Mouth-Space
My recent body of work, Mouth-Space, comprises photographs that are a return to Korean, my mother tongue. In these studio-made pictures, I reference the characters of the phonetic alphabet and enact three key ideas of language, optics, and photography. While being carried on the back of my mother in our neighborhood of Busan, I would point at the signs and repeat the words that Mom would read to me. Soon I was able to read without understanding all of the words.
The ease of learning to read the Korean alphabet is because there is a certain logic. The shapes of the vowel characters, for instance, correlate with how open or closed you could make the inside space of your mouth in making each word. Each character is a picture diagram of the space inside the mouth.
Immigrating to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English was a formative experience for me. I felt completely untethered to any internal compass that I could use to navigate my place in a new country with a new language. Confusion and contradictions of visual and verbal communication became a part of the primary conceits of my process. The large-format analog film camera I use to make my photographs is akin to the interior space of a mouth, a darkened room with a small opening to the world that brings into focus the projected image — the camera obscura.
The liminal space is where one’s mouth may sound out words, where the conscious understanding of the meaning has yet to take place. It is in the space of dissonance that I am compelled to play with the optics of the camera lens (focal length, perspective, perception, and magnification). I choose to articulate the invisible geometries anchored by the marks, rubbings, and paintings on my studio walls.
Sophia Chai was born in Busan, South Korea, and now lives in Rochester. She received her BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chai is a recipient of a 2024 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
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