ARTIST STATEMENT
What I work with is, finally, less a set of materials than a set of passages: the way things pass by and seep in, come apart and are drawn together again, thin toward disappearing and gather back into form. Straw, gauze, torn and dyed fabric, worn clothing, dandelion seed, cast bronze are the carriers through which such passage becomes visible — not the subject of the work but its occasion. Some have already moved through a body’s time; others I draw into it. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point — not to arrest that passage, but to let it be attended to before it settles either way. My work does not explain loss; it keeps company with things in transition, and asks what can be built on the far side of them. What I make is not a monument to absence but a ground to stand on again.
The origin of this work is not a place but a loss of my own. Before I understood mourning as anything shared, I carried a private grief — and I learned that grief, kept only to itself, hardens into something airless. At some point my gaze moved outward: from what I had lost toward a wider, common ground, and toward people whose losses I had not suffered. That movement, more than any single image, is the real subject of my work — and it leaves me with a question I cannot put down: what does a private grief owe to the losses it did not undergo? My answer, for now, is that to keep such attention to oneself is its own kind of complicity; the work of turning outward is to do so without taking what is not mine to take.
This thinking first came to me in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. But Pyeongtaek is not the subject of my work, only the place where the question was found. When development once broke open the ground, remains without kin came to light, and they were closed not by mourning but by paperwork — a death without name or next of kin, handled within the procedures of city planning as a purely administrative matter. It was that scene that stopped me: how does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? Since then a certain weight and air of that territory has soaked into my work. I do not reconstruct the place like a stage, nor render it explicitly; but when the ground beneath one shifts — when a home is turned into a site — what happens to a community’s posture and bonds seeps into the weight and thinness of the material. At the edge of the city lay Daechuri and Doduri — farmland reclaimed by hand from tidal flats until the farmers’ backs curved like turtle shells, a community born in the long resistance to its erasure and scattered when the land was cleared. They too give this question a body. My work does not record that loss; it asks what it would mean to gather again what was closed without name or kin, and to build the ground anew.
I have long been drawn to substances in transition: things transparent yet elastic, things that stretch until they tear and reveal the threads within, things loosened, punctured, seeping — but also things that gather, take on weight, and begin to hold. Faded cloths once used for wiping bodies, sleeves stretched from long wear, a garment that still keeps the light friction of bodies once close to one another. I choose them less for what they are than for how they behave in time. What a body has touched or worn does not simply record use; for a while it still holds the afterglow of that touch — a trace not yet gone from the fibre, already beginning to leave it. The dandelion seed lets itself be carried and disperses; worn cloth surrenders its threads one by one; bronze draws organic time into a slower, sturdier form. Some of these movements are a letting-go and some a taking-on — and it is the passage itself that holds me, the point where a thing could still go either way.
Lately I have let these carriers take hold of one another. A single thread is drawn through an older surface; a button slides down its length and hangs; a worn sleeve is caught on the button and kept — not fixed, only kept — at the point just before it would fall. What holds me is not the picture of holding on but its mechanics: a line almost too thin to be seen, asked to carry a real and stubborn weight. The thread does not resolve the tension between them; it sustains it. Holding on, here, is less a sentiment than a tending — the slow, precarious work of keeping something at the threshold between falling and being caught, where the letting-go and the taking-on are one motion, made at once.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body’s time, are not merely the record of past use. I think Kafka’s Metamorphosis in reverse: it is not that a person turns into a creature, but that what remains is the empty husk of something reduced to a single function and finally used up. That husk does not point to one person’s death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time — measured by its usefulness, spent, and discarded — the body consumed under the same logic as the death that was closed by paperwork when development broke open the ground. I do not breathe feeling into this husk. I only look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
The eye with which I recognize this absence does not come from one place. Born in Korea, living and working in Germany, I hold a double position that is not incidental to the work but its structural condition. Living between the two, I have come to hear something I did not expect: that the language with which a society gathers its dead resembles itself across borders — a death without kin is closed, here as there, by the fewest hands. East Asian restraint and Western materiality do not become the alibi of one another. The crossing itself is where my work stands — a third position that has no name yet, only material — and it shapes how I treat the interval between holding and releasing: neither as a Western drama of confrontation, nor as an Eastern formula of acceptance.
