Remembering or Fading Away

 Alpha Contemporary presents Remembering or Fading Away: Eun-hyea Choi, Naosuke Wada, Haruki Ueda, on view from June 15 to July 3, 2024.

 

 Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) once stated that “immortality remains in the memory of others, or in the works we leave behind.” While his words referred to literature, they resonate equally with visual art—painting, sculpture, ceramics—forms through which memory is materialized and sustained.

This exhibition begins with the question: how is memory accumulated, sustained, and transmitted through visual form? In an era where digital images and information are endlessly produced and erased, the exhibition examines how individual sensations and experiences are transformed into artistic language, and how they persist within the memories of others.

 

 Bringing together three artists from Japan and Korea, Remembering or Fading Away introduces practices that collect fleeting moments and fragments of time, solidifying them into works that generate new memories. Their works anchor ephemeral experiences within painterly and material structures, reconstructing traces of time and sensation through visual means.

 

 Eun-hyea Choi (Korean, b.1983) transforms accumulated scenes of lived experience into layered structures of color and form, constructing personal narratives through imagined movement. Naosuke Wada (Japanese, b.1983) builds layers of transparent color to accumulate memories of light and space, presenting surfaces that shift according to the viewer’s gaze. Haruki Ueda (Japanese, b.1987) translates everyday landscapes and impressions of light into ambiguous textures, preserving sensory traces within painting.

 

 Together, their works propose memory not as a static record of the past, but as a living structure—one that continues to be generated and transformed in the present. Remembering or Fading Away reflects on how contemporary visual art can extend personal experience into collective memory, and reconsiders the role of art at the threshold between disappearance and persistence.

 

Artist Biographies

 

Eun-hyea Choi (Korean, b.1983)

Choi collects accumulated time and experience embedded in lived spaces, translating them into visual form. Movements generated through time and space are reduced into layered structures of color and form, expanding experienced reality into open possibilities. Her works are reconstructed through “movement of the mind”—imagined transitions that shape personal, narrative spaces.

 

 Based in Yongin, South Korea. She holds MA and PhD degrees in Painting from Ewha Womans University. Her works are in the collections of Ilshin Foundation, Osan Museum of Art, Bank of Korea, Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery, and Seoul Museum of Art.

 

Naosuke Wada (Japanese, b.1983)

 

 Wada explores light and spatiality through layered glazing techniques, referencing classical painting methods. Using highly transparent media, he constructs screens of color and form that shift according to light and viewpoint, offering a fluid visual experience.

 

 He completed his MFA at Kyoto University of the Arts and is active internationally.

 

Haruki Ueda (Japanese, b.1987)

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 Ueda paints memories of light encountered in everyday moments—landscapes, forest air, and fragments of stories. Her severe nearsightedness informs a distinctive visual language, translating perception into ambiguous textures on canvas.

 

 Based in Nara, Japan. Recipient of the FACE 2023 Excellence Award and other major prizes.