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ARTIST STATEMENT
ARTIST STATEMENT
For nearly three decades, I asked myself one question:
How should I paint?
I eventually came to a simple realization:
We exist separately, yet we are all connected.
I call that invisible connection LINE.
I do not draw lines.
I draw the invisible connections that already exist.
Coexistence2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
Coexistence2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
The panda represents China, Kim Jong Un represents North Korea, and the Hulk represents the United States.
They appear to confront one another as different nations, systems, and ideologies. Yet I see them not as separate bodies, but as organs within a single body.
To destroy one is to wound the whole.
Their histories, conflicts, fears, and differences are real. But difference does not have to lead to destruction.
This painting is not about choosing one side over another. It is about recognizing that even those we consider our enemies exist within the same interconnected world.
We are different, but we are connected.
That is Coexistence.
Untitled: Gam (敢)
2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
Untitled: Gam (敢)
2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
Years ago, during a time of profound emptiness, I once stood beneath a clear sky and embraced a concrete utility pole.
I simply needed to hold something.
Years later, I remembered a painting by an old friend from art school — a figure embracing a fish. At the time, I had thought his painting childish and naïve.
Only much later did I understand it.
I wanted to embrace something again.
But embracing another person felt too difficult.
So I painted a fish.
It took me more than a year to finish the painting.
Some may call it loneliness.
Some may call it a hunger for affection.
But I cannot give it such a name.
敢 — I dare not name it.
The Couple 2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
The Couple 2024 -Oil on Canvas · 35.8 × 28.6 in (90.9 × 72.7 cm)
This painting was inspired by my parents.
My father and mother were profoundly different people — almost as if they belonged to different worlds.
They fought, endured, hurt one another, and yet remained together throughout their lives.
Watching them grow old, I began to see their relationship differently.
What once appeared to me as conflict gradually became something more difficult to define: two completely different beings who, through a lifetime together, had somehow become connected.
I imagined them as a horse from the grasslands and an antelope from Africa — creatures from different worlds becoming one.
But beneath this painting lies another feeling.
I know that one day, my parents will no longer exist together in this world.
The Couple is my childhood memory of being loved by two very different people — and my sorrow at knowing that this connection cannot remain visible forever.
The Creation of Heaven and Earth
The Creation of Heaven and Earth
The forms on both sides of the painting are breasts.
They represent motherhood.
In this work, I imagined the birth of the universe — the beginning of life, time, and space — not simply as a physical event, but as an act of motherhood.
There was once a moment when my sense of self seemed to disappear. In the emptiness that remained, I felt something vast filling me.
The closest word I could find for it was love.
But it was not romantic love. It was an aching, embracing love — something closer to the love of a mother.
From that experience came this painting.
For me, the origin of life and the origin of the universe share the same image:
Motherhood — the space that embraces life before it comes into being.
For me, LINE began at the Cross.
It was there that I came to understand that existence is not separate.
The suffering of another is not only theirs.
The life before me is not entirely separate from my own.
The Cross gave me a way to see this invisible connection.
From that realization, lines began to appear relentlessly in my paintings.
These eight works were created after that moment.
LINE was not something I invented.
It was something I received.
Am I Alone?
Am I Alone?
This painting was created in a moment of profound despair.
I painted it in oil, in a single continuous act, without returning to correct or refine it.
The Korean words on the left read:
“Am I alone?”
It was not a phrase I chose to explain the painting.
It was the question that existed within me at that moment.
The painting ended when the question ended.
Am I alone?
THE BEGINNING OF LINE
THE BEGINNING OF LINE
My lines and colors were born in despair.
At the time, prayer was not peaceful for me.
It was more like a struggle — a war within myself.
I prayed, questioned, resisted, and endured.
And in that process, something began to emerge on the canvas.
Lines appeared.
Colors appeared.
These early works may resemble religious paintings, but I do not consider them sacred images in the traditional sense.
They are traces of a period when prayer became painting — when what I could not express in words was released onto the canvas.
I did not yet fully understand LINE.
But looking back, this was where it was being born.
My lines and colors were not designed.
They emerged from prayer.
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