ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with materials in a state of passage — straw, gauze, torn and dyed fabric, worn clothing, paper, cast bronze. Some have already moved through a body's time; others I draw into that time. They come to me neither finished nor fully gone. Scraping, twisting, and reweaving them, I work at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist. I call this the Critical Point. My work does not explain loss; it carries it — until what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself.
I have long been drawn to certain substances: things transparent yet elastic; things that stretch until they tear, revealing the threads within; things loosened, punctured, but never thrown away. 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 each other — the faint sound of souls that once recognized one another in the brush of nylon. Pieces that try to shine wherever a thin light still falls. In them I recognized something I had no name for: no anger left to chew, no remorse, no blame, no bitterness — only an absence so vast that it kept collapsing and forming again, thick with the ordinary weight of an entire day. When these materials came to me, I recognized something familiar in them — they resembled absence. They were what someone had left behind. I came to think of them as evidence that someone had lived, and as a place where they continued to endure in my memory. Even when the body was gone, the matter still held its time.
The eye with which I recognize this absence does not come from one place. My double position — born in Korea, living and working in Germany — is not incidental to this 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. So my double position is, before it is a question of aesthetics, also the place where I hear that same stillness from both sides at once. Within my practice, East Asian restraint and Western materiality do not become the alibi of one another. The crossing itself is where my work stands; 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, but as a third position that has no name yet, only material. My work does not explain loss; it carries it
I do not approach loss as subject matter; I think it through — not as someone who mourns, but as someone who attends to the sensations that arise when one can no longer remain with what one was bound to. The time after such a severance is the first thing erased — and matter, which keeps its own time, becomes the place where the erased can be carried. The time of bearing is where we touch again what we were before function — beings who tended to one another, who shared warmth. I transform that time, and what cannot be undone in us, into matter.
I wanted to recreate flesh from these fragments — to fill them in, to revive them. My hands moved before my thoughts. What do we do with things that have loosened and worn thin? I pick them up. What I pick up does not need to be held forever — only borne until it can be let go.
Sometimes what bearing means becomes clearest in the presence of an eternity that only imitates it. At a gravesite, I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change, were eternal. And yet people replaced them often, with new ones. The flowers that had endured looked insufficient. The new ones felt more like sincerity. The replaced flowers become industrial waste. But we do not simply consume mourning — we consume and summon it at once. The industrially eternalized form of pain is never resolved, only renewed.
What moves through our mourning moves through our loving as well. What does it mean to mourn in a place where love rarely arrives as something self-evident? In the world I come from, love does not stand quietly between two people, recognized without being spoken. It hurries into proof, into the act of giving. We give before we name. We mend before we say. The relation between the lost one and the one who remains is, in that culture, shaped less by certainty than by what was not yet handed over: the words still owed, the gestures still owed, the unfinished tenderness. The question that returns through this work is not what love is, but what it leaves behind when it has had no time to arrive. My work returns this question to matter — what does the time of bearing hold, when what could not be said in time is what we carry? Cloth, straw, bronze: each is a place where an unfinished sentence still waits.
The grief I attend to in this work is not the grief of a single gesture, but of daily return: that ritual in which love seeks to hold eternity and yet remains too small to dissolve itself. Loss does not happen in a dramatic moment; it happens between the hours, in the expressionless flow of the everyday — among those who remain, in a world that does not know why someone has gone. Mourning is not a task to be completed. It keeps no fixed term and answers to no single cause; it returns alongside life itself. And so I am freed from the possibility of failure. Before things that have loosened and worn thin, I rest in a different question. Where, and how, do we resemble them? When we are given the time of bearing, what sensation do we meet within it? The materials I work with are not answers to this question. They are the place where the question stays.
Matter does not forget. What a body has touched, carried, or worn does not simply record use — it retains sensation. What can bend is never broken. My practice rests on this conviction.
I scrape, press, twist, and reweave. I tear, dye, and rejoin. The labor is durational; each act gives matter to a sensation that, in the time after a severance, moves only within. 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. This process of tearing, filling, and rejoining is no different from the act of reconstituting oneself.
Alongside these materials of endurance, I also work with the lightest of remnants: the dandelion seed, the flower in the act of casting itself away. Where straw and gauze record the time of bearing, the dandelion records the moment when bearing releases itself into air. Both belong to the same threshold. Both are bodies that know how to disappear — the straw through long endurance, the seed through unconditional letting-oneself-be-carried. They are not symbols of loss, but beings that complete a particular form of life. What they offer is not an image of grief, but a form for it.
