Paper becomes a shell — a skin — through which fragments of the body are shaped. Yet the fragile materiality of paper ensures that these forms can never remain fixed. The structure, inherently variable, is repeatedly cut apart and layered over with new structures, transforming again and again. The geometric shapes that compose the sculpture replicate and mutate one another in this process, weaving relations that gradually emerge as new organs or bodies with their own strange morphology.

Organs detach from their original positions and reattach to other parts, while branches and roots, protrusions and thorns entangle themselves through these seams of connection. Sculptures born from the structural fissures that matter opens up continually generate difference; they refuse to land on the earth under the pull of gravity and instead remain suspended, expanding through the human body toward the realm of the non-human.

The work begins with an interest in our habitual modes of perception. Each distinct way of perceiving generates its own reality. This is why, before asking what we perceive, I first ask how we perceive. Through everyday events and phenomena that I personally encounter, I examine how our inherited modes of perception operate, and how they relate to the things we take for granted. Observation and experimentation become ways to question these mechanisms.

Building on this question, my practice has sought to dismantle perception that centers on fixed ideas of “substance,” “subject,” and “self.” Within my work, number functions as an alternative language. Whereas conventional language systems inevitably divide and hierarchize what is perceived, number as a symbolic system invites a focus on difference and otherness between things. Using numbers, I reinterpret the skins or coverings of objects, structuring them, then repeatedly connecting and dismantling these structures to create abstracted forms.

Through this process, the sculptures reveal that things do not exist in isolation but rather emerge within an intimate web of relationships — fluid, ever-shifting, and entangled with one another.

The forms take inspiration from sea slugs and deep-sea creatures. Like primordial life, they begin in the ocean and, after the end, return to it. An experiment in memory transfer using sea slugs once offered me a clue — a glimpse into the possibility of life forms that emerge after humans, beings who materialize memory itself.

The glass and metal I use are not fixed forms but perpetually shifting substances. Glass appears solid, yet over time, under the weight of gravity, it surrenders its shape and slowly flows. Old stained glass windows in European cathedrals are thicker at the bottom for this reason — glass becomes a conduit through which memory drifts with the passage of time. Metal too, when heated beyond a certain point, liquefies and re-solidifies, embracing new shapes as it cools.

Through these mutable states of glass and metal, I attempt to extract and fix fragments of memory, holding the flow of time within the material itself. My work is an ongoing attempt to imagine beings that carry memory not only in the mind but within the very shifting fabric of their bodies — creatures that remind us that even after us, life continues to shape and reshape the echoes we leave behind.

Technology offers us vast streams of information as we try to understand and describe the world. Yet, it remains our enduring task to comprehend how living beings have coexisted in nature for millennia. This work is a small attempt to revive the wisdom of coexistence — to express, through art, the process by which memory and sensation permeate matter, flow through it, and are transferred from one form to another.

Much of my recent work has grown from Nudie Hallucination, a novel I am currently writing, which imagines beings that exist beyond the human. In 2021, during a study of sea slugs with neuroscientist Dr. Hye-Young Ko, I encountered experiments in memory transfer and surrogate sensation that revealed to me that memory is not merely an abstraction, but a tangible entity embedded in material form. Memories, woven together by networks of neurons, are not simply traces of the past but integral parts of being itself.

If an age comes when the memories of others can be transferred or artificially created, how might we change? What would identity mean in a time when we can buy and sell the memories of strangers, or carry within us sensations we have never personally experienced? Nudie Hallucination begins with these questions. Within this imagined world, I give sculptural form to beings born in the porous borderlands between memory and sensation — entities that carry the potential of intelligence beyond humanity, living in a world that may exist after us.

Through these speculative future beings, I hope we might circle back and rediscover the ways of coexistence we have forgotten — and remember that we, too, are part of a larger, entangled continuity of life.

Erased Faces is an entity close yet impossible to capture. Though near, it remains too distant to truly relate. It explores the space between self and other in the places where faces live. The everyday continuation of touching, scattering, gathering, supporting, abandoning, enduring, and crossing is lived with difficulty. Yet some things only appear through the effect of erasure — the vanished, the forgotten, the ghostly revenants, those dismissed as mere symbolic disappearances.

The moment we think we have forgotten the lost object, it suddenly returns as longing. What is farthest away becomes the closest.

“Erased Faces” and “Longing”: The Space Between Here and There

Erased Faces is the presence of the other left abandoned at the edge of the boundary, the “there” where the decentering of the self by the world manifests itself. In contrast, Longing symbolizes the “here” occupied by one who awaits a body yet to arrive from afar, and mourns a body that has already departed. Their encounter unfolds within principles that create gaps and distances. The first-person “I” opens space from here toward there — a bodily form that offers its existence toward the solitary, anonymous other.

Between here and there lies a distance that separates one from the other. Though each is directed toward the other, they never draw closer to a point of unity. The consciousness of “I” is either excessive or deficient, and the distance to relate remains vast. In the space where powerless and ignorant bodies separate, a thick silence gathers. Yet in a world where one part becomes the outside of another — where one body becomes the outside of another and thus opens space — the abyss of silence is not all there is.

The gap opened between bodies is where the moment breathes and lives. It is the breath that passes from me to you, and from you to me. In the pain born of solitude, this breath opens the self, allowing the boundary to dynamically renew itself each time, making flow possible. It is the breath that inscribes meaning on things that exist and pass only in the moment — a breath that arrives through reflection on our relation with the other.

The “I” can only be “I” in relation to the other. Through the common solitude given to mortal beings and its call, unconditional hospitality toward the other becomes the path on which “we” may coexist.