Art Portfolio

This series was conceived to trace patriarchal trauma in Korean society from the 1950s to the 2010s, visualizing how a grandfather’s silence mutates into a granddaughter’s erasure. 

The Grandfather (1960s) embodies rigid hyper‑masculinity through a black‑and‑white aesthetic on rough matte paper, his mouth sealed by ‘film damage’ as a metaphor for repression. 

The Father (1980s) shows control masked as tenderness, printed on glossy paper to mimic color film, his distorted affection materialized as a ‘light leak,’ an error of overexposure. 

The Daughter (2010s) signifies erasure, printed on standard photo paper, her expressionless face cut by a ‘dead pixel line’ across her lips.

 Together, these works layer silence, distortion, and erasure, exposing how patriarchal structures persist across decades while revealing how identity is ultimately effaced, and how memory itself becomes entangled with the materiality of photographic media.

Artwork link : https://vimeo.com/1153302275?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci 

In this work, I reconstruct my private sanctuary. Every detail functions as an archive of the emotional states, anxieties, and interests that defined my adolescence. 

Constructed from domestic remnants—leftover wallpaper, sponge, and hand-cut paper—this miniature serves as a tangible memory.

I synthesized black and white backgrounds to visualize the passage of time, layering recorded ambient sounds to imbue the space with a hyper-realistic narrative.

This work departs from the conventional sketch process to explore the essence of form through three-dimensional materiality. Using modeling paste to sculpt various artificial flowers directly onto the canvas, I translated each flower’s structural characteristics into raised, tactile shapes rather than reducing them to two-dimensional outlines.

After the modeled forms fully dried, I avoided applying generalized light and shadow. Instead, I illuminated the surface with a strong stand light and traced the actual shadows and highlights cast in real time, allowing the natural fall of light to define the painting’s color and tonal structure.

Through this process, I challenged habitual ways of observing and representing objects. By prioritizing physical presence over visual convention and by painting from the “real” shadows rather than imagined ones, the work becomes an experiment in capturing what feels true beyond standard pictorial techniques.

Frequent moves throughout my childhood led me to reflect on the idea of settling and to imagine what an ideal sense of belonging might look like once I gained independence.

 Using Google Earth, I searched for landscapes resembling northern Italy: a forested area with a single house beside a large lake, beneath an open sky yet still within reach of a nearby village. After finding a location that closely matched this vision, I studied the earthy reds of the house, the deep greens of the surrounding forest, and the afternoon light, translating the scene onto canvas with gouache. 

Navigating the landscape through repeated 360-degree views created the sensation of temporarily inhabiting the place during the act of painting. 

This process made me reflect on how digital environments allow us to simulate places we have never physically visited. Yet rather than satisfying the desire for experience, these mediated encounters intensified my urge to physically move toward the place itself. They reveal how simulated experiences can ultimately propel real movement and direct engagement with the world.

I examined marine life through watercolor's natural diffusion, using alcohol to create organic textures that emerge spontaneously. 

This investigation explored how minimal marks can evoke complex underwater forms, examining material unpredictability as a parallel to living organisms and the formation of organic structures beyond direct control, including the effects of varying water density and pigment dispersion, and how alcohol repels and displaces pigment to create eroded, organic textures.

Living in crowded Hong Kong and Seoul, I asked what my ideal city might be. 

Translating urban congestion into deep sea silence, I used watercolor transparency and light to resolve visual tension between density and imagined serenity, reimagining the deep sea as a contemplative urban space shaped by stillness and immersion, where light is filtered, absorbed, and reflected through water to heighten visual sensitivity in place of auditory noise.