Emptiness

I have pursued a series of questions regarding the invisible and the visible in perception: how does the invisible become visible; and what allows the act of seeing to become perception? I have taken the notion of intention as a central focus, largely influenced by the East Asian notion of nothingness – non-intention.

We tend to focus on what we intend. Things are visible - and thus possibly remembered – only within the field of our intentions. Our conscious intentions are mainly formed by visible memories, ratified by the value system of society. These intentions are merely individual cases of these collective desires, which become inscribed through repetition of traditions and conventions. However, like dust in a house, we see but do not perceive these intentions, because we habitually accept them; they evade our attention. TV commercials and political propaganda follow this pattern; so does history.

Things outside the field of our intentions are mostly not seen. They are hidden from our ordinary habitual consciousness; instead, they lurk in the mind as invisible memories. They reveal their existence through our unintended behaviour, and inform intentions that we do not plan. They randomly jump out at us, like found objects, from unexpected places, and catch our attention. The undercurrents of relationships are deeply tangled and hidden; and we cannot comprehend them due to lack of vocabularies, even when we perceive them. Invisible memories are corporeal, rather than verbal, like Proust’s madeleine. We are drawn to them without knowing their origins. I explore these relationships between public/communal and private/individual, by nullifying our habitual reading of things governed by conventional values and meanings.

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 have pursued the same artistic approach in mobile installations (Why Lightness, Very Sensitive Space) and object works (Outgrowth, Interrupted Fall, Dendromancy) in situ. Simultaneously, I directed and participated in improvisation performances with mobile objects (i.e. People are the most precious things we can encounter, Forest).

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.