KUN SOK / Living Sideways: Mother, Daughter, New York
What does it look like for a mother and daughter from Korea to make a life together in New York? My mother is ninety; I’m in my late fifties. We share a small apartment, buy groceries, cook, clean, ride the subway, keep many medical appointments, and take slow walks at her pace. Our days are ordinary—and yet, as two immigrants far from home, there’s a steady alertness beneath the routine, a quiet readiness as we learn how to belong, just the two of us.
Seven years ago we arrived as three—my mother, my father, and me. Last year my father passed away. During a long season of mourning, my mother began living with mild dementia and depression. My friend, Chun lent her a small camera, and something shifted: making pictures brightened her days. Looking, framing, and pressing the shutter became a way to wake memory, anchor the present, and remind us that we still stand in the world together. The city’s noise slowed; it came into focus, one square at a time.
We’re planning several long-term projects; this exhibition is the first chapter. Instead of postcard New York—the skyline and landmarks—we look sideways at the city’s working edges: construction sites and back alleys, taped corners and patched fences, makeshift joins and structures still becoming. These are the seams and sutures of daily life, the places where things hold. In those places our views meet. My mother includes people and the wider scene—the passerby, the vendor, the trace of a hand. I fixate on surfaces and parts—grids, scars in brick, the way tape pulls two edges into a temporary future. Set side by side—whole and fragment—our images make relations visible.
This show is a beginning. In a city built on motion and difference, a ninety-year-old mother and a not-so-young daughter keep searching for ways to bind ourselves to one another and to others. Our family in Korea pooled their savings for a small camera of her own. Tomorrow we’ll keep walking, meeting people, asking, and recording. The photographs will continue. I hope the camera carries the soft gloss of my mother’s fingerprints for the next ten years and beyond—proof that we were here together, looking carefully, and learning how to live—sideways.
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