Current

In Song Jung-won’s poem “Meeting on the Other Side,” she writes: “Even in different times, those who have once passed through will know how to exist anywhere.” An image preserved in our memory reveals not only a captured instant but the passage of time itself. They summon what once existed while confronting us with what is now absent. Anbuh’s photographs and Jiyin Bae’s paintings each attempt, in their own way, to hold a moment in place—but what ultimately remains on the surface is not a faithful representation of that moment, but a trace of time that has already passed. We all dwell on different moments in time. Some look at what they have and dread losing it; others look back on days already gone, longing to return to those moments left behind. Past and future may seem far apart, but they meet at a single point: the present. This exhibition, Even in Different Times, is a two-person show by Anbuh and Jiyin Bae. Through distinct mediums of photography and painting, they speak of time, memory, and sensations that last long after their causes have disappeared. Anbuh’s photographs are less concerned with documenting a specific event or figure than with concern for things that will one day vanish.His work focuses on spaces people have just vacated, light that will soon fade, emptiness and stillness. His scenes offer no clear narrative, yet a clear premonition of loss runs through them all. Light spreading across water, shadows among empty chairs, the soft glow of the afternoon sun—all are quiet intimations of things that existed at that moment but only temporarily. Rather than recording presence itself, An Abu's photographs capture the aura around that presence, preserving the moment just before it disappears and allowing it to linger on the surface of the image. Bae Ji-in’s paintings, meanwhile, exist in the gap between a photograph and a memory. Family photographs left behind by his father, scenes from childhood, moments from relationships long past—these are the starting points of his work. He summons them back onto the canvas, but it is impossible to restore them to their original form. Figures blur and dissolve into the landscape around them;space itself is dismantled and rebuilt within layers of memory. Colors overlap and bleed into one another, suggesting both the hazy boundaries of memory and its capacity to be transformed by present-day recollection. In his recent work, he has painted an image of the sun and trees in the present day on top of old photographs, creating scenes where different times merge within a single frame. In his paintings, memory is not fixed and permanent, but a continuous process in which different moments seep into each other and are constantly remade. The two artists begin using different sources of inspiration, but arrive, in the end, at the same question: What happens to that which disappears? This exhibition does not define loss as a sudden absence or disappearance. Loss is, instead, a sensation of a future that has not come and the resonance of a past that will not return. Standing before these works of art, viewers can look into someone else’s memories, but soon find themselves facing the truth about time. And they will come to discover that other people who have lived entirely different lives are, even now, living through the same experience of time—each weighed down by their own memories, losses, and residues of emotion. Even in Different Times is not a record of things that used to exist. Instead, it is a story about the moment when different times fuse within a single space—somewhere between physical reality and memory, that place where things that have not disappeared can be alongside things that have. Perhaps we are all living through our own individual experience of time, and yet, following the invisible traces left by memory and loss, we may be passing through the very same time after all