Archives Written by Water

Water flows through Hyejeong Yun’s films, installations, and narratives. Her artistic practice connects places and generations, carrying traces of what has elsewhere been lost or fallen silent. Throughout her work, rivers, coastlines, canals, and harbor landscapes recur. Along these sites shaped by water, Yun traces histories that live on in personal memories, family stories, local archives, and everyday places. Here, the landscapes themselves emerge as carriers of memory, sites where history is preserved and passed on. Over several years, the artist conducted research in these places and spoke with members of Korean communities living in Japan.

Water runs through Yun’s multi-part work Where Water Remembers (2025–ongoing) as both metaphor and archive. The project consists of the two video works Where Water Remembers (67 min.) and River Mourns, Island of Ashes (55 min.), as well as the textile installation From the Sea to the River. The work moves geographically from Kyoto to Tokyo. Between them lie Utoro, Ikaino, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Gunkanjima, and Hiroshima, places connected by different histories yet sharing a common topography. 

At the center of the project are the histories and memories of the Zainichi Korean communities Yun encountered during her research. Zainichi Koreans are people of Korean descent; most of their families migrated to Japan during the period of Japanese colonial rule over Korea (1910–1945) or were brought there under conditions of colonial exploitation and forced labor. After the end of World War II and Korea’s liberation in 1945, many of these families remained in Japan. At the same time, the Korean peninsula was divided into North and South, a separation later entrenched by the Korean War (1950–1953). This created a complex situation for many families: some came from a Korea that had existed before partition, while later generations grew up in Japan. The histories of Zainichi Korean families are therefore shaped not only by migration and discrimination, but also by questions of belonging and the transmission of memory across generations. The films suggest that intergenerational memories are carried forward through stories as well as through silences, absences, and everyday practices.

A recurring motif in the first video work Where Water Remembers is the question of language or lack of language. As Nam Sun Hyun (director of the NPO Kyoto Zainichi Korean Life Center LFA) recounts it, the story emerges of a halmoni (grandmother) whom everyone believed to be unable to speak. Only when she was addressed in Korean did she respond: “Not speaking at all makes my heart hurt less, it is more comfortable.” Condensed within this single sentence are the power of language, authority, memory, and belonging. It is often only the third generation that seems able to openly negotiate questions of origin, migration, and family history. This intergenerational silence is a dynamic that can be observed across many histories of migration, despite their different historical and political contexts. No longer directly ruled by the pressures of assimilation, they begin to inquire about stories that have long remained untold.

River Mourns, Island of Ashes turns more explicitly towards acts of mourning. Korean memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, archival materials, maps, and encounters with activists and survivors shift the focus from personal testimony to collective forms of remembrance. These gestures are grounded in the histories of colonial violence, forced labor, and displacement that the film traces across different sites. Water appears here not only as an archive of the past, but also as a medium through which grief and care continue to be expressed in the present. In one scene, at a memorial for Korean victims of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, bottles of water with labels in both Korean and Japanese are left for the dead, a subtle yet powerful gesture. Water becomes at once a medium of care, remembrance, and solidarity, embodying forms of mourning that continue to be practiced in the present.

The installation From the Sea to the River (2025) lends physical presence to these acts of commemoration. Spread across the wall and floor is a large-scale wave-like printed textile whose deep blue surface evokes a water landscape. Photographic fragments, place names, notes, and text passages are assembled, becoming small islands within an expansive network of images and references and echoing the structure of the artist’s research archive. Embedded in the work are two monitors playing the videos Where Water Remembers and River Mourns, Island of Ashes. Stones from Kyoto and Tokyo, the geographical starting and end points of her research journey, rest on the textile surface and further anchor the cinematic narratives within the space. At the same time, the work builds a bridge to the present through its title: From the Sea to the River. While Where Water Remembers is concerned with the afterlives of colonial violence and its inscriptions into landscapes, bodies, and biographies, the installation also points toward contemporary debates surrounding the war in Gaza. Whereas historical violence can be read through its traces and scars, the fresh wounds of present-day violence compel a reflection on responsibility, witnessing, and one’s own position. What does it mean to speak, and what does it mean not to be able to speak? What does it mean to remain silent?

Questions of witnessing, responsibility, and silence continue throughout the various iterations of Violence and Opacity (2024–26), an ongoing body of work that unfolds across sculpture, poetry, and performance. During her research, Yun engaged with a former military serviceman and explored the bodily postures and movements associated with carrying a rifle. At the center of the installation are life-size glass arms modeled after the poses of an armed body, although the weapon itself never appears. Instead, fragile glass objects weighing approximately twelve kilograms circulate between performers who carry, support, and then pass them on.

Rather than depicting violence directly, the work focuses on the relationships it produces: between action and inaction, responsibility and indifference, witnessing and standing by. The slow choreography of carrying, supporting, and transferring the glass arms foregrounds forms of dependency and care, extending into questions of community, resonance, and intergenerational entanglements that also shape the installation and performance work Water and Womb (2025). The sculptural installation Violence and Opacity is accompanied by both performances and poems that move between dreams, family histories, collective trauma, and contemporary forms of violence. References to atomic bomb victims, state power, and personal memories appear as fragmented voices and reflections. While Where Water Remembers asks how violence becomes inscribed into landscapes and bodies, Violence and Opacity turns its attention towards the question of what position we ourselves take in relation to it.

Yun’s approach recalls that of the writer Svetlana Alexievich, who has written extensively about war, catastrophe, and the aftermath of historical upheavals through personal memory. Like Alexievich, who was deeply interested in what people remain silent about, Yun turns her attention to the fragmentary, to memories that are passed on only in fragments, and to voices that have long remained unheard. Her practice traces clues and connects places, images, and stories, revealing how history continues to resonate in the present. In doing so, she opens up a space in which different experiences of migration, loss, exclusion, and belonging can encounter one another. Not because these stories are identical, but because they raise similar questions and reveal unexpected resonances across different histories, geographies, and political contexts.