Soft Monuments
August 2025 at Maple St. Construct in Omaha, Nebraska
This exhibition, a collaboration with Nick McPhail, gathers three works in conversation around memory, impermanence, and the unseen structures that hold personal and collective experience.
Ginkgo
Materials: Vellum paper, wire
This suspended figure, made from hundreds of hand-cut ginkgo leaves, takes the shape of a woman. Set in motion by fans, she rustles gently, like breath, or a whisper through ancient trees. In Korean folklore, a ginkgo once grew from a heartbroken woman’s tears. Its extraordinary longevity and resilience, even surviving the atomic blast in Hiroshima, have made it a symbol of rebirth, endurance, and memory. The piece offers a quiet response to a painful truth: South Korea has the highest rate of women’s suicides in the world. Each leaf is a trace, each movement a memory. The ginkgo, a living fossil and silent witness, carries grief in its rings and whispers of healing across time and air.
Video Installation:
I performed with the ginkgo figure at the Tempietto in Little Italy, breathing with it, listening to its whispers. I held fans to its body and whispered a poem written long ago by a 16th century Korean poet Heo Nanseolheon – her words speaking to the quiet burdens of being a woman in her time.
Photos by Ruth Kim
