The Brooklyn Rail

Hanji paper, made from the bark of the mulberry trees native to Korea, originated around the third century and is known for its unparalleled resilience. Resistant to water and decomposition, it’s sometimes said the paper will “last a thousand years,” thereby making it an excellent material for an artist preoccupied with time and duration. It is the material of choice for artist Yoonhee Ryoony Suh whose current exhibition, Memory Gap, at the Monira Foundation in Jersey City is her debut show in the United States.

The exhibition takes its title from the works on view, a selection from Suh’s “Memory Gap” series, all of which are composed on hanji. The paper itself appeals to the senses, thick and creamy, and striated with pulpy veins that suggest the lined and wrinkled hands of your grandmother. Suh employs a labor-intensive process, scattering natural materials like sticks, grasses, bamboo and cattail stalks across the hanji. She then boils organic matter like seaweeds and pine needles, pollen and petals in various combinations to create pigments, which she pours over the hanji, allowing it to steep like a tea. Her process is represented on video in the gallery, where viewers can watch her repeatedly stir and pour, and occasionally step upon and across the paper and debris in a seemingly rhythmic meditation that is reflected in the marks time and body impress upon the paper.

The title of each work is foregrounded by the words “Memory Gap,” a term for that blank space in the mind between other known, and remembered, points. Age, trauma, forgetfulness—any number of reasons may account for a memory gap; Suh does not dictate where her reasons might lie. Instead, her ambivalent compositions allow for a range of interpretations. In Memory Gap – That’s Life I (2021) the mottled skin of the paper’s surface is saturated by blue-gray pigment, with tones of gold and amber tinting the somber hue with a dim phosphorescence. The effect is of a rain-soaked day, when absolute wetness seems to transcend sunshine, and produce its own, peculiar gray light. At the center, a small figure walks a dog, her windswept hair tucked beneath a watch cap. In her other hand, she clutches a cell phone. Though the phone is suggested only by a small smear of red pigment Suh renders the gesture so unmistakably it becomes poignant, a universally understood indication of our contemporary need to remain tethered to the world through our technology, even during a solitary walk in the rain.

But perhaps it’s this need for connection—this tethering—that helps us forestall memory gaps. In one of the most sophisticated works on view, Memory Gap – People Hiding Inside My Brain Cortex (2017), Suh almost takes a literal tack on her subject. A viewer could easily imagine the swirling, mottled texture of the tinted hanji as the tangle of her own gray matter, that snarled mystery which allows her to remember, permits her to forget. A close investigation of the denser cloud of pigment at the center of the work reveals eight small human figures seen from above as if they were being gazed upon by an omniscient eye. They appear as sunbathers frolicking on a beach, lounging in shallow waters, holding each other tenderly, and playfully chasing each other across the sand. Whether they represent a retained memory or a fleeting one is undetermined, but the very fact of their personhood seems to reinforce the grasp for connection.

A single diptych in the show, Memory Gap – Endless Flow I (2022), features both a panel of pure abstraction as well as a figurative one. The right hand panel depicts a lone scuba diver deeply submerged, which lends an oceanic connotation to the non-figurative panel on the left. While the left side suggests a dark, roiling and thrashing sea, the diver floats in calm waters. The two sides appear representative of the opposing forces of the mind: the tumultuous monkey mind that embraces capriciousness and unrest, and the quieted mind that strives counter to it, seeking to bring order to chaotic thoughts, and disorganized memories.

It’s this entreaty for quietness (as distinct from silence) that Suh seems to bend towards in this body of work. In this way, those forgotten moments—the memory gaps—might be surmounted and instead permanently pressed into remembrances. It’s notable that in Memory Gap – Endless Flow I, the hanji paper itself is most evidently on display. At the separation between the two panels, the rough-hewn edge of the paper is visible, and its thickness and durability are easy to see. A paper that won’t crumble or dissolve, a material that will always retain a memory long after it has otherwise faded away, as all memories inevitably will. Suh’s works are destined to exist beyond the vagaries of the mind.