Et congregati sunt ubi iacuimus translates from Latin meaning “And they gathered where we lay.” Insil and her mother, lying in a field together, the light going gold behind them. That’s where it starts. The field holds them the way the diaspora holds its people — in fragments, in beauty, in a kind of grief that coexists with joy. Printmaking carries its own logic of inheritance, the pressing of one surface into another, and Insil uses that fully here. This is a picture about what gets handed down without words. About lying in the grass with your mother and feeling, somehow, that you are not alone in it — that the women who survived so that you could exist are still, in some way, right there beside you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The legible impurity of memories and stories traveling through generations that change over time is reflected in the misaligned channels of color that glitch in contrast to the facts of nature. Central to these paths is a saturated pool of varnish which cradles and protects the artist and her mother.

Insil Jang is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist with a heavy emphasis in printmaking and archiving. Her work is rooted in the Korean diaspora, memory, and the stories that pass between generations without ever being written down. She received her BFA in painting and printmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Her work has been acquired by institutions including Yale University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and UC Berkeley. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​