Artist Statement
I am an artist based between Seoul and London, working across painting, printmaking, and video. My practice moves fluidly across the boundaries of material and immaterial media, exploring human relationships, the finitude of life, and the ambivalent emotions that arise within them. By extending the physical principles of printmaking into painting, video, and installation, I use the process of disparate surfaces meeting to form images as a metaphor for relationships.
I construct a hybrid visual language by appropriating imagery from diverse historical periods and cultures, and employ allegory to visualize contradictory desires and emotions. My work is driven by both personal and social narratives, including an obsessive pursuit of an “authentic Koreanness” within a layered cultural history, as well as inner conflicts and feelings of guilt shaped by sexual identity.
These ambiguous emotional layers are organically interconnected through multiple media within the exhibition space. Print works may appear within video frames, while objects from videos extend into the physical space, creating a chain of interactions that expands the viewer’s sensory experience. My recent work focuses on how overlapping values in contemporary Korean society differentiate and complicate the identity of femininity. By deconstructing and reconstructing mythological motifs and female iconography from both Eastern and Western traditions, I aim to capture the gaps through which the same subject is interpreted differently depending on its social context.