What I attend to is not loss in general but a particular thing that loss leaves behind. In the culture I come from, love rarely stands quietly between two people, recognized without being spoken; it hurries into proof, into the act of giving. We mend before we say, and give before we name. So when someone is gone, what remains is seldom settled — it is the unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over, the sentence that had no time to arrive. So the question that returns through my work is not what love is, but this: what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I return that question. Worn cloth, straw, bronze — each becomes a place where an unfinished sentence keeps waiting to be said. At times the body itself splits into something like script — a fracture, a scattered fragment that begins to read as a letter. It is writing under erasure: it carries the pressure of a meaning that never resolves into legibility, because what it would say could never be wholly said.
I also distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers — they did not wilt, did not change, were eternal — and yet people replaced them constantly, because the ones that had endured looked insufficient while the new ones felt more like sincerity. The discarded flowers become industrial waste. We do not simply feel grief; we consume and summon it at once, and pain, once industrially eternalized, is never resolved but only renewed. A general poetry of transience works the same way: it is easy to make, easy to look past, and it asks nothing of us.
What my work asks instead is time, and a direction. I do not measure it by whether a viewer is moved, but by whether it keeps faith with the people and the ground it draws from — whether it returns something to them rather than putting their loss on display. Between weight and lift — the farmer’s back bent under carried earth, and the kite raised on thin bamboo into the same sky the fighter jets crossed — a posture is at stake: faced with what is leaving, do we turn toward it or fold away from it? The vulnerable do not fail to reach out because help is beyond their reach; they are fighting the fear of reaching out at all. So the work is answerable first to them. It does not exhibit their grief; it tries to hold a place open — a place made with them in mind, where what was scattered might, for a moment, be stood on again.
The Critical Point is not a state but a sensation: the floating precariousness that appears as severance, dissolution, breaking, and — on its other side — the moment when something held tightly learns, without ceasing to be, how to become lighter. I think it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but on closer look are sharp, look light but cannot be lifted. I do not claim a final definition of this threshold; each work returns me to the same sensation, only to find it has shifted. The naming is provisional; the attending is what lasts. But the Critical Point, for me, is no longer only a condition of objects. It is the condition of a ground, and of the people who once stood on it — and what I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a quiet sign that the ground is still there to be stood on.
In the gallery my works lean, settle, and gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed, carrying in their weight or their thinness the displacement that produced them. I do not seek a finalized shape. I take the very threshold — where a form is decided, whether it will hold or come apart — as the condition of my work, because this labor — dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw — is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding; and beyond it lies the quieter task I now set myself — to make, out of what has come apart, a place where we might stand together again.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What I work with is, finally, less a set of materials than a set of passages: the way things pass by and seep in, come apart and are drawn together again, thin toward disappearing and gather back into form. Straw, gauze, torn and dyed fabric, worn clothing, dandelion seed, cast bronze are the carriers through which such passage becomes visible — not the subject of the work but its occasion. Some have already moved through a body’s time; others I draw into it. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point — not to arrest that passage, but to let it be attended to before it settles either way. My work does not explain loss; it keeps company with things in transition, and asks what can be built on the far side of them. What I make is not a monument to absence but a ground to stand on again.
The origin of this work is not a place but a loss of my own. Before I understood mourning as anything shared, I carried a private grief — and I learned that grief, kept only to itself, hardens into something airless. At some point my gaze moved outward: from what I had lost toward a wider, common ground, and toward people whose losses I had not suffered. That movement, more than any single image, is the real subject of my work — and it leaves me with a question I cannot put down: what does a private grief owe to the losses it did not undergo? My answer, for now, is that to keep such attention to oneself is its own kind of complicity; the work of turning outward is to do so without taking what is not mine to take.
