Material: Tape, Portrait
Dimension: 8.6 x 11.4”  
Year: 2020

It was this winter when I first heard about the Corona Virus. To be honest, selfishly,  I didn’t take it seriously at that time even if a number of people were dying in China. I thought it was a thing just occurred in China, which had nothing to do with me. I even thought that I was lucky since it didn’t happen to me. However, after I came to know my boyfriend’s family got infected, and saw my boyfriend’s sorrowful face after his grandmother passed away, I realized that the number is not just a number. I realized that the numbers of the death contained the sorrow and the loss of many people and the pain that I could never fully understand. What was more sad was that they could only do the online funeral and didn’t even have the funeral photo of their grandma since it happened all of a sudden. My boyfriend asked me to help him drawing the funeral photo of his grandma so we drew her portrait depending on the group family photo. Since it was group photo, the resolution of the photo was really low and pixelated. By reminding his memory of his grandma, we had to revise the drawing again and again.  

Although I couldn’t do anything for him and his family, I wanted to do something meaningful for them. So until the traces of her grandmother disappeared, I repeatedly taped and removed her portrait. The vivid memories of his grandmother disappeared into white. I presented this work to his family hoping that they could overcome their deep sorrow.