I have a habit of regularly flipping through photo albums. In a corner of my home lies an album filled with portraits of myself. Every time I open it, I feel a strange sense of unfamiliarity with the person in the photographs. I can’t recall who took them, what the surroundings were like, or even that I had been to those places or done those things.

What was meant to be a family album documenting an intimate relationship between photographer and subject instead made me question: In what form is existence actually recorded?

At first, I cut out the past versions of myself from the photos and made those old portraits the subject of my new photographs. As the photographer now, I visited the locations in the photos, picked up objects from the past, and tried to revive the memories I had lost.

Only after my grandmother passed away, when I looked at the album again, did I finally see his presence in the photos — a presence I hadn’t noticed before. It was then that I realized: existence is not just recorded in images, but in every fleeting moment of longing and every passing glance in our everyday lives.