This thinking first came to me in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. But Pyeongtaek is not the subject of my work, only the place where the question was found. When development once broke open the ground, remains without kin came to light, and they were closed not by mourning but by paperwork — a death without name or next of kin, handled within the procedures of city planning as a purely administrative matter. It was that scene that stopped me: how does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? Since then a certain weight and air of that territory has soaked into my work. I do not reconstruct the place like a stage, nor render it explicitly; but when the ground beneath one shifts — when a home is turned into a site — what happens to a community’s posture and bonds seeps into the weight and thinness of the material. At the edge of the city lay Daechuri and Doduri — farmland reclaimed by hand from tidal flats until the farmers’ backs curved like turtle shells, a community born in the long resistance to its erasure and scattered when the land was cleared. They too give this question a body. My work does not record that loss; it asks what it would mean to gather again what was closed without name or kin, and to build the ground anew.
I have long been drawn to substances in transition: things transparent yet elastic, things that stretch until they tear and reveal the threads within, things loosened, punctured, seeping — but also things that gather, take on weight, and begin to hold. Faded cloths once used for wiping bodies, sleeves stretched from long wear, a garment that still keeps the light friction of bodies once close to one another. I choose them less for what they are than for how they behave in time. What a body has touched or worn does not simply record use; for a while it still holds the afterglow of that touch — a trace not yet gone from the fibre, already beginning to leave it. The dandelion seed lets itself be carried and disperses; worn cloth surrenders its threads one by one; bronze draws organic time into a slower, sturdier form. Some of these movements are a letting-go and some a taking-on — and it is the passage itself that holds me, the point where a thing could still go either way.
Lately I have let these carriers take hold of one another. A single thread is drawn through an older surface; a button slides down its length and hangs; a worn sleeve is caught on the button and kept — not fixed, only kept — at the point just before it would fall. What holds me is not the picture of holding on but its mechanics: a line almost too thin to be seen, asked to carry a real and stubborn weight. The thread does not resolve the tension between them; it sustains it. Holding on, here, is less a sentiment than a tending — the slow, precarious work of keeping something at the threshold between falling and being caught, where the letting-go and the taking-on are one motion, made at once.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body’s time, are not merely the record of past use. I think Kafka’s Metamorphosis in reverse: it is not that a person turns into a creature, but that what remains is the empty husk of something reduced to a single function and finally used up. That husk does not point to one person’s death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time — measured by its usefulness, spent, and discarded — the body consumed under the same logic as the death that was closed by paperwork when development broke open the ground. I do not breathe feeling into this husk. I only look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
The eye with which I recognize this absence does not come from one place. Born in Korea, living and working in Germany, I hold a double position that is not incidental to the work but its structural condition. Living between the two, I have come to hear something I did not expect: that the language with which a society gathers its dead resembles itself across borders — a death without kin is closed, here as there, by the fewest hands. East Asian restraint and Western materiality do not become the alibi of one another. The crossing itself is where my work stands — a third position that has no name yet, only material — and it shapes how I treat the interval between holding and releasing: neither as a Western drama of confrontation, nor as an Eastern formula of acceptance.
What I attend to is not loss in general but a particular thing that loss leaves behind. In the culture I come from, love rarely stands quietly between two people, recognized without being spoken; it hurries into proof, into the act of giving. We mend before we say, and give before we name. So when someone is gone, what remains is seldom settled — it is the unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over, the sentence that had no time to arrive. So the question that returns through my work is not what love is, but this: what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I return that question. Worn cloth, straw, bronze — each becomes a place where an unfinished sentence keeps waiting to be said. At times the body itself splits into something like script — a fracture, a scattered fragment that begins to read as a letter. It is writing under erasure: it carries the pressure of a meaning that never resolves into legibility, because what it would say could never be wholly said.
I also distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers — they did not wilt, did not change, were eternal — and yet people replaced them constantly, because the ones that had endured looked insufficient while the new ones felt more like sincerity. The discarded flowers become industrial waste. We do not simply feel grief; we consume and summon it at once, and pain, once industrially eternalized, is never resolved but only renewed. A general poetry of transience works the same way: it is easy to make, easy to look past, and it asks nothing of us.
