The 18th Jesa
24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia, CA 91355
Part of ‘CalArts Expo 2026’
Wood, Raspberry Pi, IR camera, 5-inch display, television, edited home video, wine glass, wine, LED candles, and paper ancestral tablet
preserved, grief is revisited, and the words I never had the chance to say are silently spoken.
The installation is situated in a dark room. On the central wall, a small black wooden frame holds a 5-inch vertical display. Beneath it, where the wall meets the floor, a low altar-like table is placed. On the table are two LED candles, a wine glass filled with the wine my mother liked, and a jibang, a paper ancestral tablet traditionally written in brush calligraphy and used during Jesa. These objects echo the structure of a memorial portrait and a ritual offering table, but they are reduced to a minimal and personal form. Rather than reconstructing a traditional ritual literally, the work reimagines Jesa as a contemporary media object that holds absence, memory, and the unstable presence of the living.
The installation also includes a television playing home video footage recorded by my father when I was two years old. In the footage, I appear with my mother. I blurred only my mother's face to express how, as I watch the recording in the present, I am gradually forgetting the details of her face. Although the video preserves a moment we shared, it cannot
restore the clarity of my memory. It holds two conflicting conditions at once: the image remains, while my memory of her becomes increasingly indistinct.
The 5-inch display first shows a sequence of years from 2009 to 2026. As the numbers change, they dissolve into particles and gradually blur, tracing the span of time since my mother's death. Time appears not as a continuous narrative, but as a repeated sequence of disappearing images. When a viewer approaches the work, an IR camera embedded in the frame
detects their presence. The display shifts to a second video in which the sentence "image remains, but details blur" covers the screen. Beneath the text, the viewer's face appears in black and white, softened and blurred by the camera system.
The viewer's image is never shown clearly. It is transformed into an unstable afterimage, suspended beneath a phrase about the failure of memory. Through this interaction, the viewer does not simply observe a memorial; they become temporarily absorbed into it. Their presence activates the work, yet their own image is immediately made fragile. In this way, The 18th Jesa moves between personal mourning and a broader reflection on mortality. It asks how memory preserves only fragments, how images remain while details disappear, and how every living body is already moving toward becoming a memory.
This work does not attempt to resolve grief. Instead, it creates a space to remain with it. By combining ritual objects, archival home video, embedded technology, and the viewer's own fading image, The 18th Jesa becomes a personal act of remembrance and a quiet confrontation with the finite nature of life.
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