Young Chai · First Solo Exhibition · 2026 K-Photowave 7 Awards
I Tried to Remember
November 25 (Wed) – December 1 (Tue), 2026 · Opening reception: Wednesday, November 25, 6 pm
Kim Young Sup Photo Gallery · B1, Monthly Photography Building, 18 Chungmuro, Jung-gu, Seoul · +82 2 733 6322
Organized by 
Korea Photo Gallery Association, Gallery & Artist Matching Program
About the Exhibition
Kim Young Sup Photo Gallery presents I Tried to Remember, the first solo exhibition by Young Chai, from November 25 to December 1, 2026. The show is part of the Korea Photo Gallery Association’s Gallery & Artist Matching Program, which pairs winners of the K-Photowave 7 Awards with a gallery.
I Tried to Remember reaches back to a childhood that no one ever photographed. Chai spent his early years in his grandmother’s house in the countryside, but when he tries to recall it, the scenes never come back whole. What stays sharp are fragments seen from low down: the kitchen floor, the sheen of the oiled-paper flooring, light slipping through a gap in a door. The house itself, with its clay-hearth kitchen and paper-floored rooms, is long gone. There is nowhere left to point a camera.
So Chai described the house in words and asked a generative AI to picture it. These are not photographs. They are memories turned into language, and language turned back into images. The machine can draw only what it is told; where the words run out, it fills the gaps in its own way. Chai looks closely at the distance between what appears on the screen and what he feels he remembers. The machine does not know that house, and his own memory, he finds, has empty places too.
There are no faces in the exhibition. A person appears only in the last image: a grandmother’s hand holding a child’s finger. In his artist’s note, Chai describes holding his own grandchild and recognizing in his arms the way his grandmother must once have held him. The scenes have faded, but the love came through, not as memory but in the body. That is why the final image alone is printed by hand in the darkroom, as a silver gelatin print.
Starting from one person’s small, private sensations, I Tried to Remember asks how a time that never became a clear picture can still live on in the body today. It is an exhibition about trying to recover the past, and about the places that can never be recovered.
Images
Poster
Artist’s Note
There is a love I cannot remember: my grandmother’s, given to me in the countryside when I was too young to keep it.
And yet my body seems to remember. When I hold my grandchild, gestures I never learned come on their own. They must be the way she held me. Love does not travel through memory. It travels through the body.
I wanted to see that love again. But when I try to picture it, only low things come back clearly, like the kitchen floor. Most of it does not return. The hearth kitchen and the paper-floored rooms of her house are gone.
So I described scenes from that old house in words and made images with generative AI. These are not photographs taken with a camera. They are an attempt to draw the kitchen, the rooms and the things inside them once more. What I remember and what I cannot remember sit side by side.
Memory fades. The gesture that carries love remains.
I could not fully redraw the years I lived with my grandmother. Still, her love is passing through my body to my grandchild.
About the Artist
Young Chai
Photographer & Visual Artist
young@luxlatens.com · luxlatens.com
After retiring from a forty-year career in research, Young Chai turned to photography and AI-based visual art. He makes photo-essay books that pair AI-generated images with his own writing. He runs the publishing house LuxLatens Press and the Latent Light Research Lab (luxlatens.com), where he also teaches on AI. In preparation for this exhibition, he wrote the English-language book Expression, Not Archive. He has also written five papers on AI-generated images and composite memory.
Poster
