Note:
Apr 2025:I work with what’s closest to me—pine wood and hanji paper.
They’ve always been around. Quiet, unassuming, within reach.
I don’t begin with an idea. I begin with what my hands remember.
Something soft, something carrying weight.
I was trained to see through frames. First in design, then photography.
Everything had a border, a crop, a logic. But life spills. It doesn’t hold still.
So I build frames—not to control what’s outside,
but to give shape to how I meet it. A frame is not a limit, but a threshold I can stand behind.
My sculptures resemble windows, screens, or doors that never fully open.
They hold space without revealing it.
Hanji filters light like a half-remembered feeling.
Pine grain holds the trace of my grip.
I’m not chasing clarity. I’m following atmosphere,
that thin, vibrating layer between knowing and sensing.
Hands often appear. Not to gesture, but to stay.
They press, hold, hesitate. They aren’t characters. They’re reactions.
They arrive when the structure begins to shake.
When what’s rigid starts to feel too certain.
I carve them because my own reach often feels unfinished.
Like something is trying to come through me, not from me.
I don’t build for answers. I build to remain in the moment before one.
To sit with what lingers. With weight. With pause.
With that which has no name but still insists on being felt.
As a Korean-born artist living in New York,
I exist between languages—spoken and visual, cultural and instinctive.
I don’t aim to resolve these distances.
I let them echo. I follow what flickers in between.
Without making, I’d feel hollow.
But I don’t make to fill that hollow.
I make to stay with it.
To give it a shape. To let it breathe.
Feb 2025:
A window is never just a window. It decides what we see and what remains hidden. In my work, I construct wooden frames that define a particular view, partially obscured by hanji paper. This thin yet significant barrier does not completely block the outside world but filters it—softening edges, diffusing light, leaving room for interpretation. Unlike glass, which promises clarity but reflects as much as it reveals, hanji offers a different way of seeing: one that embraces both ambiguity and presence.
Looking through a window is never passive. We believe we see the world as it is, but our vision is always framed—by culture, memory, and the structures that surround us. In my work, hands grip the frame, holding onto its edges, yet they cannot fully open or remove it. Does the frame offer protection, or does it confine? If the window were gone, would we see more, or would we be lost in formless space?
Western glass windows suggest transparency, an unobstructed truth, yet they also separate and contain. Traditional Korean hanji windows, by contrast, allow light and air to pass through, embracing the imperfect and the uncertain. My work exists between these two ideas—between clarity and concealment, between the seen and the imagined.
These frames do more than define a view; they shape perception itself. The world we see is never just what is there, but what is allowed, what is constructed, what is remembered. Through my work, I explore this tension—not just between inside and outside, but between choice and constraint, agency and illusion. What we believe to be an open view may, in the end, be nothing more than a carefully placed frame.