Imprint: A Personal Assemblage (2026)
The Gaze of Chance, Unbound Places
As we travel towards a given destination, we encounter unexpected scenes by chance. The images captured as we experience these fleeting situations and emotions may simply represent moments of coincidence. However, they may also become opportunities and lead to new ideas.
The photographs chosen here depict indistinct landscapes, ambiguous spaces, or places of memory whose precise locations are now unknown. They are ordinary spaces, easily overlooked—places that suggest no grand significance, but which may hold specific meaning for someone. As such, images of them exist on the boundary between the universal and the personal.
This sense of boundary extends metaphorically into the visual language of the work, connecting various relationships: positive and negative, relief and intaglio, photographic positive and negative, solid and void, front and reverse.
Memory, distortion, disappearance, afterimage, residue, place, space, gaze, and surroundings gather and disperse, embedding ambiguous concepts within the work. As a medium, photography captures concrete forms. Yet, this representational quality can also become a limitation, consigning works into normative categories.
Images of places can be interpreted variously because they are able to remain distinct depending on contextualising temporalities, events, emotions, and memories. This is reflected visually and conceptually in the choice of materials and the development of forms.
These processes can be understood as a way of revealing the paradox in which photographic images form the narrative of the work while simultaneously allowing ‘chance’ and ‘ambiguity’ to coexist within it.
IMAGE ARCHIVE (2020)
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.