For many months, my parents have been working on clearing out their garage. Every weekend, during our FaceTime calls, they inform me of what they did in their spare time over the week. Tennis, book club, work, church, and clearing out the garage. While I don’t believe my parents are extreme hoarders, they still are immigrants who have moved and lost, and therefore have a hard time letting things go to waste or go in general. This project has been in the works for a long time. There are constant reports of dusty artifacts that are resurfacing and being rediscovered piece by piece. In a moment, I’ll notice a familiar sweater that my dad is wearing through the pixelated FaceTime screen. Or my mom will be modeling a pair of neck pillows in the shape of fruits purchased from a train station in Korea, and then she’ll ask me to decide if the pillows are worth holding on to or not. 

These moments where the past resurfaces reminds me that the past is something latent, piled, buried—always, possibly, here, in this moment. And while the substance of the past is a serial accumulation, its heft is accessed through a present activation. 

The past is both a collection and a presence.

Is this not the ontological reality of movies? Songs? A series of photographs activated through circulation, or a series of musical notes passed through to create the Clair de Lune. Former fragments connected, then activated, to be in this moment: a presence conjured. Like water, both films and music are solely themselves when they are experienced in their entirety—indivisible. Music especially. Where is music? A thing that is no space and all time.  

And yet, these mediums of time create space. The reverb of an amped guitar creates echoes that bounce off the walls of an impossible warehouse. The light filtered in a cinematic scene creates the sunrise on another planet. The memories of my grandmother’s untold stories create paintings and drawings. In these moments, time creates space and space collapses time, like true myths conjured by some dresses pulled from the nadirs of a garage.  

Specifically, these dresses. These jersey-cotton a-line dresses were from my grandmother’s boutique in Los Angeles’ Koreatown in the 90’s. She was a chic individual, laden with ambiguous grief. And while I have never seen this store or learned all the facts of my grandmother's loss, I recognize these garments as notes and signs, like a sheet draped over a ghost. To me, these dresses are new. I have never seen this green cotton dress with cobalt blue trimmings, nor have I encountered this black shift dress with delicate bleached details. But their form speaks of their 90’s West Coast fashion origins, their tags bear witness to my grandmother’s store, and these ciphers code in me a larger migration history of Koreans in Los Angeles.

The past is always present and the present is a current.

Part of the emotional drag of clearing out the garage is encountering these sorts of threads. A hoard of black and white photographs, pins, shelves, clothes—items passively accumulated and unexpectedly inherited, simultaneously useless and indispensable. It is obvious to say that the indispensable nature of these objects is due to the life they aureate—the space, time, and being they conjure. But the useless nature of these objects is also due to the distance and interval from the world and person through which they were once animated by. These emotionally charged materials are like spirits, and spirits may have supernatural powers—or they may just be needy exiles. They sit, spinning, absorbed into gravity, fated to forever orbit Jupiter as a ring until the god of war wields them once again. Or less dramatically, until a confrontation grounds their suspension—something as mundane as the need to stop paying the rent on an external storage unit.

My parents have finished their garage project. It has been a few months now. Bags of clothes and other items have been sorted, given away, or thrown out, but still on FaceTime calls, there will be the resurfacing of a sweater that is freshly familiar. A new thing I had forgotten and lived with in the past.  

The past is present, the present is (a) current, and what was made, will be what happens.

Michelle Chun is a visual maker born and raised in Southern California. She received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School. Through excavation of familial archive and historical references, her practice is an assemblage of precarious nostalgia, glass prayers, and treasured fragments from the immigrant’s longings for eschatological belonging. She is currently a HATCH resident at the Chicago Arts Coalition and a Teaching Artist Resident at Lillstreet Art Center.  She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island, among other exhibitions. 

michellejchun.com
@michellejchun