When driving through a dark space at high speed, scattered lights coming from houses or street lamps flash by in the night. As I watch these points of light pass, I begin to sense the distance between myself and each of them. I start to imagine the shape of the space they inhabit.
When I come across a particularly dark area, I form a careful, even cautious, mental image of it. A few moments later, my mind assembles a landscape composed of fragments and clues found within the darkness.
The body, a subject that perceives images through light, or light reflected off objects, serves both as a reference point for understanding the world and as a vessel for projecting meaning onto space and matter. The eye, as the most sensory organ related to space, perceives the forms, movements, and sources of light. It recognises how light shifts and transforms in relation to the architecture of a space. Our gaze becomes a presence. Quietly observing the light, its origins, and the many ways it reveals or shapes the world around us.
People see objects through light. However, the eye is not a transparent window facing outward; it is a sensory organ, a piece of flesh, that detects light reflected from external objects. To see visually is to experience light through the senses, and to experience the glare of light itself.
Just as the metaphysical world is embodied in physical objects, light exists between the metaphysical and the physical. The numbness of the senses in experiencing light does not only mean an inability to see; it also connects to the paralysis of the city, the stagnation of relationships, and the instability of emotions. I seek the root of the anxiety I experience, because this unease extends beyond myself to family, home, nation, and community. The cracks and instability in what is thought to contain me most securely are believed to originate from this chain reaction of anxiety.
In my works that model anxiety, this unease lingers like the afterimage of light experienced after directly facing it. This exhibition starts from Gwangju’s history, places, and memories; sources of anxiety, and moves through relationships with others mediated by light, eventually connecting to virtualized ideal spaces. Through this process, I aim to reveal intersections of the individual and society, memory and history, and to depict landscapes experienced not as they are shown by light, but through memory, sensation, and emotion.
