Installation view of 《Naphthalene Candy》 (00 of 00, 2023) ©Sangha Khym

Looking at photographs of one’s mother when she was young inevitably feels unfamiliar. Most people have experienced this at least once—flipping through an old album and encountering a mother who looks different from the one they know: younger, beautiful, carrying dreams and futures unknown to the viewer. Combined with a past landscape that differs from the present, the sense of unfamiliarity deepens.

However, looking at old photographs of one’s mother is not the same experience as viewing her Cyworld page. Whether they are travel snapshots or group photos with friends, album photographs function faithfully as records of moments. Photos uploaded to social media, however, carry an added layer of meaning. A selfie—or even a non-selfie that one deliberately chooses to share—cannot carry the same meaning as an album photo. If photographs of the past were tools for recording memories, digital photos uploaded online are means of self-expression. They represent a version of oneself shown to others, an image shaped by how one wishes to be seen.

Because these images reveal how a mother perceived herself and how she wanted to be seen, encountering them provokes an even stranger feeling. Most daughters are unaccustomed to seeing their mothers express or present themselves publicly. Since daughters encounter their mothers primarily in private spaces, they rarely experience how their mothers represent themselves socially. Moreover, the mother from before the daughter’s birth—or from the daughter’s early childhood—is someone the daughter never fully knew. To see her is to encounter what feels like an entirely different person.

Sangha Khym describes feeling this same sensation when she first encountered her mother’s photos on Cyworld—a feeling that these images could never truly become her own memories, that she would never fully know the mother in those photographs. Rather than allowing the images to remain as online data destined to be lost, Khym chooses to print them, turning them into material objects. Yet the material she selects is not one that lasts. She prints the photographs on thermal paper—receipt paper printed by heat without ink. Vulnerable to heat, thermal prints fade over time. Khym then exposes these printed images to heat once more, transforming them. By blowing on them or rubbing them with her hands, the images gradually lose their form.

It is as if she attempts to understand—or somehow reach—her mother’s image by erasing her face with the heat of her own body. Yet, as evident as her labored breathing, it is equally evident that she can never reach her. Mother and daughter are destined to misunderstand one another.
Photography is a means of recording and remembering subjects. In photographs left to remember a subject, Khym paradoxically discovers the impossibility of fully knowing that subject. This realization is especially acute when the subject is one’s mother—someone who feels closest, yet remains profoundly unknown.

Through carefully observing, materializing, and transforming her mother’s photographs, Khym may have come closer to her in some sense. Yet she can never fully know or understand the mother in the image. A moment of time recorded remains incomplete, and this incompleteness is the fate of photography itself. It is always insufficient—forever unreachable, never fully remembered, and inevitably misunderstood. In this way, it mirrors the unresolved relationship between mother and daughter.

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