We May Be Separated Like Islands, But

10.12-16.02.2025
@daegueartfactory


Burning Waves

This tapestry serves as a metaphorical cartography of the ocean as a site of global entanglements— where cultures, myths, and systems of power intersect. It reflects the historical trajectories shaped by maritime navigation, colonial expansion, and the transoceanic trade of exotic goods. Water emerges not merely as a conduit for material exchange but as a transcultural medium that carries ideologies, stories, and collective memory across time and space.

The work unfolds a complex narrative that intertwines the splendor of maritime mythology with the shadowed histories of conquest and displacement. By weaving together historical, cultural, and poetic dimensions, the tapestry—interlaced with opaque glass forms and weighted chains, the tapestry reveals the ocean as a space of dualities: of adventure and exploitation, of longing and domination. The muted luster of the glass alludes to beauty extracted and displaced, evoking nature stripped from its origins, while the chains embody the weight of histories that cannot be erased. This layered composition invites viewers to reconsider the ocean not as a vast and empty expanse but as a palimpsest of human history, where the traces of past movements and forgotten voices remain embedded in its depths.

Yeni Ma


We May Be Separated Like Islands, But

The water that constitutes our bodies, just as it was once part of other bodies, rivers, and lakes long ago, may one day form seas and ponds in the distant future. In the vast timeline of water, this fleeting body will return there, falling as rain and seeping into other beings.

Through the lens of water, everything circulates and interconnects. However, people who have over time based their thinking on imaginary lands have constructed concepts such as linear time, history, arbitrary boundaries, and national borders. While they took from each other and built barriers, countless lines were drawn acrossmaps. The exhibition We May Be Separated Like Islands, But, proposes thinking with water to cross these drawn lines, remember the deep and unknowable ancestral time beyond narrated history, and connect it to the present and future.

The exhibition title, We May Be Separated Like Islands, But, is excerpted from the artist's note on the performance Muljil by the theatre company "Elephants Laugh," with the original sentence ending "we are immersed in the same sea." If we think and flow like water, everything is not an isolated entity but a medium of constant circulation.

기획 Curators
Yeni Ma @yeni.ma.7
Doy Kim@doykim.work
Fee Yuni Hoayun Chung @yuni_hoayun_chung




Excerpts of the poem “Untamed tides” are woven words on tapestry