Dongdaemun

Artist Statement

I work by overlapping unforgettable memories — moments of recollection. I bring memories back, splice them, and stack them again and again, amplifying those moments as much as I can within the canvas. Just as the Korean word "to draw/paint" (그리다) is born from the word "to long for / to miss" (그리워하다), I draw what I long for. I photograph or collect what I love and want to see again, and keep layering it. As I overlap them, I remember and remember the moments of those memories, again and again. This resembles the regret over what is being forgotten, and the modern desire to hold on to more. The image in the painting is not destroyed by being layered; it lives more vividly. So I deliberately do not mix the colors — to make the radiant memory more bright and dazzling. The most luminous moments of my life, or of someone's life, and the places where I so wished to be together with someone, are pressed into the painting again and again, branded so they cannot be forgotten. The overlapped places are paintings of photographs taken at small intervals of time as I moved left and right; in each shift the image and the experience of moving change indirectly, and you can find in them the figure of the modern person who keeps drifting through this age. The people of this age travel to famous landmarks of the world and feel, within strangeness, a different kind of familiarity. The contemporary world is a place where cultures collide and many scenes coexist. In a space inhabited by many races and streams of information, culture meets culture, and the memory of others meets one's own memory. The overlapped scene rendered as painting is at once a meeting of East and West, and a meeting of self and other. A virtual-reality-like world of fantasy in which, through countless data and indirect or direct experience over the internet, others' memories begin to feel like one's own. The places that appear in my paintings are filled with my own experience and feeling, and so they overlap into one all the more powerfully. Different yet alike, alike yet different — scenes drawn intricately and clearly so that every moment feels precious and important. Time is for an instant, but the instant always exists alongside the eternal, like a present that has already become past. "Multilayered" carries, beyond its meaning of overlapping in many layers, a second meaning for me: that all those moments are important. I paint, in the language of painting, a fluctuating, shifting identity within a hybrid culture. The body's movement is accompanied by the mind's movement; memory and recollection are joined and broken apart. By drawing recollections, I evoke a memory or travel-memory likely held by many of today's people who have experienced diverse cultures, and I form a shared resonance. Everyone's memories are different. The moment memories overlap — even when standing in the same place, we live recalling different memories. Through my painting, I hope that each person remembers their own most luminous moment, the images of the city in which they were happiest, and that they engrave that happiness within.