What the Mouth Remembers: Lost Recipe, Found Words

What the Mouth Remembers is a research-creation project that explores how spoken language, especially when fragmented, mistranslated, and passed down across migration, family histories, and colonial ruptures, becomes a site of embodied memory, survival, and imaginative reconstruction. At the heart of the project is the Jeju language, not as a fixed object of preservation but as a way of understanding and relating that vibrantly moves through sound, memory, and gesture.

Join us from noon to 3 p.m. daily during the exhibition, Jeju Seaweed Soup (Mom-guk) will be available for visitors to taste. Participants can choose either the classic pork-based version or a vegetarian alternative, both of which include rice, kimchi, and seaweed (in this case, from Monterey Bay Seaweeds), prepared using Yoon’s mom’s traditional Jeju recipe for mom-guk.

Yoonkyung Lim is a visual artist and Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yoon’s art is participatory. The environment she creates around a theme allows an open space for interaction, discussion, and shared responsibility. Visitors are not merely viewers, they become co-creators. Her recent work investigates feminist oral histories, alternative archives, and diasporic modes of translation. She has exhibited at the Gangwon International Triennale (2024), MMCA Seoul and Gwacheon and the Coreana Museum of Art. Lim holds a BFA from Korea National University of Arts, an MFA from UCLA, and completed the Whitney ISP. Artist website: www.yoonkyunglim.com