Untitled (‘translations’), 2025
Laser prints, China marker
Untitled (4×5), 2025
Laser and silver gelatin prints, paper
Slemmons Collection
Most of these images were originally taken by Yale medical missionaries in the mid to late 1910s, around Shanghai and Hong Kong, which Rod then created copy negatives of. From these, I was focused on two groups of images: those with Chinese writing, and those including colonial Westerners. I am drawn to these by a lack of connection and a sense of guilt: exclusion, accusation, alienation at not understanding something I ‘should,’ and somehow also an expectant feeling of accountability. How has regard changed in the 100+ years since they were taken?
Koo is interested in representations of continuously shifting space through its relationship to time. All of the small things—a string of words, a drift of light, a snapshot taken on a phone—capture what can feel like the most important thing in the world. Sometimes it’s just a second before it fades into obscurity, other times it iterates itself repeatedly into something else. This movement of space acts as a contemporaneous acknowledgement of being within it, as it simultaneously builds itself from both the ‘now’ and ‘previously’ existing memories, creating an ever shifting perception that can appear as indecision or extremes of indirection. Is it inevitable that words, images, objects, movements, should fail in capturing our relationship to spaces?