A handwritten poem Jinhee Kim discovered on one of the many old postcards she had collected from flea markets was the inspiration behind her hand-embroidered Labor of Love diptych. Her painstaking creative process involved photographing 40 postcards, depicting such ordinary scenes as mountains, lakes and buildings, and digitally assembling them into two grids of 20 postcards each, which she then printed as two separate photographs. Using pale coloured threads, Kim embroidered by hand the found poem – O weep O curse for love tho’ sometimes it be good / take all the stars from up above and throw them out to sea / O sing O dance for love tho’ it may sometimes end / fetch all of the stars from out of the sea and give them to a friend – over the postcard images. In photographing the postcards, the artist flattens them into one plane, which in turn heightens the three-dimensionality of the embroidery. For Kim, the use of the hand in embroidering the photographs ‘connotes personal memories and is also a non-linguistic way of communicating.’ Seoul-based Kim has won several awards, including the 2011 Sajin Bipyong Award, and has been selected for a number of photo festivals, including the 2015 Seoul New York Photo Festival. Her work is held in the collection of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan.