*ARTIST STATEMENT
I don't think I belong anywhere. I felt this feeling when I returned a few years after leaving home in 2007. Instead, while I was reborn as a nomadic subject from an immigrant, what explained my identity with a new cultural identity was memories, not a specific physical location. Among them, faint memories related to the death of a family member due to the military incident in 1998 were revealed irregularly but repeatedly in the place where I was adrift and in the creative process.
When I first started dealing with this memory in 2006, I couldn't define it. However, as I experienced reviving these memories through nostalgia and recalling them through photographic images after moving, I came up to understand that this was a minor trauma and a symptom of immigration. I sublimate the loss, displacement, nostalgia, and (traumatic) memories that lead to some uncanny experience without being tied to a specific time or place as the foundation and fuel of my creation and a medium of imagination to recreate home.
Making images and spaces utilizes my visual logic and photographic language to make sense of the world and my experience. I do not refer to the meaning of a specific place in the work. Rather it homogenizes the landscape in a way that the nature of photography welcomes. Further, I focus on the physical influence and relationship of present or photographic images. By relocating fragments of images, objects, and memories in a specific space in the present, the process of photographs expanding from flat to three-dimensional and its possibilities are explored.
My use of photographs operates on several levels: as a physical object, specifically embracing found photographic ephemera – a tactile object reminiscent of a place in one's memory; as a 'memory image' probing desire for a place; as a subjective translation of my experience; and as a photographic sculpture that alludes to a way home manifested and the fantasy to be 'somewhere else' that a vista provides.
My main interest in shaping these works is that they allow me to engage with a more nuanced and complex contemporary environment. This 'other place' belongs partially in the imagination. For me, this is split between two continents in one home from the other and a temporal stretch between the before and the after of immigration and dispersion. I want to think about what the perception of other places created by encounters through chance, past and present, and experience of misalignment between time and space can teach us living in a society of supermodernity. 23/02/23