I also work with bronze. This material entered my practice as a way of carrying the changing time of organic matter into another time — a permanence that is human, an eternity that is ordinary. Not the unchanging promised by industry, but a permanence reached only through bearing. Where straw, gauze, and worn fabric come apart, bronze, emerging through fire and a long process, allows what is fragile to be held in another form. Bronze is one of several ways I ask the same question across materials — how to give weight to fragility itself.
In the gallery, these works occupy space as if they have drifted into it. They lean, settle, gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed. They carry, in their weight or their thinness, the displacement that produced them — bodies, fabrics, and matter that have moved between places, never fully arriving.
The forms maintain a state of tension, as if about to come apart. I think of this as the Critical Point: the threshold neither fully collapsed nor fully sustained. It is the formal condition I seek to capture, and the existential condition of someone who endures while losing themselves.
But the Critical Point is not a state — it is a sensation. It is the floating quality of loss that arises when one can no longer remain with what one was bound to; the precariousness that appears as severance, dissolution, breaking. I think it through the image of thinly trembling grasses: they look fragile, but on closer look they are sharp; they look light, but when touched, one cannot lift them. The Critical Point is where these contradictions occupy the same body at the same time. It is not only the threshold of collapse — it is also the threshold of release: the moment when something held tightly learns, without ceasing to be, how to become lighter. The cracks and holes are sites where an invisible internal struggle has erupted onto the surface; the lightness of the seed is the same threshold seen from its other side.
I do not claim to have arrived at a final definition of this threshold. I name it the Critical Point, but I do not believe the name fully holds it. Each work returns me to the same sensation, only to find that the sensation has shifted; the trembling grasses are not the same grasses each time. The naming is provisional; the attending is what lasts.
I believe matter remembers. Even after the body disappears, sensation remains within the material. The viewer encounters worn layers instead of sleek surfaces; a time of dwelling instead of instant stimulation.
What I seek is not endurance alone. At the threshold, when the body can no longer hold, something else begins — a quiet floating, a breath returning. The pressure that bound the form becomes weightless. A time of keeping the eyes closed, still, until the light has passed. Through the language of enduring matter, I record not only the time after a severance, but also the moment when what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself. Loss, in my work, is finally a movement that contains both severance and yielding.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with materials in a state of passage — straw, gauze, torn and dyed fabric, worn clothing, paper, cast bronze. Some have already moved through a body's time; others I draw into that time. They come to me neither finished nor fully gone. Scraping, twisting, and reweaving them, I work at the threshold where a form must decide whether it will collapse or persist. I call this the Critical Point. My work does not explain loss; it carries it — until what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself.
I have long been drawn to certain substances: things transparent yet elastic; things that stretch until they tear, revealing the threads within; things loosened, punctured, but never thrown away. 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 each other — the faint sound of souls that once recognized one another in the brush of nylon. Pieces that try to shine wherever a thin light still falls. In them I recognized something I had no name for: no anger left to chew, no remorse, no blame, no bitterness — only an absence so vast that it kept collapsing and forming again, thick with the ordinary weight of an entire day. When these materials came to me, I recognized something familiar in them — they resembled absence. They were what someone had left behind. I came to think of them as evidence that someone had lived, and as a place where they continued to endure in my memory. Even when the body was gone, the matter still held its time.
The eye with which I recognize this absence does not come from one place. My double position — born in Korea, living and working in Germany — is not incidental to this 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. So my double position is, before it is a question of aesthetics, also the place where I hear that same stillness from both sides at once. Within my practice, East Asian restraint and Western materiality do not become the alibi of one another. The crossing itself is where my work stands; 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, but as a third position that has no name yet, only material. My work does not explain loss; it carries it
I do not approach loss as subject matter; I think it through — not as someone who mourns, but as someone who attends to the sensations that arise when one can no longer remain with what one was bound to. The time after such a severance is the first thing erased — and matter, which keeps its own time, becomes the place where the erased can be carried. The time of bearing is where we touch again what we were before function — beings who tended to one another, who shared warmth. I transform that time, and what cannot be undone in us, into matter.
I wanted to recreate flesh from these fragments — to fill them in, to revive them. My hands moved before my thoughts. What do we do with things that have loosened and worn thin? I pick them up. What I pick up does not need to be held forever — only borne until it can be let go.
Sometimes what bearing means becomes clearest in the presence of an eternity that only imitates it. At a gravesite, I once saw plastic flowers. They did not wilt, did not change, were eternal. And yet people replaced them often, with new ones. The flowers that had endured looked insufficient. The new ones felt more like sincerity. The replaced flowers become industrial waste. But we do not simply consume mourning — we consume and summon it at once. The industrially eternalized form of pain is never resolved, only renewed.