What my work asks instead is time, and a direction. I do not measure it by whether a viewer is moved, but by whether it keeps faith with the people and the ground it draws from — whether it returns something to them rather than putting their loss on display. Between weight and lift — the farmer’s back bent under carried earth, and the kite raised on thin bamboo into the same sky the fighter jets crossed — a posture is at stake: faced with what is leaving, do we turn toward it or fold away from it? The vulnerable do not fail to reach out because help is beyond their reach; they are fighting the fear of reaching out at all. So the work is answerable first to them. It does not exhibit their grief; it tries to hold a place open — a place made with them in mind, where what was scattered might, for a moment, be stood on again.
The Critical Point is not a state but a sensation: the floating precariousness that appears as severance, dissolution, breaking, and — on its other side — the moment when something held tightly learns, without ceasing to be, how to become lighter. I think it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but on closer look are sharp, look light but cannot be lifted. I do not claim a final definition of this threshold; each work returns me to the same sensation, only to find it has shifted. The naming is provisional; the attending is what lasts. But the Critical Point, for me, is no longer only a condition of objects. It is the condition of a ground, and of the people who once stood on it — and what I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a quiet sign that the ground is still there to be stood on.
In the gallery my works lean, settle, and gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed, carrying in their weight or their thinness the displacement that produced them. I do not seek a finalized shape. I take the very threshold — where a form is decided, whether it will hold or come apart — as the condition of my work, because this labor — dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw — is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding; and beyond it lies the quieter task I now set myself — to make, out of what has come apart, a place where we might stand together again.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What I work with is, finally, less a set of materials than a set of passages: the way things pass by and seep in, come apart and are drawn together again, thin toward disappearing and gather back into form. Straw, gauze, torn and dyed fabric, worn clothing, dandelion seed, cast bronze are the carriers through which such passage becomes visible — not the subject of the work but its occasion. Some have already moved through a body’s time; others I draw into it. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point — not to arrest that passage, but to let it be attended to before it settles either way. My work does not explain loss; it keeps company with things in transition, and asks what can be built on the far side of them. What I make is not a monument to absence but a ground to stand on again.
The origin of this work is not a place but a loss of my own. Before I understood mourning as anything shared, I carried a private grief — and I learned that grief, kept only to itself, hardens into something airless. At some point my gaze moved outward: from what I had lost toward a wider, common ground, and toward people whose losses I had not suffered. That movement, more than any single image, is the real subject of my work — and it leaves me with a question I cannot put down: what does a private grief owe to the losses it did not undergo? My answer, for now, is that to keep such attention to oneself is its own kind of complicity; the work of turning outward is to do so without taking what is not mine to take.
This thinking first came to me in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. But Pyeongtaek is not the subject of my work, only the place where the question was found. When development once broke open the ground, remains without kin came to light, and they were closed not by mourning but by paperwork — a death without name or next of kin, handled within the procedures of city planning as a purely administrative matter. It was that scene that stopped me: how does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? Since then a certain weight and air of that territory has soaked into my work. I do not reconstruct the place like a stage, nor render it explicitly; but when the ground beneath one shifts — when a home is turned into a site — what happens to a community’s posture and bonds seeps into the weight and thinness of the material. At the edge of the city lay Daechuri and Doduri — farmland reclaimed by hand from tidal flats until the farmers’ backs curved like turtle shells, a community born in the long resistance to its erasure and scattered when the land was cleared. They too give this question a body. My work does not record that loss; it asks what it would mean to gather again what was closed without name or kin, and to build the ground anew.
I have long been drawn to substances in transition: things transparent yet elastic, things that stretch until they tear and reveal the threads within, things loosened, punctured, seeping — but also things that gather, take on weight, and begin to hold. Faded cloths once used for wiping bodies, sleeves stretched from long wear, a garment that still keeps the light friction of bodies once close to one another. I choose them less for what they are than for how they behave in time. What a body has touched or worn does not simply record use; for a while it still holds the afterglow of that touch — a trace not yet gone from the fibre, already beginning to leave it. The dandelion seed lets itself be carried and disperses; worn cloth surrenders its threads one by one; bronze draws organic time into a slower, sturdier form. Some of these movements are a letting-go and some a taking-on — and it is the passage itself that holds me, the point where a thing could still go either way.
