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.

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.