BIOGRAPHY

She received her degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL). After returning to Korea, she moved to New York in 2017. She currently lives and works in Korea.

STATEMENT

Reality is not a stable condition but a shifting field between perception, memory, and interpretation.

My paintings explore the subtle dissonance between everyday reality and subjective perception. I am drawn to those fleeting moments when the familiar suddenly feels strange—when the natural order of reality appears quietly disrupted, revealing an unreal or fictional dimension embedded within truth itself. These moments often arise through experiences such as déjà vu, misremembered memories, misunderstandings, or events that resist conventional logic. Within such instances, reality and perception briefly fall out of alignment. My work seeks to visualize this gap and to trace the delicate shift in consciousness that occurs when awareness momentarily diverges from the world it attempts to grasp.

This recognition of difference carries a paradoxical character: disruptive yet calm, transcendent yet lucid, imaginative yet deeply grounded in observation. I translate these layered perceptual experiences into dreamlike pictorial spaces rendered in oil paint. Through a candid and almost photographic realism, the images appear as if they are quietly documenting a moment that has surfaced from beneath the surface of ordinary life.

Motifs drawn from nature and fragments of my personal everyday environment frequently appear throughout the work. Within the landscape, these elements often seem arbitrarily placed, resisting immediate narrative coherence. Altered proportions and subtle exaggerations generate an atmosphere that feels quietly uncanny. The smooth, meticulously rendered surfaces stand in deliberate contrast to the surreal narratives unfolding within the image, producing both tension and moments of visual wit.

I believe that an image already carries within it the knowledge of what it wants to become. Even when the canvas is still an empty white darkness, the essence of the image is somehow present. The painter senses this inwardly yet cannot fully articulate it. Painting therefore becomes a process of accompanying the image as it gradually reveals itself—layering, revising, and sometimes obscuring the surface until the work arrives at its own inherent form.

The nature of painting, which demands prolonged attention to a single image, mirrors the very subject of my work. Through persistent observation, shifting perception, repeated failure, and unexpected leaps, I continue this exploration alongside the image until it finally emerges into its own clarity.

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