Baram

Baram brings the invisible and unstable nature of wind onto the surface through simple two-dimensional forms and a range of colors. In Korean, the word baram carries two meanings: wind, the movement of air, and wish, the desire for something to come true. I see these two meanings as overlapping in life.

There are warm, gentle winds in life, and at times there are fierce winds that are difficult to endure. Through simple forms and varied colors, I temper the hardships and turbulence of life within the pictorial surface, while embedding in the work a wish that the winds yet to come will be bokpung (福風, a wind of good fortune).

Baram began with studies I made during a period of uncertainty when I first started painting. One day, the studies scattered across the floor, each marked by irregular forms, began to look like wind. I gathered them and spread them irregularly across a canvas, and in doing so discovered a form for the wind. These studies, which embodied my anxiety and sense of imperfection in painting, came together as a structure within the rectangular canvas. Through this experience, I became interested not in eliminating instability, but in allowing it to exist within a stable structure.

The forms of wind continue to shift and expand as the work develops. In this process, they come to encompass the different forms of instability encountered in life, while expanding the meaning of Baram as a wish for the winds ahead to be winds of good fortune.

Kiwa

Whenever I select timber at a sawmill, there is one part I always check first: the two ends of the board—the end grain. Because end grain is where moisture escapes, it is prone to cracking and warping, and its weaker bonding strength often leads it to be concealed within a structure or discarded. But I use precisely this discarded and hidden part of the wood.

End grain is a cross-section in which the growth rings are cut into a rectangular form. Its pattern reveals how the tree has grown, forming a unique record inscribed by nature. I thought it possessed a pattern too distinctive and beautiful to be discarded or hidden.

After looking closely at end grain over a long period of time, its pattern began to resemble roof tiles layered one upon another to form a tiled roof. A single roof tile is fragile and easily broken, but when many are assembled together, they form the solid structure of a roof. End grain seemed to possess the same quality. I began to regard each piece of end grain as a single roof tile, stacking and arranging them like a tiled roof to create one complete form.

Over a year and a half of working on the series, I carried out hundreds of tests in an effort to prevent the end grain from warping and cracking. Yet, shortly before the exhibition, the completed work cracked and split in the dryness of winter. Ordinarily, I would have repaired the damaged areas, but I chose not to. Instead, I accepted and revealed the natural behavior of the wood as it was.

I had tried to conceal its imperfection, but it surfaced regardless, and this experience changed the way I understood imperfection. Imperfection was no longer simply something to be removed or hidden. It was also an inherent quality of the object—part of its identity. I began to think that a complete form might not be a state without flaws, but a structure that remains intact while containing its imperfections. This led me to question whether a flawless, complete form can exist at all.

From then on, what mattered to me was not transforming something imperfect into something flawless, but allowing its imperfection to remain within the structure of a single form without removing it.