ARTIST STATEMENT
Whenever I go back to Pyeongtaek, my hometown, I find myself pausing for a moment between the place I remember and the one in front of me. Familiar shops have closed, trade has drifted elsewhere, and the people who once worked there have left. I wanted to say that my hometown stirs in me the same feeling as missing my father, or longing for family far away. And yet, for a place I had missed for so long, I knew very little about it. I remembered whom I had walked with, but not what kind of road it was.
My parents' hometowns, and the places where my grandparents lived, have always stayed dear to me in memory. I kept putting off going back to ask, as if there would always be time, and some of those places vanished before I ever found out about them. What I wanted to hold on to were the traces of time spent together; as the years passed, I also came to need a sense of where I come from. I think that is why I find myself drawn now to maps and photographs of Pyeongtaek, and to the stories of the people who have lived there. What lives were there, beyond my own memory? How do others remember the places I have always called by familiar names?
In my studio I have handled organic materials left over from use – straw and gauze, worn clothes, textiles and wax. Twisting and pressing them with my hands, tearing and joining them, then pulling them apart and weaving them again, I found myself remembering the collages I made as a child. Clothes keep their creases and stretched places long after the body has left them; gauze covers something and still lets what lies beneath show through. The more I touch a material, the more it changes, though it seldom goes the way I intend. Sometimes I need to add more; sometimes I have to take back what I have already done. I am drawn to the moment when something is about to give way and is still holding on, and that is where I tend to stop.
Without my quite noticing, the way I work with my hands carries skills and gestures from the place where I grew up. I remember a school trip, wringing out with my friends the towels that kept falling into the water, twisting them between us like a braid. I think I brought that movement into my work.
Alongside my own practice, I work at an art foundry. There I fill the cracks in cast bronze and finish the seams with hammer, chasing tools and other hand tools. As I sand the cast pieces with ever finer grit, the places I have mended sink into the surface. When a sculpture that has passed through my hands leaves the workshop, the places I touched are not supposed to show. The longer a spot has been worked on, the harder it becomes to tell that anyone worked on it at all. In my own work, which began before I came to the foundry, the traces of where my hands lingered remain. Moving between art and making a living, I keep coming back to the question of what remains in a finished thing, and what becomes invisible along the way.
After my father died, I once looked through the certificates and papers left in my hands. His name and life history were written there, but I could hardly find in them the father I remembered. He had photographed for a military press office and left behind many images, yet there was not a single recording of his voice. Not a conversation, not a phone call. His voice was the one thing I had wanted to keep, and now I can only trace it back through memory.
Sorting things before a move, I came across a 35 mm film canister I used to see at home as a child. It had once been white, but over the years it had yellowed. I opened it carefully. Inside was my umbilical cord, which my father had sealed in clear plastic and tied tightly. I had nearly thrown the little container away without knowing what it held, yet my father had been keeping my beginning in it. When I think of it, I think of the wish to keep something, and of everything that cannot be known from what is kept.
In the work that grew out of that canister, what matters is a size that fits in the hand and a voice heard close to the ear. I am also interested in placing an object someone has chosen, or a few written lines, in a small container. To hear the voice, you have to lift the container to your ear and stay there a moment. In that brief time, I hope a person's way of speaking can be heard – their breath, the pauses between words.
Something has stayed with me for a long time from watching artists who, out of histories different from mine, have worked for their own communities: the way they seek out the history of the people they are bound to, gather scattered records, and make places where people can meet again. What I have lived through is different from their history, yet watching them, I found a question turning back on me. What can I leave behind for the place I love?
