Abstract

This Moon in Your Throat examines the concept of Han, a haunted and inherited Korean affect that moves across bodies, generations, and diasporic life. Rather than treating Han as a fixed emotion, this thesis understands it as a lasting force shaped by historical trauma, family memory, and the unfinished effects of colonialism, war, capitalism, and displacement. Drawing on hauntology, the project asks how the past remains present through sensation, habit, bodily tension, and emotional atmosphere, especially in the lives of Koreans living in the United States. Night serves as the project’s spatial, temporal, and emotional ground, a setting in which the boundaries between past and present, self and other, and the living and the dead become less stable. Through night portraiture, still life photography, and collages made from family archives, I trace how Han returns through ancestral presence, paternal transmission, and intimate encounters with other diasporic Koreans. Shadow work functions as both a personal and artistic method, guiding the project as it engages suppressed grief, anger, shame, and longing as they surface through darkness, long exposure, and ritualized portrait sessions. The installation extends these concerns through a polyphonic layout that resists a single linear narrative and instead presents multiple temporalities at once. By treating the body as a haunted archive where past and present coexist, This Moon in Your Throat presents photography as a space for witnessing inherited negativity and opening the possibility of transformation.

Publication Date

5-1-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Photography and Related Media (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

Photographic Arts and Sciences, School of

College

College of Art and Design

Advisor

Joshua Thorson

Advisor/Committee Member

Ahndraya Parlato

Advisor/Committee Member

Carole Woodlock

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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