Canada, spent his adolescence in Korea, and returned to Canada as an adult. Exploring themes of migration, identity, and home, Park uses film, video, photography, and performance to question how individuals reconstruct perceptions of time and space.
Park’s recent work critically examines the socio-political and ontological dimensions of the Image, inspired by his late grandmother’s words: “In the past, people feared the camera, believing it took part of their soul.” This reflection fuels his exploration of the Image as both a colonial tool and a vessel for memory. By engaging with the power dynamics of image-making, Park imagines a diasporic aesthetic that reclaims meaning, inviting viewers to reconsider how images shape personal and collective identity.
Warning: Low light in the first gallery room, please proceed with caution.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James Goddard via email or by phone at 514-842-9686. For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page.
Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events