I could never preserve my hometown exactly as it lives in my memory, but I wanted to leave at least something of the lives that were lived there. That does not mean I want to keep only the version I miss. For someone else, the same place may live on as an entirely different memory. Since my own thinking enters into choosing and cutting the recordings, I keep asking myself whether I am only hearing what I want to hear. Where my own memory cannot reach, I want to leave room for other people's words.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Whenever I go back to Pyeongtaek, my hometown, I find myself pausing for a moment between the place I remember and the one in front of me. Familiar shops have closed, trade has drifted elsewhere, and the people who once worked there have left. I wanted to say that my hometown stirs in me the same feeling as missing my father, or longing for family far away. And yet, for a place I had missed for so long, I knew very little about it. I remembered whom I had walked with, but not what kind of road it was.
My parents' hometowns, and the places where my grandparents lived, have always stayed dear to me in memory. I kept putting off going back to ask, as if there would always be time, and some of those places vanished before I ever found out about them. What I wanted to hold on to were the traces of time spent together; as the years passed, I also came to need a sense of where I come from. I think that is why I find myself drawn now to maps and photographs of Pyeongtaek, and to the stories of the people who have lived there. What lives were there, beyond my own memory? How do others remember the places I have always called by familiar names?
In my studio I have handled organic materials left over from use – straw and gauze, worn clothes, textiles and wax. Twisting and pressing them with my hands, tearing and joining them, then pulling them apart and weaving them again, I found myself remembering the collages I made as a child. Clothes keep their creases and stretched places long after the body has left them; gauze covers something and still lets what lies beneath show through. The more I touch a material, the more it changes, though it seldom goes the way I intend. Sometimes I need to add more; sometimes I have to take back what I have already done. I am drawn to the moment when something is about to give way and is still holding on, and that is where I tend to stop.
Without my quite noticing, the way I work with my hands carries skills and gestures from the place where I grew up. I remember a school trip, wringing out with my friends the towels that kept falling into the water, twisting them between us like a braid. I think I brought that movement into my work.
Alongside my own practice, I work at an art foundry. There I fill the cracks in cast bronze and finish the seams with hammer, chasing tools and other hand tools. As I sand the cast pieces with ever finer grit, the places I have mended sink into the surface. When a sculpture that has passed through my hands leaves the workshop, the places I touched are not supposed to show. The longer a spot has been worked on, the harder it becomes to tell that anyone worked on it at all. In my own work, which began before I came to the foundry, the traces of where my hands lingered remain. Moving between art and making a living, I keep coming back to the question of what remains in a finished thing, and what becomes invisible along the way.
After my father died, I once looked through the certificates and papers left in my hands. His name and life history were written there, but I could hardly find in them the father I remembered. He had photographed for a military press office and left behind many images, yet there was not a single recording of his voice. Not a conversation, not a phone call. His voice was the one thing I had wanted to keep, and now I can only trace it back through memory.
Sorting things before a move, I came across a 35 mm film canister I used to see at home as a child. It had once been white, but over the years it had yellowed. I opened it carefully. Inside was my umbilical cord, which my father had sealed in clear plastic and tied tightly. I had nearly thrown the little container away without knowing what it held, yet my father had been keeping my beginning in it. When I think of it, I think of the wish to keep something, and of everything that cannot be known from what is kept.
In the work that grew out of that canister, what matters is a size that fits in the hand and a voice heard close to the ear. I am also interested in placing an object someone has chosen, or a few written lines, in a small container. To hear the voice, you have to lift the container to your ear and stay there a moment. In that brief time, I hope a person's way of speaking can be heard – their breath, the pauses between words.
Something has stayed with me for a long time from watching artists who, out of histories different from mine, have worked for their own communities: the way they seek out the history of the people they are bound to, gather scattered records, and make places where people can meet again. What I have lived through is different from their history, yet watching them, I found a question turning back on me. What can I leave behind for the place I love?
