*ARTIST STATEMENT
I realized that the processes involved in my creation reflect places, experiences, and memories. In 1998 my eldest brother died in the army. I spent my adolescence during his absence and left for Germany in 2007 as soon as possible to finish my university graduation. Beginning in Paris, France 2011, I repeatedly traversed the European and Asian continents as a nomadic subject. During a visit to Korea in early 2020, I was isolated due to the spread of COVID-19 and the resulting global border closure. Currently, I am (temporarily) staying in Korea in 2023.
The impacts of my dispersion and migration on my artistic practice operate on varying levels: I am biologically Korean, but mentally I am more of an alien. In addition, as I came to think in the language of my emigration countries, There are gaps in speaking and comprehending my native language, which is usually revealed when I converse with other native Korean speakers. Signs of my fractured relationship with my homeland begin to show when I visit Korea and feel it more difficult to assimilate into cultural life. Interestingly, my cultural legacy everywhere is often that of migrants. I look and sound Korean, but I understand my identity is partially foreign.
While my practice is not perfectly auto-biographical or self–referential, there are methods and affinities with the way I might engage with a place or translate a set of objects in a creative work that covertly brings up an encounter with displacement, loss, nostalgia and the effects of memory. They lead to something uncanny experience without being tied to a specific time or place. I seek to transform it anew in a hybrid form that is both a reflection of the past and an anticipation of the present.
Making images and spaces utilizes my visual logic and photographic language to make sense of the world and my experience. I do not refer to the meaning of a specific place in the work. Rather it homogenizes the landscape in a way that the nature of photography welcomes. Further, I focus on the physical influence and relationship of present or photographic images. By relocating fragments of images, objects, and memories in a specific space in the present, the process of photographs expanding from flat to three-dimensional and non-linear temporality is explored.
This 'other place' belongs partially in the imagination. For me, this is a split between two continents in one home from the other and a temporal stretch between the before and the after of migration and dispersion. I want to think about what the perception of 'other place' created by encounters through chance, past and present, and experience of misalignment between time and space can teach us living in a society of supermodernity. 27/05/23