Installation view of 《Let’s Go Home》 (Insa Art Space, 2024) © Jihye Park

The exhibition 《Let’s Go Home》, held in two locations—Seoul (September–October) and Busan (October–November)—is the second family narrative by artist Jihye Park, following 《Son’s Time》 presented in Incheon in 2022 and 2023. In a time when discussions around the dissolution of the traditional family and the social safety net for single-person households are prevalent, it may seem like a somewhat sly curiosity, yet she believes that the domain of irrationality that runs through history—emotion and empathy—still holds potential and sustainability worth exploring.

Through her creative practice of diligently making and equally diligently discarding, she has continuously raised questions about the meaning of non-economic labor, including artistic production. Now, the artist gradually expands her own narrative, seeking to draw out empathy from our neighbors whose lives converge in domestic work and everyday labor.

Jihye Park’s solo exhibition 《Let’s Go Home》 is a sculptural/installation exhibition that visualizes the stories of three generations of women (grandmother–mother–daughter) who share one lineage yet live across Seoul, Incheon, and Busan. The works placed throughout the corners of the first and second floors of Insa Art Space are best experienced by focusing on emotions that cannot be fully expressed in words and on the layered accumulation of time.

The story begins when the daughter, one of the narrators, exhausted by the burdens of life in Seoul, unexpectedly reunites with her family due to an unforeseen event. In the process of tending to each other’s pains—pains they could not easily ask about before—they come to recognize how the choices they made in order to fulfill the roles expected of “proper women” in Korean society have been devalued as powerless.

By focusing on the micro-histories of ordinary citizens who have struggled beneath the surface to maintain a peaceful daily life in which nothing seems to happen, this exhibition proposes that we reconsider the positional value of the many anonymous individuals, rather than a few heroic figures at the forefront of reform.


Installation view of 《Let’s Go Home》 (Insa Art Space, 2024) © Jihye Park

Artist Jihye Park, who has continued her practice through labor and language, presents in this exhibition ten sculptural works of varying scales, created through meticulous hand-making and condensed expression. Using materials that are mostly harmless and compliant—such as paper, fabric, and wood—she casually arranges persistent yet coarse masses.

Passing by the first-floor main work 〈Our Home〉, which embodies the shared regional experiences of the three individuals, visitors move up to the second floor composed of three rooms, where they can glimpse the perspectives of the three generations as they interpret the everyday life and landscapes unique to the Busan and Gyeongnam region in different ways.

Perhaps it is no longer important to judge the rights and wrongs of events such as the Korean War, the democratization movement, the IMF financial crisis, or the recent housing lease fraud crisis—events that may have become their traumas. It is hoped that the courage to willingly invite, or to respond without distortion to, the closest “other” to one’s home—family—within the high and fragile walls surrounding one’s own home, our home, will become the miracle that allows us to dream of tomorrow.

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