I Packed My Bag explores everyday objects as vessels of memory, transformation, and cultural residue. Ceramic forms are cast using former East German mesh shopping bags as molds, leaving fossil-like grid impressions on their surfaces. These fragile, oversized forms recall utilitarian containers, ocean creatures, or at times fashion accessories—suspended between adornment and function—and some remain wrapped in original mesh, merging object and support.
Displayed atop repurposed styrofoam fishing buoys salvaged from Korean coastlines, the ceramics engage another layer of imprint from fishing lines and marine wear, forming a textured conversation across materials and geographies that links land and sea, East and West, craft and industry. The installation evokes dualities of solid and flexible, heavy and light, presence and absence. The title refers to the memory game "I packed my bag," where repetition accumulates meaning, echoing the layered histories carried by the objects themselves.
Dear Drawing II: TRACE, FOLLOW, LIFT, and PLOP!, NOTHING IS REAL, 2025, Seoul, KR
Fluid Ground, Installation view, Alternative Art Space LOOP, Seoul, 2023
A quote by Ursula K. Le Guin's
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.
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The first cultural device was probably a recipient.... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
