ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always enjoyed reminiscing about past events ever since I was young. I remember a particular time driving, and the breeze of early summer outside the window made my heart flutter.  I remember the green chair I saw during the trip with my loved ones at the rainy sea. Those emotions and memories re-energizes me. As I encounter fond memories of places and objects, I can recall them again. I want to create artworks that will capture the emotions so they can be remembered forever.

The places or objects also have memories for different people who shared them at different times. All those memories are created one by one but eventually engraved together. I abstract the intangible concept of those memories into ‘lines’ and express them on the canvas. A line in My work is a fragmentary memory and the overlapping of the lines create an aggregate. I express those fond memories as repetitive multiple lines on the canvas and create a space as the abstracted collection of emotions. Memories made invisible, but they exist beyond time of the experiencer. The memories as a stack of lines transferred into objects and becomes abstracted traces.

I start working by painting the color for the emotion of space on three-layered paper. The color is saturated but does not develop completely for the first coloring. I repeat painting until the natural color comes out. I repeat this process to saturate the color into the paper as if dyeing the paper. By painting this way, each fiber in the paper is dyed and filled with color to create a deep emotional space.

Memories are gradually obscured by the passage of time. They eventually fade away and disappear. I want to record the moments by switching the intangible memories into a tangible surface, traces on the canvas.