Madness, to me, is not the opposite of reason but a threshold — a place where trauma, belief, and perception press against one another until new images appear. My paintings stay at that threshold.
I grew up inside a family history in which the line between inheritance and injury was never clear. My father was imprisoned and tortured during Korea's democratization movement and lived with mental illness until his death. Living as a neurodivergent person myself, I have come to see the boundaries between heredity and trauma, between disability and the workings of the mind, and the limits of each era's psychiatry as blurred across time and space. My work holds an ambivalence I have not resolved: whether the "abnormal" should be expressed or contained.
I borrow images from the margins of history — outsider art, women mystics, psychiatric archives, kinky fashion — images that once fell outside the "normal." I extract their forms as vectors for a structure, mix them with ordinary images, and cut them into stencils that leave traces on the canvas, which I then rework with gestural marks. A stencil has a sharp edge, yet the threshold between negative and positive keeps shifting. As traces accumulate, sources become unrecognizable and boundaries cross and tangle. I think of these overloaded surfaces as palimpsests: legible as script, but felt as an excess of affect rather than as text.
My method is shaped by music. As a DJ recently active in Seoul's underground scene, I approach painting the way contemporary electronic musicians approach records. Art-historical research is my digging; transforming borrowed images is my sound collage; a painting is a mix, in which rhythm, repetition, and a choreographic sense of time are built into the picture plane.
Painting, for me, is a way of listening to what was pushed to the margins, and playing it back.