Friends We Forget is an augmented photography series developed for Muyeol Choe’s first solo exhibition in the neighborhood he grew up in; Inheon-dong at Seoul. The creatures are created using computer graphics, then superimposed onto pictures of his old neighborhood. The imaginary and the mythical is born by interacting with the people of the neighborhood. The creatures are born as a record of the lives living in the neighborhood.
Inheon-dong is a historically disenfranchised community where the majority of the dwellers lived in poverty. The neighborhood saw a recent gentrification that rapidly replaced hints and touches of those days in favor of coffee shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. The old community is slowly dissolving while no new community is forming to replace it.
Friends We Forget uses the language of monster myth to remember the dissolving community and the lives of people that lived in it. The creatures are a iconographical representation of imagination, memory, emotions, and interactions between the denizens of the neighborhood, each showcasing different states of life. The creatures evolve into one another as human interaction dies out and individuals in the neighborhood becomes increasingly separated, or as they act and interact with one another; asking for a parking validation, buying fruit at the market, throwing away a cigarette, crying alone in the café; these all form into a collective mythos of lives spent within the space where one life and another may meet.
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