I think the experience of growing up in Seoul and later moving between different countries in Europe fundamentally shaped the way I think about belonging, space, and mobility.
Seoul is a city built upon multiple historical layers and influences. It has been deeply shaped by Western culture and rapid modernisation, yet at the same time it retains a strong heritage and rich local cultural traditions. What I find particularly interesting is how these different influences often coexist in unexpected ways. Historical references, imported aesthetics, advanced technologies, vernacular architecture, luxury branding, and everyday urban life become intertwined, sometimes in humorous, kitschy, or highly capitalistic forms. Out of these collisions, Seoul has developed a very particular visual and spatial language that feels neither entirely local nor entirely global, but something uniquely its own.
Looking back, I think growing up within that environment made me comfortable with contradictions and hybrid conditions. I never experienced traditional and contemporary, industrial and handcrafted, local and international as separate categories. They were always overlapping and shaping one another.
Later, moving between Korea and Europe intensified this awareness. I found myself existing between different languages, cultures, and social systems. Rather than understanding displacement as a loss, I began to see it as a particular way of perceiving the world. Living in Europe also introduced a different relationship to time. There seemed to be a greater sense of continuity between past and present, and things often moved more slowly, both physically and socially. Processes took longer, and there was a different rhythm to everyday life. Experiencing these contrasting temporalities made me more aware of transition, duration, and the ways people orient themselves within changing environments.
This perspective naturally found its way into my work. It feels natural for me to combine aircraft materials, industrial structures, stained glass, mosaics, and crafts from different eras because I have always been surrounded by environments where diverse histories, technologies, and aesthetic systems intersect. I am drawn to airports, waiting rooms, lounges, and other transitional environments for a similar reason. They embody a condition that feels familiar to me, spaces where different temporalities, identities, and expectations coexist without fully resolving into a single state. I am interested in what happens when materials, places, or people occupy this condition of in betweenness, carrying multiple associations at once.
Perhaps this is also why I have become increasingly interested in atmosphere rather than image. Contemporary Korean society is incredibly image saturated, where visual culture, technology, architecture, entertainment, and media continuously generate new desires and experiences. Rather than producing more images, I find myself wanting to construct environments that are experienced physically and psychologically, through movement, duration, and presence. But at the same time, I do not want to romanticise displacement. I do not deny my own desire to settle, to feel comfortable, and to find a place that feels like home. But I think this condition of being in between is simply the way I am arriving there, and perhaps also the reality of my current life. Of course, anxiety, uncertainty, self doubt, and questions are always present. They can make me feel fragile. Yet ironically, those same conditions often become the force that pushes my artistic practice deeper and wider. Many of the questions I explore in my work emerge directly from trying to navigate those unresolved states.
