슬픔은 어디에서 오는가

I grew up moving between China and Korea. Conditions that define me — such as nationality, language, and even my birthday — have always made my identity unstable. This experience, which cannot be reduced to a single answer, has become the fundamental question that drives my work. I explore the uncertainty and fractures arising from a borderland identity, and attempt to extend them to a social dimension. Instead of concealing or mending my instability, I reveal and record it, seeking new relationships and meanings through the process.

오예지 Yeji Oh 吴礼智
xhdpwl@naver.com

<슬픔은 어디에서 오는가> Where Does Sadness Come From, 단채널 비디오(52분 19초), 컬러, 사운드, 2023
Single-channel video (52 min 19 sec), color, sound

Where Does Sadness Come From(2024) is an interview-based video work that traces the origins of sorrow passed down through the maternal line. The voices of a mother and grandmother carry within them not merely personal history, but the traces of specific historical periods and social events — the Cultural Revolution, the Mao Zedong regime, and the Tangshan earthquake. I do not read this grief simply as an inherited emotion; instead, I reexamine it within its social context, investigating how private memory intersects with the public domain. The work surfaces the wounds of modern Chinese history that state power has concealed or distorted, demonstrating that the voices giving utterance to these wounds function as historical testimony. Further, it transforms personal narrative into a counter-archive, positioning itself as a political practice of memory restoration.