Daecheon Beach Portal
Made for Relational Reconstructions at the School for Poetic Computation.
SketchUp Model
2025
2025
Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, this collage gestures toward memory reconstruction. I gathered images from disintegrating photo albums, text messages, newspaper archives, and postcards to build a speculative landscape of Daecheon Beach (South Korea) in the late 1960s–early 70s.
This piece is an augmentation of the archive. I’ve inserted my hand, filling blanks with transcriptions of oral histories and an image of a piece made by a family member now passed: included in this extended landscape is a piece by Eun Sook Kim entitled Jejudo: The Resting Place of My Exiled Great-Grandfather.
In the original photograph, women in white sell freshly caught seafood on the beach; a group of medical students on a trip pose for a photo.
Uncle once told a story about those women. When he was a kid, they’d walk the beach with oysters, sea cucumbers, and 멍게 in their pockets, selling them for “less than a dollar.” They’d slice the 멍게 on a rock and serve it with salt and gochujang. “It was the best,” he said. “So fresh.” Now, he insists, it’s impossible to find. “They’re too expensive now.”
Growing up with my mom—who survived TBI and now has dementia—the elusiveness and absurdity of memory have always made for a malleable reality. Her history often felt like a negotiation between her lived experience and the memories of someone more “able-minded.” Like when my dad recalled her obsession with Elvis in college, and she denied it, insisting she only listened to classical music. Somehow, I believe both are true.
I watched Mom relive Uncle’s story about the 멍게 as he told it—an unspoken consensus on a shared past. With attentive eyes and soft “응, 응,” she affirmed each sensory detail. It made me wonder how much memory lives in the body.
Everyone struggled to recall the English word for 멍게. “Oh, what is it—how do you say that again?”
“Sea squirt,” Mom remembered.
This piece is an augmentation of the archive. I’ve inserted my hand, filling blanks with transcriptions of oral histories and an image of a piece made by a family member now passed: included in this extended landscape is a piece by Eun Sook Kim entitled Jejudo: The Resting Place of My Exiled Great-Grandfather.
In the original photograph, women in white sell freshly caught seafood on the beach; a group of medical students on a trip pose for a photo.
Uncle once told a story about those women. When he was a kid, they’d walk the beach with oysters, sea cucumbers, and 멍게 in their pockets, selling them for “less than a dollar.” They’d slice the 멍게 on a rock and serve it with salt and gochujang. “It was the best,” he said. “So fresh.” Now, he insists, it’s impossible to find. “They’re too expensive now.”
Growing up with my mom—who survived TBI and now has dementia—the elusiveness and absurdity of memory have always made for a malleable reality. Her history often felt like a negotiation between her lived experience and the memories of someone more “able-minded.” Like when my dad recalled her obsession with Elvis in college, and she denied it, insisting she only listened to classical music. Somehow, I believe both are true.
I watched Mom relive Uncle’s story about the 멍게 as he told it—an unspoken consensus on a shared past. With attentive eyes and soft “응, 응,” she affirmed each sensory detail. It made me wonder how much memory lives in the body.
Everyone struggled to recall the English word for 멍게. “Oh, what is it—how do you say that again?”
“Sea squirt,” Mom remembered.