Ha Ja

• Photographer
  Jee Su Kim
• Technical Info
  Korean Hanji Covered Box With Lid. Signature Binding. Accordion Pages With Image Cutouts.
• Photo Date
  2020 - 2023

This serves as a blueprint of my grandmother Ha Ja's life, through which I aim to share her narrative by revealing her side of the story she was never given the agency to express in her own voice as a daughter, wife, mother, and especially a woman in Korea. The unconventional design requires some tenacity to flip through the entire book. It is an experience in itself. It allows the viewer to examine and appreciate the subject, much like discovering and acknowledging Ha Ja as a person, not just her physical embodiment, but also a collection of her stories.

Jee Su Kim is a South Korean visual storyteller whose works go beyond documenting literal representations by blending her subjective vision to create more emotionally evocative images through symbolic and abstract imagery. Growing up in a multicultural background, her challenges with finding a sense of belonging enabled her to channel isolation and otherness into a source of empowerment by giving agency to her photographed subjects who are carefully staged in an ordinary background to convey a certain story or emotion while preserving the documentary elements of her photographs.