Artist Statement Blue Territory series are about the urban space of the extensive ruins covered with blue tarpaulin. The tarpaulin after destructing buildings is an arbitrary landscape of discontinuity in time and space, and also a temporary establishment cutting off history of the city and the memory of individuals. Now it is a new space hiding and wrapping the shunned class and the violence added to an urban life. I interpret it as a concept of a territory, and this blue territory implies the situation that the people who can not belong to this territory of the 'privileged class' have to move to a strange place, and the reality that in the meanwhile they become mentally alienated. Green Curtain series addresses Nanjido, which was previously a garbage landfill. Nanjido was an island where Nan(lily) and Ji(mushroom) grew long ago, but was used as a landfill that treated the impurities of economic growth during Korea’s economic development. After this rampant economic development, Nanjido is now an eco-friendly green space. This area is currently a man-made ecological park that shows the process of Korea’s condensed economic growth, and Korea’s marvelous contemporary history. Nanjido might be a huge skin covering memories and historical ironies like an enormous green curtain. Reflecting this, landfill gas-wells and signboards portraying the habitat of wild animals coexist here unnaturally. Although green which is the main color of lawns, forests, and nature, and brings us to a psychologically, emotionally stable state, it actually appears cryptic, unrealistic, and surreal in this series. Sppeding Light - In the subway map, a station is represented by a dot, and a tunnel between stations by a segment. While traversing the dots-the abstract directing posts, we are in a hazy space-time without consciousness of bodily position and locality. Space without an itinerary shortens time, but at the same time makes it meaningless. An existence of an individual in a crowd, like an object moving to its destination in silence, starts and ends a day of a boringly repeated routine life. We experience in the underground world a bustling crowd and darkness shown through small windows, but the movement of a subway from the view in the tunnel seems like a huge band moving with deadly speed. I entered the tunnel to record the line of the light of the subway. In that records, it seems that existence of each individual is disappearing in the tunnel. This work is an abstraction of hazy direction and the time that our contemporaries lost who are being pushed into speed and quantity. Urban Depth series features a waste disposal site located in the deep underground of Seoul. A tremendous amount of waste discharged everyday is classified here, and up-to-date facilities are used to treat foul smelling gas produced in the processes of condensing and removing waste. This vast underground space restlessly engulfs and digests urban impurities while we are unaware of this fact. Although this is an important space present in the center of Seoul, its presence is belied and camouflaged through a park at ground level, and no information or sign indicating its presence. This is why this site reflects the attributes of a city where lots of complex interests clash.
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