What is to Keep
@ NEOMEDIAPOLIS
Studio 473 2233 S Throop St Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Saturday, September 19th, from 7PM - 9PM
On view through Sunday, October 4th
What is to Keep begins with a question: what does it mean to keep something when staying is never guaranteed?
During my years in Chicago, arrival and departure became part of everyday life. In the United States, migration is often narrated through the promise of arrival—the American Dream—but my experience has been marked just as much by leaving. Friends moved away, relationships stretched across distance, and temporary apartments became homes only in time to be abandoned again. Before moving to New York, one friend asked me to keep their pie plates rather than throw them away. The gesture made me wonder what is actually preserved when an object remains: the thing itself, the person attached to it, or a moment we are unwilling to let disappear.
Two years ago, I learned of my grandmother’s death just before I was about to board a roller coaster. Her ashes were later placed in a green burial, leaving no permanent grave or precise location for me to return to. What I have instead are fragments: photographs, memories, and video recordings. As those recordings are replayed, I wonder whether one day more time will be spent watching her image than I was able to spend with her in life. The recording cannot preserve her, yet it keeps something of her moving in the present.
From these experiences, keeping becomes less a matter of possession than a continuous act. We keep plants alive, keep a car running as its parts are replaced, keep relationships across distance, and keep images by copying, projecting, and replaying them. To keep is also to keep doing, to repeat.
Repetition does not stop time; it reveals it. A loop returns to the same image, yet every return occurs at a different moment. Time becomes the difference between otherwise identical repetitions: the quiet witness to change.
Across four works in moving image, sound, projection, and installation, What is to Keep considers the desire to hold something still while knowing that nothing remains unchanged. The phrase 「樹欲靜而風不止」 describes a tree that wishes to be still while the wind refuses to stop. Here, the wind becomes time. The works attend to what remains after departure: objects, images, gestures, and traces carried forward even as the lives around them continue to change.
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Tags: Chicago, Lower West Side, MANA, media art, neomediapolis, Yun Lee
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