What moves through our mourning moves through our loving as well. What does it mean to mourn in a place where love rarely arrives as something self-evident? In the world I come from, love does not stand quietly between two people, recognized without being spoken. It hurries into proof, into the act of giving. We give before we name. We mend before we say. The relation between the lost one and the one who remains is, in that culture, shaped less by certainty than by what was not yet handed over: the words still owed, the gestures still owed, the unfinished tenderness. The question that returns through this work is not what love is, but what it leaves behind when it has had no time to arrive. My work returns this question to matter — what does the time of bearing hold, when what could not be said in time is what we carry? Cloth, straw, bronze: each is a place where an unfinished sentence still waits.
The grief I attend to in this work is not the grief of a single gesture, but of daily return: that ritual in which love seeks to hold eternity and yet remains too small to dissolve itself. Loss does not happen in a dramatic moment; it happens between the hours, in the expressionless flow of the everyday — among those who remain, in a world that does not know why someone has gone. Mourning is not a task to be completed. It keeps no fixed term and answers to no single cause; it returns alongside life itself. And so I am freed from the possibility of failure. Before things that have loosened and worn thin, I rest in a different question. Where, and how, do we resemble them? When we are given the time of bearing, what sensation do we meet within it? The materials I work with are not answers to this question. They are the place where the question stays.
Matter does not forget. What a body has touched, carried, or worn does not simply record use — it retains sensation. What can bend is never broken. My practice rests on this conviction.
I scrape, press, twist, and reweave. I tear, dye, and rejoin. The labor is durational; each act gives matter to a sensation that, in the time after a severance, moves only within. 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. This process of tearing, filling, and rejoining is no different from the act of reconstituting oneself.
Alongside these materials of endurance, I also work with the lightest of remnants: the dandelion seed, the flower in the act of casting itself away. Where straw and gauze record the time of bearing, the dandelion records the moment when bearing releases itself into air. Both belong to the same threshold. Both are bodies that know how to disappear — the straw through long endurance, the seed through unconditional letting-oneself-be-carried. They are not symbols of loss, but beings that complete a particular form of life. What they offer is not an image of grief, but a form for it.
I also work with bronze. This material entered my practice as a way of carrying the changing time of organic matter into another time — a permanence that is human, an eternity that is ordinary. Not the unchanging promised by industry, but a permanence reached only through bearing. Where straw, gauze, and worn fabric come apart, bronze, emerging through fire and a long process, allows what is fragile to be held in another form. Bronze is one of several ways I ask the same question across materials — how to give weight to fragility itself.
In the gallery, these works occupy space as if they have drifted into it. They lean, settle, gather on the floor like sediment, or hang as if waiting to be claimed. They carry, in their weight or their thinness, the displacement that produced them — bodies, fabrics, and matter that have moved between places, never fully arriving.
The forms maintain a state of tension, as if about to come apart. I think of this as the Critical Point: the threshold neither fully collapsed nor fully sustained. It is the formal condition I seek to capture, and the existential condition of someone who endures while losing themselves.
But the Critical Point is not a state — it is a sensation. It is the floating quality of loss that arises when one can no longer remain with what one was bound to; the precariousness that appears as severance, dissolution, breaking. I think it through the image of thinly trembling grasses: they look fragile, but on closer look they are sharp; they look light, but when touched, one cannot lift them. The Critical Point is where these contradictions occupy the same body at the same time. It is not only the threshold of collapse — it is also the threshold of release: the moment when something held tightly learns, without ceasing to be, how to become lighter. The cracks and holes are sites where an invisible internal struggle has erupted onto the surface; the lightness of the seed is the same threshold seen from its other side.
I do not claim to have arrived at a final definition of this threshold. I name it the Critical Point, but I do not believe the name fully holds it. Each work returns me to the same sensation, only to find that the sensation has shifted; the trembling grasses are not the same grasses each time. The naming is provisional; the attending is what lasts.
I believe matter remembers. Even after the body disappears, sensation remains within the material. The viewer encounters worn layers instead of sleek surfaces; a time of dwelling instead of instant stimulation.
What I seek is not endurance alone. At the threshold, when the body can no longer hold, something else begins — a quiet floating, a breath returning. The pressure that bound the form becomes weightless. A time of keeping the eyes closed, still, until the light has passed. Through the language of enduring matter, I record not only the time after a severance, but also the moment when what was held tightly learns, at last, to release itself. Loss, in my work, is finally a movement that contains both severance and yielding.
ARTIST STATEMENT