ARTIST STATEMENT
I spent my childhood in an isolated forest. With no playgrounds or children my age nearby, my greatest joy came from observing and imagining. My family home, known in Korean as the “big house,” hosted twelve ancestral rites a year for our extended family. We raised several deer, and on the days we cut their antlers, we would invite the entire village for a feast—sometimes sharing and drinking the blood together. On weekends, I often sang hymns at church. These diverse ritual experiences—ranging across Eastern and Western traditions—have deeply informed my artistic practice.
Experience is never fixed; it is constantly reconstructed. If life can be seen as a script, it means we can arrive at different endings ourselves. I adopt the concept of “roleplay” to reconstruct lived experience and propose a methodology for breaking free from the structures of given life. By assigning fictional scenarios to real events, I seek to shift their meaning and discover unexpected possibilities. This approach echoes the practice of group drama therapy known as psychodrama1. Each narrative is composed in the theatrical form of an “act,” and together they form a trilogy.
In The Funeral of the Deceased (2018, Art Space TTANGSOK) and The 49 Days Rite of the Deceased (2018, Space XX) , I drew from the structure of traditional Korean funerals. In Dixit Dominus Domino Meo – The Game of Worshippers (2020, 0 Gallery), I turned to old Catholic hymns and the origin of the game of dominoes.
Although I studied oil painting throughout my undergraduate years, this period marked a shift toward more direct and dramatic expressions of personal experience. I imposed no limits on medium or form: I worked with pencil drawings, hand-embroidered cloth, created folding screens, and produced small sculptural objects using resin.
The Birth of a Hyperdense Neutron Star, which emerged from a chance encounter with a star bearing a history much like my own, marks a shift from autobiographical narrative toward a broader mythology. The fictional death I experienced through art became a portal into new life. To subvert the unidirectional order that defines linear flow of time, I composed disoriented and divided frames. The image of the uroboros—a snake consuming its own body in an eternal cycle—embodied the theme of reincarnation. By smudging graphite on a canvas with oil paint, I evoked a primitive atmosphere reminiscent of ancient illustrations or cave paintings. I layered bright pigments between brushstrokes, creating an earthen texture, further accentuated by the work’s characteristic ashy-brown background.
As Walter Benjamin noted in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), modern art has been stripped of its cultic value with the decline of ritual. Yet I wished to reclaim the classical, potent force of the image—recalling its ancient function of shielding us from the unknown or the feared. Only when we are liberated from the negative events and failures of life can we begin to craft our own myth. By inheriting the age-old function of myth—guiding humankind and shaping modes of being—I seek to explore the singularity of each life.
1 Developed in the 1920s by Jacob Levy Moreno (1889–1974), psychodrama was described by him as “The Theater of Truth.” He defined it as a science that uses theatrical methods to illuminate the truth of human existence and explore the realities of one's environment.