Paper Ghosts, Distortions

Nun (2021)

Yeoja (2021)

Paper Ghosts (2021)

There exists a perpetuated narrative that the US freed the Korean peninsula from Japan at the end of WWII. The real story begins 40 years prior, with William Howard Taft condoning the Japanese subjugation of Korea in a classified letter. The US “rescue” of Korea from a fate they directly influenced did little to blunt the resulting shockwaves of an impoverished nation, families separated during the Korean War, and mass adoptions that lasted even into 1974 when my mother was adopted by an American G.I. The hegemonic history omits inconvenient truths and renders the origins of these stories invisible. The powerful dictate what is recorded and in doing so disempower and strip the other of their voice.

Distortions is a series of photographed projections in my personal living space. These images also live in Paper Ghosts. Both works are an experimentation with archival photographs found in the US National Archives of the Korean War and its aftermath. Distortions is my attempt to show this history isn’t relegated to the past, but bleeds into our present. Paper Ghosts comes from a place of healing. When creating a gum bichromate print, the initial coating is washed off several times; an erasure that reveals a ghostly image when using hanji paper. I use the suture stitch to connect the prints as if stitching skin back together to heal a wound. In person, the hanji gum bichromate prints have a particularly dried skin-like quality. The resulting tapestry with this texture is simultaneously comforting and haunting.

Doria Choi