Architectural Prosthetics. I work in the realm of modern architecture and the institutionalized human experience, examining how repetitive, standardized, and normalized structural forms and practices inscribed in architecture have responded as a remedy to traumatic modern experiences.
I believe in the power of utilizing unregulated spaces that lack specific purposes, such as window borders where people often place their belongings or sit down, as junctions for extending my artistic practice. My works resemble buildings, yet they are not traditional architectural elements because they can move between unregulated spaces. To avoid architectural quality, I use my body as a scale to ensure nothing I create is heavier or bigger than it. If I want to make a bigger or heavier piece, I make it as a module unit, so that my physical strength can still handle it. My pieces can move freely within the conditions defined by architecture—specific dimensions, and positions—for example, they can move from one vent registration to another, or from one window border to another. My artworks dwell within a place where one is compelled to live, however, they do not obey the laws of the place.
Often, the experience of transforming traumatic experiences into my own creation—interpreting emotions within the realm of reason—has, for me, been a transition from the state of a silent victim to that of a questioning witness, a speaker, and a narrator. As an Asian female who grew up in South Korea, had my first show in Tokyo, and has an academic background in Paris and the United States, I explore the normalized state that modern architecture imposes—permanent, still, sterile, incorruptible, and immobile—functioning as constraints, and examine the movability of art-making as a narrator in this context.