Powerful and Cruel,

“How powerful, and how cruel, is oblivion,” precisely because it is inescapable. We do not actively enact oblivion; rather, we encounter it. It is not an act of volition, but closer to a transformation to which we merely submit. Certain memories grow more vivid with each passing day, while others fade before we even notice. We may strive to choose what to remember, but we can rarely determine what we will forget.

To forget—is this a failure of memory or a consequence of loss? Unlike memory, which preserves the past, oblivion rearranges our present relationships. In the spaces where things have vanished, speculation and imagination, distortion and narrative, arbitrarily fill the void instead of leaving a blank canvas. If so, does oblivion become a generative condition for the creation of new memories and beliefs? The influence of oblivion operates more actively within society than within the individual. Where do they go—the unrecorded individuals, the unrepresented events, and the anecdotes that failed to be included in official history? Here, we are compelled to ask not “What do we forget?” but rather “What has been shaped to be forgotten?” While oblivion serves as a survival mechanism for some, for others, it becomes a form of violence that effaces the very proof of their existence once again.

The reason why artistic attitudes toward memory and time occasionally feel conventional and trite is that they monumentalize the past into a finalized narrative, reducing the “other” within it to a passive object of sentimentality and pity. Yet, should not the role of art extend beyond merely replicating bygone times or sentimentally restoring what has been lost? Should it not instead create a rupture within a timeline constructed from the victor's perspective, forcing the suppressed past to collide with the present? It is also within this context that contemporary art has traversed fragmented aesthetics by deconstructing and subverting rigidified narratives.

When art resists oblivion by repeatedly calling upon the forgotten, it acknowledges the impossibility of total summoning or complete restoration. At the same time, it reveals that these entities excluded from history still define and influence the present. These figures roam the present like the specters of which Jacques Derrida spoke. The erased faces must be re-inserted and re-recorded here and now as an “absent presence.” Art that engages with memory senses this exact deficit; it becomes a practice of interrogating what was erased to build up our living present.

Therefore, the point of intersection that contemporary criticism and art must confront is the space belonging to those whose existence must never be erased. What we must ask, in our resistance against oblivion is: “What must not be forgotten?”, in the void left after oblivion: “What shall we generate?”, and in that process: “Are we, yet again, erasing the very absence itself?”