Artist Statement

I am collecting the sea's broken teeth—what remains. Each fragment a letter never sent home, each surface a skin that could be a map, that could be memory, that could be the space between hands letting go.

My body is an archive of empire—a mathematics written in blood across generations. The hair falls out in fistfuls, autoimmune, the body rejecting itself, or perhaps remembering what it was never supposed to keep. I gather each strand like evidence. Scan them hundreds of times until they become weather, storm systems mapped across hanji paper thin as grief.

I am asking: what does it mean to seal longing in beeswax? Once, honey belonged to dynasties. Now I smooth it over surfaces that hold what the mouth cannot say. The haenyeo dive without killing the sea. But the colonizers' boats scraped everything clean—shellfish, children, names.
I work with what they left behind.

Some wounds make pearls.

The nacre forming around invasion

is also how we survive it.

In glass vessels, I place what cannot be held any other way: emptied teabags smaller than memory, woven with hair. Here is my archive of the almost-born, the not-yet-mourned, the things that exist only in the space between presence and absence. I draw from Korean aesthetic traditions without nostalgic imitation—the breath and negative space of sumukhwa ink painting, the bold symbolic directness of minhwa folk art. I work in conversation with these forms, not as heir but as student, always beginning again.

Sometimes I think my art is just another way of saying: I am trying to build a country from fragments. Each piece a portal where the abandoned meets the oyster's question—how to make a home around what intrudes. How to transform surveillance into sight. How to make the wound beautiful without forgetting it is a wound.

I create from the position of witness rather than author. My work does not impose meaning; it makes space for meaning to arise. Like still water holding the moon, I receive what passes through and return it changed yet unchanged. What the moon does to water, I try to do with form.

빈 그릇이 가장 많이 담는다

The empty vessel holds the most

☽