I could never preserve my hometown exactly as it lives in my memory, but I wanted to leave at least something of the lives that were lived there. That does not mean I want to keep only the version I miss. For someone else, the same place may live on as an entirely different memory. Since my own thinking enters into choosing and cutting the recordings, I keep asking myself whether I am only hearing what I want to hear. Where my own memory cannot reach, I want to leave room for other people's words.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Whenever I go back to Pyeongtaek, my hometown, I find myself pausing for a moment between the place I remember and the one in front of me. Familiar shops have closed, trade has drifted elsewhere, and the people who once worked there have left. I wanted to say that my hometown stirs in me the same feeling as missing my father, or longing for family far away. And yet, for a place I had missed for so long, I knew very little about it. I remembered whom I had walked with, but not what kind of road it was.
My parents' hometowns, and the places where my grandparents lived, have always stayed dear to me in memory. I kept putting off going back to ask, as if there would always be time, and some of those places vanished before I ever found out about them. What I wanted to hold on to were the traces of time spent together; as the years passed, I also came to need a sense of where I come from. I think that is why I find myself drawn now to maps and photographs of Pyeongtaek, and to the stories of the people who have lived there. What lives were there, beyond my own memory? How do others remember the places I have always called by familiar names?
In my studio I have handled organic materials left over from use – straw and gauze, worn clothes, textiles and wax. Twisting and pressing them with my hands, tearing and joining them, then pulling them apart and weaving them again, I found myself remembering the collages I made as a child. Clothes keep their creases and stretched places long after the body has left them; gauze covers something and still lets what lies beneath show through. The more I touch a material, the more it changes, though it seldom goes the way I intend. Sometimes I need to add more; sometimes I have to take back what I have already done. I am drawn to the moment when something is about to give way and is still holding on, and that is where I tend to stop.
Without my quite noticing, the way I work with my hands carries skills and gestures from the place where I grew up. I remember a school trip, wringing out with my friends the towels that kept falling into the water, twisting them between us like a braid. I think I brought that movement into my work.
Alongside my own practice, I work at an art foundry. There I fill the cracks in cast bronze and finish the seams with hammer, chasing tools and other hand tools. As I sand the cast pieces with ever finer grit, the places I have mended sink into the surface. When a sculpture that has passed through my hands leaves the workshop, the places I touched are not supposed to show. The longer a spot has been worked on, the harder it becomes to tell that anyone worked on it at all. In my own work, which began before I came to the foundry, the traces of where my hands lingered remain. Moving between art and making a living, I keep coming back to the question of what remains in a finished thing, and what becomes invisible along the way.
After my father died, I once looked through the certificates and papers left in my hands. His name and life history were written there, but I could hardly find in them the father I remembered. He had photographed for a military press office and left behind many images, yet there was not a single recording of his voice. Not a conversation, not a phone call. His voice was the one thing I had wanted to keep, and now I can only trace it back through memory.
Sorting things before a move, I came across a 35 mm film canister I used to see at home as a child. It had once been white, but over the years it had yellowed. I opened it carefully. Inside was my umbilical cord, which my father had sealed in clear plastic and tied tightly. I had nearly thrown the little container away without knowing what it held, yet my father had been keeping my beginning in it. When I think of it, I think of the wish to keep something, and of everything that cannot be known from what is kept.
In the work that grew out of that canister, what matters is a size that fits in the hand and a voice heard close to the ear. I am also interested in placing an object someone has chosen, or a few written lines, in a small container. To hear the voice, you have to lift the container to your ear and stay there a moment. In that brief time, I hope a person's way of speaking can be heard – their breath, the pauses between words.
Something has stayed with me for a long time from watching artists who, out of histories different from mine, have worked for their own communities: the way they seek out the history of the people they are bound to, gather scattered records, and make places where people can meet again. What I have lived through is different from their history, yet watching them, I found a question turning back on me. What can I leave behind for the place I love?
I could never preserve my hometown exactly as it lives in my memory, but I wanted to leave at least something of the lives that were lived there. That does not mean I want to keep only the version I miss. For someone else, the same place may live on as an entirely different memory. Since my own thinking enters into choosing and cutting the recordings, I keep asking myself whether I am only hearing what I want to hear. Where my own memory cannot reach, I want to leave room for other people's words.