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 called for a more direct and dramatic vocabulary, so I experimented widely across drawing, embroidery, and installation. Using sound and video to stage the exhibition space as a single work, I invited viewers to light incense at the works or examine them with flashlights, seeking a more active relationship with the audience.
As in psychodrama—where the protagonist, director, auxiliary egos, stage, and audience interact—I hoped viewers would become part of the exhibition itself. Beyond formal experiment, these devices questioned the myth of the “ideal victim” and the phenomenon of secondary harm in our society. Through rituals and audience participation, I came to recognize how such elements can function not merely as expressive techniques but as transformative devices that mediate othered experiences and open new ways of seeing. The healing, solidarity, and artistic efficacy I encountered then remain the central purpose and driving force of my practice.
The fictional death I experienced through art became a turning point from a representational, declarative autobiography toward a communal narrative. From a chance encounter with a star bearing a history akin to my own emerged The Birth of Hyperdense Neutron Star, a work that rejects linear, fatalistic causality while presenting the possibility that anyone may become a star. Symbols such as stars and fire, trees, and the uroboros are archetypal motifs with long mythic lineages; combined with landscape imagery, they acquire a renewed scenographic presence. Working graphite with a brush alongside oil paint, I sought a primitive atmosphere reminiscent of ancient illustrations or cave paintings.
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.