*ARTIST STATEMENT
(EN) There are places that cannot be fully seen.
Not because they are hidden, but because the forms available to represent them — the photograph, the document, the archive — flatten what they try to hold. A photograph can show a wall. It cannot carry the weight of what happened against it, the smell of the space behind it, or the layered histories of labor, displacement, and transformation that have accumulated within its surface over time. Images stabilize. But certain places — and certain kinds of memory — resist stabilization.
This is the problem my practice begins from.
My practice also emerges from a position of displacement. I have lived and worked across Korea, Germany, France, Indonesia, and Vietnam — not as a series of destinations, but as a condition of being that has shaped how I see, make, and think. I do not return to a fixed origin. Instead, I find — in the act of cutting, reassembling, and reconstructing — a way of making place from displacement itself. Photosculpture is not only a formal methodology for me; it is a way of inhabiting the world as a nomadic subject: one who moves between cultures, languages, and geographies without resolving into any single one of them, and who understands that identity, like memory, is never fully fixed.
In 2006, I made House — a first work that incorporated photographs of red brick walls. The images were recognizable, but something essential was missing. The photograph was flat. It could be seen, but it could not be entered. The lived experience I was trying to hold — the weight of a specific wall, the way certain spaces carry histories that refuse to be seen clearly — remained outside the image, pressing against its surface without getting through. The image was static; over time it felt like it was becoming a fossil — identifiable, but no longer alive to what it was supposed to carry. My practice developed from this failure. It was only later — through sustained practice and research — that I came to understand what that work was already asking: how to make photography do what a single image cannot. Not to document a place, but to reconstruct the conditions under which a place is felt — partially, incompletely, and with all its contradictions intact.
Since 2011, I have developed two interconnected forms through which this question is pursued. Photopiles are constructed by cutting photographic prints into fragments and layering them into thin, three-dimensional structures — dismantling the image's flat surface and recombining its parts into forms that evoke fragmented temporal and spatial experience. Photosculptures extend this process further, translating what Bergson calls "memory-images" — photographs that carry the charge of a specific encounter with a place — into objects situated within space, foregrounding their physical transformation and their relational positioning within the exhibition environment. Across both forms, images are displaced from fixed coordinates and reconstituted within an indeterminate spatial field: no longer bound to a singular geography or temporal origin, but inhabiting an in-between condition that I think of as an "other place" — open, undefined, and resistant to closure.
Through this process, photography becomes less a representation of place and more a structure through which displacement, fragmentation, and unresolved memory can emerge materially, spatially, and temporally. The resulting works are deliberately incomplete: open spatial forms that resist closure and remain in a state of becoming.
I am interested in how art can productively engage with the experience of diaspora — not by representing displacement as a fixed condition, but by asking how attachment to a specific past continues to surface in the places and materials that surround us. Nostalgia, in this sense, is not sentimental longing. It is a contemporary condition produced through the misalignment of space and time — a critical and reflective mode of perception that my work attempts to materialise.
The subjects of my work have consistently been places where official histories and personal memories do not align — where the visible surface of a city conceals layers of displacement, labor, and transformation that cannot be fully seen or spoken. I am drawn to architectural surfaces that carry more than they show: red brick walls encountered across Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam that function not as symbols but as physical records of overlapping histories of labor, colonial infrastructure, and postcolonial transformation. I am equally drawn to warehouse districts suspended between industrial memory and cultural redevelopment, and to harbor edges where the question of what a place has been and what it might become remains genuinely unresolved.
My research has developed alongside this practice, investigating photosculpture as both a formal methodology and a theoretical field — one concerned with how photography, when pushed beyond its representational limits, can become a site for encountering postcolonial memory, diaspora, and placeness in ways that neither photography nor sculpture alone can reach. The act of physically cutting apart and reassembling a photograph is not only a formal operation; it is a way of questioning the authority of the image to contain a place, and of insisting that what has been overlooked, suppressed, or incompletely remembered deserves a form that reflects its instability.
Photosculpture, for me, is ultimately a practice of making place from what cannot be fixed — from fragments, residues, and incomplete structures that refuse to settle into coherent images. The incompleteness is not a limitation. It is the most honest formal response I have found to the kinds of places, histories, and forms of belonging I am trying to engage.
12/05/26