Places I, or others, stayed remain as images. These places, in which we stared and felt differing emotions, are fixed as scenes. The photographic images I use represent those parts of a place where gazes fell and rested. They exist as a means of recording often incidental, yet always subjective, memories.
Windows play a significant role in my work. Perhaps this is because of the attractive part their frames play inside and outside of a space. The element of the frame is used as both a three-dimensional form and a planar image; it serves as a medium which expresses the interaction between place and memory. This provides a narrative element while also reconstructing, as ornaments, memories of various places located in the unconscious.
Place, window, image, memory, recall, space…
There are various spaces around us. Not only 'places', but also many 'things' serve as spaces for certain purposes. Just as important as images in my work is the concept of space. The space that the image shows directly and indirectly can be said to be a metaphorical material that includes an actual place where one stayed in the past, the virtual space where memories are mixed, and the abstract space that reconstructs those memories.
The word ‘space’, which may be an ambiguous and broad concept in some ways, creates an equivocal story that runs through my work. Although the work contains personal images, it may also be a tool for conversation, one that asks viewers to make new stories instead of simply telling my own. This working process directly or indirectly embodies familiar spaces such as rooms, boxes, doors, windows, alleyways, corridors, stairs, and buildings. It also includes notions such as 'closed’ / ‘open’, and 'contained’ / ‘liberated'. The focus of each piece is not simply the visual characteristics of an image. Rather, each piece also contains the purpose and desire for its story to be continued.
I aim to maintain and expand this practice, hoping that many people who want to keep their own things in this randomly created 'space' will sympathize with it - and find room in it for themselves.