The Life Cycle of a Memory

To begin to talk about the life cycle of a memory, we must ask, when does a memory originate, and for how long does it echo? Is it confined to a single living being, or can it extend past the body?  

Two words come to mind in considering the art of Kat Yue Sun, Noah Hirayama-Rubel, and Marie Khediguian: prememory and postmemory, concepts I borrow from memory studies scholar Marianne Hirsch. i The former refers to the potential of an unexplored past invoked through surreal intuition, and the latter to the past as a continuously reanimated subject. Though termed as “pre” and “post” memory, we are not discussing things in linear terms. By invoking the paradigm of the life cycle, we can understand memory not as linear but as circular, spiraling, and cyclical. We are talking about the slipperiness of memory, so slippery that it extends before and past a single lifetime. Memory bleeds into itself, whether it is a consciously repeated family narrative, or a subconscious state. In referencing the “life cycle” of a memory, I aim to emphasize the cyclical nature of memory that these three pieces bring to light, wherein memory regenerates in new forms.  

Points of origin are mysterious, and hard to trace; this is why they are called creation myths. We are never present for the beginning; we are not witness to our own births. And so, memory is just as much about what we don’t remember, as it is about what we do. Reverie (2025) by Kat Yue Sun is a haunting presence, a sculptural representation of all that lingers below the surface, just out of reach. Memory, desire, and the fluidity of both, are elicited through the amorphous, entangled form that is reminiscent of the loops and folds of the human brain coming undone – or perhaps coming together. Awash in a burnt yellow glaze, Sun’s piece feels light and evasive. It captures the feeling of a memory on the cusp of being remembered—not yet fully formed, but full of potential. Working in a trance-like, meditative state, Sun was intuitively guided by and instinctively responded to the material. As a record of Sun’s bodily gestures, the sculpture asks to what extent memory is self-originating? Instinct speaks to an invisible history that has shaped us, a kind of prememory.  

To possess a memory implies ownership, but as Sun shows, ownership is dubious. In asking “What happens to a dream deferred? What does it mean to inherit a dream that never fully arrived?” She invokes notions of biological and evolutionary processes such as epigenetic memory. Are these really dreams, or inherited memories we were born with, like vestigial limbs? 

The Shortest Week (April in Ishikawa Prefecture) (2025) by Noah Hirayama-Rubel is a series of 10 cyanotype prints made over the course of a week last April, during which the artist had flown last-minute to Japan to attend the mourning ceremony of his baachan (grandmother), Miyeko. Composed of sakura blossoms, twigs, and small rocks the artist collected from the streets of his mother’s hometown in Noto Peninsula, Japan, these prints represent the brevity of life, human and non-human alike. The prints are light-sensitive imitations that preserve an image while the reality withers almost immediately; sakura blossoms wilt as soon as two hours after falling—which made the artist’s task of collecting them nearly impossible. 

Hirayama-Rubel visually invokes the history of cyanotype as a medium, which was at its inception primarily used by botanists for documentary purposes. By playing with ideas of documenting a spectral presence, a sense of temporal displacement follows. Between the 16-hour time difference and the immortalization of a fleeting life, we feel as though we are steeped in memory, with the past and present blending into new flavors. For Hirayama-Rubel, who grew up a continent away from his grandmother, time itself fells like another insurmountable distance. Creating in memory of a loved one becomes a way to remain in relationship with them, despite their absence. The Shortest Week intervenes in normal perceptions of time and echoes a promise of devotion. Postmemory is a condition in which we ritualistically perform our connection to a previous generation and their memory and honor them through echoing.   

Postmemory, in simpler terms, refers to a memory of a memory. As the granddaughter of four survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Marie Khediguian grew up with second and third-hand memories of a world she never saw with her own eyes. Grieving in Three Acts (2025) is composed of a triptych of paintings which depict Khediguian’s mother, her main link to her family’s history and Armenian heritage. 

Khediguian began the series as an exercise in reproducing family photographs, inspired by fellow Armenian painter Arshile Gorky’s piece The Artist and His Mother. Following in Gorky’s footsteps with themes of maternal loss and exile, Khediguian instrumentalizes oil paint to revisit her mother continuously, so long as the paint does not dry. The first two paintings, Ara & Nairi and Between Then and Now, build upon the family archive which Khediguian herself was not present to witness, as the scenes precede her birth. Ara & Nairi features Khediguian’s mother and uncle as children, arm in arm in a rooftop scene in 1950s Alexandria, Egypt. Between Then and Now shows the artist’s mother as a young woman with her father on the couch in the 70s.

The third painting, Failing Towards Brilliance is a layered portrait from memory that will never be resolved or finished. Khediguian works the oil paint to its limit in an endless ritual of addition and subtraction. On top of her memory, she paints a memory of that memory. This ritual results in an almost chromatic black background, formed out of smearing a whole spectrum of color. Does chromatic black remember where it came from? Memory is mediated through the body, and the colors of Grieving in Three Acts are like weather that chills or warms us. Khediguian asks, “What do we do with everything that is left behind?” 

Memory connotes an absence, a distance. Paradoxically, this absence becomes a ghostly presence of its own. While Sun’s Reverie dives into memory as a surreal and inborn current that we stand in, we find ourselves steeped in the past and present all at once in Hirayama-Rubel’s Shortest Week, and Khediguian’s Grieving in Three Acts reminds us that the past is unresolved, and lives on inside us. Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory shows us that through memory we create and regenerate, as “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation”. iii It is therefore about what you make of what is left over. From vestigial limbs of prememory, we can extract the marrow and graft it into a new being, extending it past a singular body. The works of Sun, Hirayama-Rubel, and Khediguian each reflect this approach of embodying echoes. If we understand memory as temporal displacement, then we are constantly searching for our place, simultaneously creating it. In the life cycle of a memory, perhaps pre and post memory become the same thing, because memory presupposes an after. To remember is to continue moving through time, and to live beyond.