As a transnational being, the psychological backdrops of my work relate to my research and understanding of the ecology of the community in different locations and finding out the connectivity with them in self. I’m interested in the otherness of the human body throughout civil history, and the tension between its societal use and physical existence. Using natural material and body as subject matter and tools to capture the tension of alteration, I think of those who do not have a strong sense of belonging or self. I activate space as a niche for them to physically sense the larger pulse of their body in a natural form, through the multi-faceted interaction. Beyond the language, I find mutual connections, confusion, uncertainties, and beliefs by sensing the desire through non-verbal language and sensorial reactions to the outside world. Recent works perform multiple roles- as a work, as a public space, and as a series of paragraphs of body writing of my own. My multidisciplinary approach to revealing the connectivity and sense of belonging actively invites the audience. Ceramics and sound are intimate matters reproducing memories of the past into the present. The ceramic is considered permanent as it survives throughout a long period, but it is somehow temporal, like sound when thinking via the nature of weathering process.
The rhythm of nature organisms is different from that of humans invented throughout civilization. I see chaos, destruction, and indiscriminate hostility against natural organisms of life. I look back to the 1950s and 1980s when Korean society was facing huge crises like wars and uprisings, and when my parents and grandparents survived with huge trauma. I look at images of crowds of people and mounds of personal belongings they had to leave behind (glasses, artificial legs, shoes, etc.). These private belongings are individuals that slowly fossilize into a flat representation of something else. It is absurd what individuality is, perhaps because there is no such thing as individuality. Each person considered as an individual becomes a crowd, a medium of culture, and then it becomes abstract, like how a pig becomes pork and becomes meat. It becomes words and meanings. Flesh becomes a concept.
The act of making aims to highlight the movement of making itself, rather than heading toward the final form of definition. I use my fingertip to form a small ball of soil, scratch this small piece of soil and attach it to the other clay piece, discovering new patterns and directions for these tiny units. I'm not making anything but wanting to prove there is a different way to communicate about body and time, outside of names and meanings but only through the physical relationship and the altered way of interacting. Units of clay flatten, fuse, collapses, fall, and attaches to each other throughout the process of making, firing, and cooling. The remainder of this process survives, sometimes in the form of mound, or flat ground. The hand is a distal organ that directs the form, and the small unit made by the hand visibilize a bodily trace of compression with biological information. Referring to the biological pulse of larger nature, I focus on interacting with time in an alternative manner and speed. It is for encountering the otherness and intersecting with it through intimate vulnerability. I want to remember that I have a body, the body that we all own ourselves.