In the first chapter of Crying in H Mart, we find Michelle Zauner mourning her mother, Chongmi, amid the aisles of H Mart brimming with banchan and rice cakes. Her grief is both summoned and solaced by the aromatics of Korean cuisine that emanate from either side- on one hand, soothed by the familiar pungency of fermented black beans, and on the other, inflamed upon remembering there’s no one left to consult on “which brand of seaweed we used to buy”. Among humdrum shoppers, we witness a poignant moment that cuts deep into the diaspora, capturing the predicament of accessing one’s estranged cultural roots when the only lifeline has been severed.

An immigrant’s heart is a battlefront. Torn between past and present, the home that once was and the home that is now, we are above all most homesick for a place we have never known: a place of stability. It’s the hunger that beckons the uprooting of the Yis, the Korean-American family at the forefront of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. With the hazy focus of a memory, the film traces the travails and resilience of immigrants in the lure of America’s ill-defined promises. Indeed, the Korean herb from which the film takes its name is capable of flourishing on the most unforgiving of terrains, its verdant sprouts brimming with hope- the question is whether the same will prove true for the Yis.

While brick-and-mortar spaces dwindle in numbers, there is certainly no shortage of frenzied action being taken by the art world to bring culture straight to the doorsteps, contact-free. The appetite for the arts is now being satiated digitally as cultural institutions go virtual, but with such unprecedented uncertainty and diminishing attention spans- the coronavirus pandemic coupled with the revolutionary fervor re-incited by George Floyd’s murder- shows of solidarity through art take precedence over mind-numbing satiation.

Rarely do we see the turbulent forces of nature as sympathetic to mankind’s endeavors. Tempest-tossed and drenched, the subject at mercy of nature always occupies an adversarial position. Yet, when Swiss-born artist Vivian Suter’s lakeside studio in Guatemala was flooded, the foe that is the vicissitudes of weather would come to be a friend.