Hyunha Lim
Embroidery on a scenery landscape of Deogyu Mountain
This work is embroidery on fabric, printed with a digitally manipulated photograph I took while hiking uphill on a snowy day; reaching the peak, I was touched by the extraordinarily beautiful view. I remember this experience not only mentally, but physically, as I interacted with the mountain using my whole body. 70% of land in South Korea is covered with mountains, but they are hard to find near London. I have moved from city to city throughout my life, always having feelings of homesickness, without knowing where my real home was. In an attempt to fulfil my desire to re-visit or re-experience places from the past, I remembered the tradition of scholars in Korea keeping paintings of landscapes in their rooms, as a replacement for the nature they no longer had time to experience. I decided to make one of my digital photographs of the mountain into a physical object, trying to stabilize the still-volatile printed image with embroidery — to fix it or nail it, so that it won’t go away. But I know that the present will become a memory in the future, and that every second we spend will never come back, because we ourselves are changing every moment.
