Mimi Youn studied photography in the Sang Myung University and Media in the University College London. She employs photographs as a tool to explore the relationships between time, memory and spaces.
She has been interested in materiality of photograph and she creates distorted, erased and modified memory using photographs that she has collected. Moreover, she usually folds repeatedly photographs based on paper to make object as material and to show the weakness of structure like memory and then to take pictures again the objects. The object is shown as unexpected shape by lower f-stop and different angle.
Mimi Youn is interested in vintage photographs made by 19c and early 20c in Korea. The photos provide historical information about the times, but it is hard to read individual stories behind it.
In her previous work “Here is where we meet” has been expanded in several ways. Mimi invited people to donate photographs to her in order to use them in her project. She folded and overlapped these photographs together with her own to form a shape, which she then photographed again to create the final print. The artist’s aim was to recreate new shapes of memory, time and space using the donated photographs together with hers. Much stronger emotional meaning was conveyed to these people through their photographs and the stories behind them. Mimi feels that this meaning has not been limited to their individual stories but has been also expanded through their shared story.
