ARTIST STATEMENT
What worries me becomes what I attend to. For a long time it has been people whose bodies are in pain, and people carrying a loss they cannot set down. I could not stop seeing them. I want to care for them, and to be of some strength to them — not to hand them something, but so that they might stand again. Art made for oneself matters. I want mine to reach past me. So the question I work from is plain: what can I do about what this society has left unattended?
I do not yet know what the answer looks like in material. But I know where to stand while I find out: at the point where nothing has been decided yet — where a form is still choosing between collapse and persistence, and a loss has not yet been closed. A society closes what it cannot finish. A death handled by paperwork rather than mourning. A home turned into a site before anyone could return to it. I want to know what can be built there.
I did not arrive at this from the outside. In the culture I come from, love rarely rests 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 an unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over. The question that returns in my work is this — what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I go to ask it.
What I work with is a set of passages more than a set of materials: things 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 this passage becomes visible. They are not the subject of the work but its occasion. I choose them for how they behave in time. 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. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point. I am not trying to arrest the passage. I want it attended to before it settles. I think about it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but are sharp up close, look light but cannot be lifted.
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 the mechanics of it: 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 is work, not feeling.
The question widened in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. When development broke open the ground there, remains without kin came to light. 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. That scene is what stopped me. How does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? 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. One of them spoke of the land as a child he had raised his whole life, given up not because it was no longer needed but because force required it.
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. Living between Korea and Germany has made that plain to me, and it has changed what I understand the work to be about. It is not a condition of one country.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body's time, do more than record past use. I read Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. 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. The cloths I gather were used for wiping bodies. The sleeves were stretched by the same motion repeated for years. That husk does not point to one person's death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time, measured by its usefulness and then discarded. I do not breathe feeling into the husk. I look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
I distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change — they 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 made eternal by industry, 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 measure it 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. 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.
In the gallery my works lean and settle 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. This labor is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart: dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding. What I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a place where we might stand together again.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What worries me becomes what I attend to. For a long time it has been people whose bodies are in pain, and people carrying a loss they cannot set down. I could not stop seeing them. I want to care for them, and to be of some strength to them — not to hand them something, but so that they might stand again. Art made for oneself matters. I want mine to reach past me. So the question I work from is plain: what can I do about what this society has left unattended?
I do not yet know what the answer looks like in material. But I know where to stand while I find out: at the point where nothing has been decided yet — where a form is still choosing between collapse and persistence, and a loss has not yet been closed. A society closes what it cannot finish. A death handled by paperwork rather than mourning. A home turned into a site before anyone could return to it. I want to know what can be built there.
I did not arrive at this from the outside. In the culture I come from, love rarely rests 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 an unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over. The question that returns in my work is this — what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I go to ask it.
What I work with is a set of passages more than a set of materials: things 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 this passage becomes visible. They are not the subject of the work but its occasion. I choose them for how they behave in time. 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. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point. I am not trying to arrest the passage. I want it attended to before it settles. I think about it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but are sharp up close, look light but cannot be lifted.
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 the mechanics of it: 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 is work, not feeling.
The question widened in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. When development broke open the ground there, remains without kin came to light. 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. That scene is what stopped me. How does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? 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. One of them spoke of the land as a child he had raised his whole life, given up not because it was no longer needed but because force required it.
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. Living between Korea and Germany has made that plain to me, and it has changed what I understand the work to be about. It is not a condition of one country.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body's time, do more than record past use. I read Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. 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. The cloths I gather were used for wiping bodies. The sleeves were stretched by the same motion repeated for years. That husk does not point to one person's death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time, measured by its usefulness and then discarded. I do not breathe feeling into the husk. I look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
I distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change — they 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 made eternal by industry, 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 measure it 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. 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.
In the gallery my works lean and settle 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. This labor is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart: dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding. What I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a place where we might stand together again.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What worries me becomes what I attend to. For a long time it has been people whose bodies are in pain, and people carrying a loss they cannot set down. I could not stop seeing them. I want to care for them, and to be of some strength to them — not to hand them something, but so that they might stand again. Art made for oneself matters. I want mine to reach past me. So the question I work from is plain: what can I do about what this society has left unattended?
I do not yet know what the answer looks like in material. But I know where to stand while I find out: at the point where nothing has been decided yet — where a form is still choosing between collapse and persistence, and a loss has not yet been closed. A society closes what it cannot finish. A death handled by paperwork rather than mourning. A home turned into a site before anyone could return to it. I want to know what can be built there.
I did not arrive at this from the outside. In the culture I come from, love rarely rests 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 an unfinished tenderness: the words still owed, the gesture never handed over. The question that returns in my work is this — what does love leave behind when it has had no time to arrive? Matter is where I go to ask it.
What I work with is a set of passages more than a set of materials: things 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 this passage becomes visible. They are not the subject of the work but its occasion. I choose them for how they behave in time. 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. I hold each at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist — the point I call the Critical Point. I am not trying to arrest the passage. I want it attended to before it settles. I think about it through thinly trembling grasses that look fragile but are sharp up close, look light but cannot be lifted.
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 the mechanics of it: 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 is work, not feeling.
The question widened in Pyeongtaek, the South Korean city where I grew up. When development broke open the ground there, remains without kin came to light. 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. That scene is what stopped me. How does a society gather the dead it has failed to answer for, or close them without gathering them at all? 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. One of them spoke of the land as a child he had raised his whole life, given up not because it was no longer needed but because force required it.
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. Living between Korea and Germany has made that plain to me, and it has changed what I understand the work to be about. It is not a condition of one country.
These worn garments, these empty husks that have passed through a body's time, do more than record past use. I read Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. 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. The cloths I gather were used for wiping bodies. The sleeves were stretched by the same motion repeated for years. That husk does not point to one person's death alone. It points to the laboring body of our time, measured by its usefulness and then discarded. I do not breathe feeling into the husk. I look at what it was reduced to, and at what still remains in it, waiting to be attended to.
I distrust mourning that has been made easy. At a gravesite I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change — they 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 made eternal by industry, 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 measure it 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. 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.
In the gallery my works lean and settle 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. This labor is no different from raising oneself back up, one layer at a time, out of what has come apart: dyeing the wet cloth, catching a loosened thread between my fingers to join it again, filling a torn place with straw. Loss, in the end, is a movement that contains both severance and yielding. What I want the work to leave behind is not a headstone for those who have gone, but a place where we might stand together again.