Cutting Water

I usually work with seemingly insignificant objects (mostly found objects), or things with little visibility or weight. I examine their material characteristics to discover invisible memories. Their insignificance helps me probe our innate habits of meaning-making and value-judgement; and I pursue the ambivalent states of things, free from the authoritarian command of man-made definitions stored in collective memories. I try to let the objects reveal their existence through appearances, and see history through their physical bodies. For this reason, my art is necessarily site-specific.

This process started with my photographic series Oddments, when I began observing Nature channeled through remnants of ordinary natural materials that are intimately, yet invisibly present in everyday life - onion skins, lemon seeds, fish bones, pumpkin stalks, pine needles - things that are routinely discarded after we consume their useful parts. I juxtaposed unexpected materials with each other, anticipating how they might make sense together. 

I expanded this idea and my repertoire of art materials through my solo exhibition “Cutting Water” in South Korea in 2016. After an unplanned visit to a local Buddhist temple, I decided to explore the notion of non-duality through our perception of water. Fluids cannot be cut; or, rather, if you cut them, the pieces instantly merge back together, eventually dissolve the subject, and thus become one. Instead of representing water, I tried to present materials that transmit the feeling of water to me. I sought visual constructions of everyday objects – such as bottles, fishing lines, hair, and foam boards – in odd juxtapositions. 

Illusion of Measurement (silkscreen print, tape & print on acetate film), 100cm x 70cm, 2016