ENGLISH

1.

You write that you paint “the state of remaining in between” rather than moving in one direction. When did you first notice that this in-between state was your subject, and not just a mood passing through a single painting?

I first realized it while preparing for my first solo exhibition in July 2025.

When I begin a new body of work, I don’t start by deciding on a theme. I pay attention to the sensations I’m drawn to at that moment. I collect images that keep catching my eye in films or online, and I write down passages from books that stay with me. I place those images and words next to each other and look for a feeling they share. Once I sense it, I stay with it, imagining it and feeling it as I paint.

While I work, I also write down my thoughts from time to time. In those notes I realized that what I was pursuing was closely tied to the word “in-between”. Finding a word like that feels like finding the last piece of a puzzle. It names thoughts and emotions I had carried for a long time without being able to describe them clearly.

2.

Your path runs from business administration, through design work in the entertainment industry, including album art, to painting full time. How has that route, rather than formal art training, shaped the way you use the canvas?

More than anything, I think it made me freer in the way I use color. Rather than choosing colors by the relationships and theories taught in art education, I choose them according to my emotions. Because of that, my use of color feels freer and has become one of the distinctive features of my work.

3.

In your statement, the figures don’t belong to a fixed place, whether floor, air, or something else. How do you decide, painting by painting, how much ground to give a body and how much to take away?

I don’t want the viewer to know exactly where the figure is. Standing on the ground, lying in the sky, floating on the sea: I prefer not to give a clear answer. I think that’s because I don’t see space as only physical. I also see it as an extension of consciousness, and the place we are in changes depending on how we experience it.

When I decide how much space to give a figure, the most important thing is the tension within the canvas. I want the spaces that form around the figure to hold different kinds of tension, some calm and stable, others unstable and intense.

4.

You describe the gaze in these paintings as awake, but settled on nothing. Is that gaze yours, the figure’s, or something that exists only between the two of you?

When I wrote that, I was describing the gaze of the figures in the paintings. But I think viewers, myself included, feel something similar as we look at them. It’s also the kind of gaze I aspire to. I don’t like being fixed in place or attached to a single point. Rather than a gaze trained on one clear destination, I’m drawn to one that doesn’t fully settle anywhere, yet isn’t vague or absent. It stays awake inwardly.

5.

You write that staying inside instability is what moves you forward, rather than something to resolve. Was there a moment, in the studio or outside it, when you understood that clearly, rather than simply felt it?

It came toward the end of my previous series, Floating in Between. While I was working on it, I had no particular problem, strong emotion, or clear direction, and I spent that time drifting, unable to move toward anything. I kept painting in that state. By the end of the series I had found a new feeling: after drifting for so long, I wanted to put both feet back on the ground and move forward again, wherever that might lead. I also realized that I feel more stable when I’m moving than when I’m standing still.

I’m sure I will keep repeating this cycle of staying, moving, and staying again. Now I think that remaining still isn’t the same as stopping. It’s a time of preparing to move forward again. I think I realized this while walking through a park near my studio whenever I felt stuck in my work.

6.

From The Thinking People to Walking in Between to Floating in Between, what has changed in how you paint the in-between state? Is it the same sensation in a new place, or is the sensation itself shifting?

I think each series explores a different meaning and range of “in-between”.

The Thinking People dealt with the most personal and internal kind of in-between. The paintings came from the thoughts and questions that remained unresolved within me.

In Walking in Between, the series where I first became aware of “in-between” as a central theme, my focus moved beyond my inner world to the space between myself and the outside. I was thinking about the time I spent inside and outside my studio, and about my relationships with other people.

In Floating in Between, I moved past those everyday questions and painted a state of drifting and simply remaining within that in-between space.

Until then, I had thought of “in-between” mainly as a boundary. In the new work I’m making now, I’m beginning to see it as a connection instead. The way I look at “in-between” itself has changed, and I’m curious to discover where these paintings will lead me.

7.

You mention working, earlier on, through emotional fractures and the distances that form inside relationships. Do you think of painting as a way to close that distance, or to stay honestly inside it?

For me, painting is very much like therapy. When I bring the problems I carry inside me into my work, painting offers its own kind of answer. After going through many stages, I no longer feel that I have to force myself to close those distances. My work tells me instead that it’s all right to remain there for a while, or even to find another way forward.

8.

When you begin a new canvas, does an image arrive first, or does the ambiguous space come first, with the figure something you find inside it?

I don’t think of the figure and the space as separate. To me, they continue into one another. I enjoy discovering the new spaces that appear when the lines and shapes of a figure are placed within a space, and that’s how I build a painting.

9.

If someone stood in front of one of these paintings and asked you where the figure is, on the floor, in the air, in another world, what would you want him or her to sit with instead of an answer?

I’d first want to know where he or she feels the figure is. Then I’d ask why he or she felt that way. I’m less interested in explaining what I intended than in hearing what the viewer experienced and why.

10.

Looking back at your first solo show in Bukchon, and forward to your next body of work, what feels most different in how you see your own paintings now?

To continue from my last answer, the biggest change is that I no longer see “in-between” as a boundary but as a connection.

After working through many of the contradictory emotions I had carried for so long, and the questions I had about relationships, I feel that my perspective has opened into a much wider space. Perhaps the way I look at myself and the world has also become warmer and more hopeful.

These days I no longer feel that I’m standing between two opposite paths, trying to decide which way to go. I feel that I exist in the space that connects one place to another within an endless landscape. When I look quietly at the sea, there are moments when I feel I have become part of it. The sound of the wind and the waves fills my ears. The horizon, where sea and sky meet, appears faintly before my eyes. I feel the wind and the scent of the ocean on my skin. In those moments I’m no longer separate from the sea. That feeling is what I want to call connection.