When she was young, Soomin Ham had a fear of losing her parents. In 2009, her mother committed suicide, and Ham’s recent photography and video work, now on display at the Art League in Old Town Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory, powerfully addresses loss and memory.
As I spoke with Ham about her work yesterday, I felt we both had trouble holding back tears. Her evocative photography takes family photos and objects that belonged to her late mother and imbues them with an incredibly poignant sense of fleeting time and memory. In the “Back to Heaven” series, named for one of her mother’s favorite Korean poems, the ephemeral images seem to fade before your very eyes.
Ham is the youngest of four children, and studied classical music South Korea, where she played oboe. In 1994, she came to the United States, where she studied at New York University and the International Center of Photography. Her mother, who stayed in Korea, had trouble with loneliness and a lifelong struggle with depression intensified. Ham returned to Korea after her mother’s death to sort her belongings.
“It was very painful,” she admits, and explains that at the time she wasn’t thinking of creating art from grief. But as she cataloged her mother’s possessions, she grew more intent on capturing a “silent echo” of her mother through objects that she owned and touched.
Like a childhood photo of her mother, or a page from one of her journals, or a jar of cream that still held her mother’s fingerprints.
Ham’s photography process creates a visual distance that, although her images are physically distressed and decayed, the process perhaps intensifies the pain behind them.
At a glance, the photos in “Back to Heaven” look like prints that have been left out in the elements to fade and decay. The images in these photos seem overwhelmed by white noise. When you look closely at the images, you see that the white is in fact snow. Ham took prints of family photos and printed them on rice paper, then she would leave the prints outdoors in one of last winter’s snowstorms and rephotograph the results.
For her “Frozen” series, Ham made square-format prints of objects that belonged to her mother or are associated with her—a favorite watch, a blanket that held her mother’s ashes, a pair of comfortable sandals that was to be burned at a memorial ceremony. Ham placed prints in a square tray filled with water, froze the tray and rephotographed the ice-encased print, the patterns of crystallization adding a subtle veneer to the image.
It’s like cryogenic preservation of memory.
As part of FotoWeekDC, Ham is participating in the group show Photography/Praxis at Dupont Circle’s Studio gallery. The work she’s showing at the Art League was previously on display this past March in a solo show at Flashpoint; where her short videos were projected on a gallery wall. The Art League is an intimate space for this affecting, gut-wrenching work, and I highly recommend making the trip to Alexandria to see it.
Join Soomin Ham for an opening night reception on Thursday, November 10 from 6:30-8:00 p.m. at the Art League, 105 North Union Street, Studio 21 in the Torpedo Factory Art Center, Alexandria, VA. Regular gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m Monday through Wednesday and Saturday; 10 a.m.to 9 p.m. Thursday ; and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday,
