For "Three Generations of Time" (2004), Oh used a thermal transfer process to print a procession of self-portraits onto a long scroll of sambe, the hemp cloth traditionally used to dress and honor the dead at Korean funerals. The photographs were taken at the same time as Oh’s work, "Three Generations" (2004), with the artist pictured wearing her grandmother’s, mother’s, and her own chima chogori into the tropical landscape of Jeju Island—her family’s ancestral home in South Korea. The sambe cloth is the remaining swath of the original cloth that Oh’s grandmother had prepared for use at her own funeral, imbuing the piece with her memories and life. By imaging her own figure on the meaningful cloth, Oh actively takes part in reconstructing memory, a salient part of familial mourning processes.

In each frame, Oh’s clothing alternates between the three chima chogori, allowing a simple yet cryptic narrative to emerge. The artist cycles between her own (pink), her mother’s (red), and her grandmother’s (white) dresses, producing a colorful stripe of images flowing horizontally for the length of the scroll. Although the saturated, tropical landscape of Jeju seems to seamlessly blend into an endless panoramic image behind her, Oh’s body is contained in a loop—a recurring dream sequence with no clear beginning or end. She walks towards the viewer, surveys her surroundings, then turns to walk down a path to almost disappear into the landscape before returning again to the foreground. The “coming and going” rhetoric established by the narrative sequence evokes the precarity of geographical migration as well as the variability of memory over time. The small size of the photographic transfer allows Oh’s face to remain anonymous, while drawing viewers in to look closely, creating an intimate space between the viewer’s body and the ceremonial cloth.