Lately I have let these carriers take hold of one another. A single thread is drawn through an older surface; a button slides down its length and hangs; a worn sleeve is caught on the button and kept — not fixed, only kept — at the point just before it would fall. What holds me is not the picture of holding on but its mechanics: a line almost too thin to be seen, asked to carry a real and stubborn weight. The thread does not resolve the tension between them; it sustains it. Holding on, here, is less a sentiment than a tending — the slow, precarious work of keeping something at the threshold between falling and being caught, where the letting-go and the taking-on are one motion, made at once.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body’s time, are not merely the record of past use. I think Kafka’s Metamorphosis in reverse: it is not that a person turns into a creature, but that what remains is the empty husk of something reduced to a single function and finally used up. That husk does not point to one person’s death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time — measured by its usefulness, spent, and discarded — the body consumed under the same logic as the death that was closed by paperwork when development broke open the ground. I do not breathe feeling into this husk. I only look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
The eye with which I recognize this absence does not come from one place. Born in Korea, living and working in Germany, I hold a double position that is not incidental to the work but its structural condition. Living between the two, I have come to hear something I did not expect: that the language with which a society gathers its dead resembles itself across borders — a death without kin is closed, here as there, by the fewest hands. East Asian restraint and Western materiality do not become the alibi of one another. The crossing itself is where my work stands — a third position that has no name yet, only material — and it shapes how I treat the interval between holding and releasing: neither as a Western drama of confrontation, nor as an Eastern formula of acceptance.
What I attend to is not loss in general but a particular thing that loss leaves behind. In the culture I come from, love rarely stands quietly between two people, recognized without being spoken; it hurries into proof, into the act of giving. We mend before we say, and give before we name. So when someone is gone, what remains is seldom settled — it is the unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over, the sentence that had no time to arrive. So the question that returns through my work is not what love is, but this: what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I return that question. Worn cloth, straw, bronze — each becomes a place where an unfinished sentence keeps waiting to be said. At times the body itself splits into something like script — a fracture, a scattered fragment that begins to read as a letter. It is writing under erasure: it carries the pressure of a meaning that never resolves into legibility, because what it would say could never be wholly said.
I also distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers — they did not wilt, did not change, were eternal — and yet people replaced them constantly, because the ones that had endured looked insufficient while the new ones felt more like sincerity. The discarded flowers become industrial waste. We do not simply feel grief; we consume and summon it at once, and pain, once industrially eternalized, is never resolved but only renewed. A general poetry of transience works the same way: it is easy to make, easy to look past, and it asks nothing of us.
What my work asks instead is time, and a direction. I do not measure it by whether a viewer is moved, but by whether it keeps faith with the people and the ground it draws from — whether it returns something to them rather than putting their loss on display. Between weight and lift — the farmer’s back bent under carried earth, and the kite raised on thin bamboo into the same sky the fighter jets crossed — a posture is at stake: faced with what is leaving, do we turn toward it or fold away from it? The vulnerable do not fail to reach out because help is beyond their reach; they are fighting the fear of reaching out at all. So the work is answerable first to them. It does not exhibit their grief; it tries to hold a place open — a place made with them in mind, where what was scattered might, for a moment, be stood on again.
The Critical Point is not a state but a sensation: the floating precariousness that appears as severance, dissolution, breaking, and — on its other side — the moment when something held tightly learns, without ceasing to be, how to become lighter. I think it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but on closer look are sharp, look light but cannot be lifted. I do not claim a final definition of this threshold; each work returns me to the same sensation, only to find it has shifted. The naming is provisional; the attending is what lasts. But the Critical Point, for me, is no longer only a condition of objects. It is the condition of a ground, and of the people who once stood on it — and what I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a quiet sign that the ground is still there to be stood on.
In the gallery my works lean, settle, and gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed, carrying in their weight or their thinness the displacement that produced them. I do not seek a finalized shape. I take the very threshold — where a form is decided, whether it will hold or come apart — as the condition of my work, because this labor — dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw — is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding; and beyond it lies the quieter task I now set myself — to make, out of what has come apart, a place where we might stand together again.