Catalogue

Portfolio

EchoesəvYourFace

This participatory art installation comprises three abstract paintings and 143 interactive LED lights, which respond in real time to the emotions in audiences' facial expressions, detected by a camera using an AI face-recognition model. The detected data transforms the colour, movement, and intensity of the interactive LED lights illuminating the abstract paintings.

Rather than simply identifying a single primary emotion, the AI subtly incorporates secondary emotions, such as traces of surprise within a happy expression, enabling intriguing and nuanced combinations in the light sequences. When multiple viewers' faces are recognised simultaneously, each person's primary and secondary emotions mix, producing unpredictable and varied combinations.

The three main paintings displayed for the interactive installation (Fragments I, II, III) capture the swirling of feelings in an abstract style. It is about the sensation felt while wandering and searching for something, floating and suspended in space. Then, suddenly, every form of emotion overwhelms the viewer, surrounding them and drawing them somewhere among the fragments of memory. It is like a rush of feelings rising from within, like thousands of petals drifting without destination, tangled, spiralling, pulling each other close. It is as if every portion of memory comes rushing in, producing a chaotic longing before letting it drift away, forlornly. This installation is created in collaboration with Dr Luca Franceschi, a machine learning scientist.

EchoesəvYourFace

EchoesəvYourFace

Innerscape

A series of imagined emotional landscapes, each accompanied by its own soundtrack, played on the gayageum, a traditional Korean 12-string instrument, composed and performed by the artist.

This series traces the confusing, unsettling experience she went through while becoming someone different over time. It grows out of life between different places and cultures, where belonging is always partial and the sense of home stretches, blurs, and sometimes slips away.

Each painting captures the feeling of standing on the boundary between two spaces, absorbing the overwhelming influence of a new environment while feeling a growing distance from the home country. Moments of confusion, constant adaptation, and the sensation of never fully belonging to either side are expressed in these inner landscapes. When the question of ‘what is the truest version of oneself?’ constantly circles, the certainty of identity blurs, the self feels unstable and strained to its limit, and the emotions and memories shaken by different expectations and meanings appear as 'Innerscape'.

The melodies of the gayageum strengthen the emotion of the artist finding herself where different cultures clash. These soundtracks contribute to a multi-sensory experience, fusing sound and colour into a more intended emotional state. This allows viewers to do more than look at the landscape; they feel its rhythm, tension, and subtle inner changes as if walking through her memory.

▶Listen to the soundtrack

▶Listen to the soundtrack

Innerscape

▶Listen to the soundtrack

▶Listen to the soundtrack

The Misty Heaven

This is the first series to capture the artist's working method, which involves an interplay between spontaneity and control.

One sketch showing objects floating within a misty, dreamlike space recalled the ascending saints found in the works of Old Masters, which became a motif for her works. Their dynamic compositions, fantastical moods, elegant styles, and balanced relationships among figures influence her art.

The artist has an instinctive desire to control, even while occasionally longing for a spontaneous approach to life. This duality is reflected in the creative process. Free, unconscious brushstrokes gradually coalesce into recognisable forms. Through the intentional shaping of these figures, the process goes through unexpected moments of creation. Objects floating within the composition, rendered in dark or intense hues with dynamic brushwork and fluid motion, evoke a sense of movement and vitality. In contrast, bright, serene colours and soft textures create a static, misty atmosphere that balances this dynamism.

The Misty Heaven

The Misty Heaven

Dance (Hani-mation)

A portrait of the artist made through movement, holding her emotion as it came, before shaping. What started as improvised motion in her Berlin studio grew into a quiet refusal of fixed identity, of social structure, of the expectations gathered around her. The work is a declaration made on impulse, a rite in which she lets herself go completely by way of rhythm, memory, and feeling.

Collage I of 9 'Dance' — 80 x 57 cm, Oil and Acrylic on paper, 2024

In front of a camera triggered by remote, she captures moments of moving freely, mostly to melancholic songs with a few upbeat ones mixed in, gathering more than 400 photographs. The method places her outside anyone else's looking and kept her fully inside the moment, so that what matters is not her appearance but what she feels. With makeup, costume, and outward performance set aside, she wants an honest presence to surface, that of a woman, a Korean, an artist, making her way through the complexity of life in another country. It is, essentially, an act of shaking the body back and forth in order to hold tightly onto a soul.

Dance (Hani-mation)

Choosing nudity here is not simply about symbolizing freedom in a Western context. It is an act of exposure that allows emotion to be revealed completely, and is a direct meeting with the awkwardness and fragility that being unclothed brings. This is especially true for an artist raised in Korea, where nudity is not widely regarded as a common means of self-expression, and so the choice carries an even more distinctive meaning.

Collage II of 9 'Dance' — 80 x 57 cm, Oil and Acrylic on paper, 2024

The work holds Berlin's freedom and creative charge together with the grey landscape beneath it, the loneliness, the moments of alienation. Here, dance is at once how she shows herself and a language through which she expresses the emotional terrain of the city. Berlin is a place where freedom, solitude, fragility, and a sense of helplessness all arrive together. To live in another country is to translate yourself without end. As the woman she used to be grows faint with time, 'Dance (Hani-mation)' reaches for her, a hand extended quietly to remember her and to find her again.

Chopin

This series began with the artist's passion for Frédéric Chopin’s music, expressing his melodies through visual art. Giving in entirely as the music overwhelms her with emotion, the artist keeps each movement completely instinctive. Without looking at the surface, the brush flows naturally across wet paper with acrylic ink.

Sometimes the focus narrows to a single passage, capturing its pure spirit in a single moment. Other times, a whole musical piece becomes the entire art piece. A single Chopin nocturne repeats in the background during the work, allowing fresh brushstrokes to respond to and overlap with what came before. Every new listen sparks a different feeling, leaving behind a physical buildup of emotion on the paper.

This body of work shows exactly how the artist’s bond with classical music becomes a practical way of making art. This straight line from sound to art creation is growing into the 'AfterThoughts' project, where visual art and music meet to express philosophical ideas.

Untitled — 36 x 48 cm each, Oil pastel, Acrylic ink on paper 310 g/m², 2025

Chopin

Untitled — 36 x 48 cm each, Acrylic ink on paper 310 g/m², 2025

Untitled — 36 x 48 cm each, Acrylic ink on paper 310g/m², 2024

Connection

Gazing down at the city lights from a plane window, the artist caught herself thinking that the world is woven entirely from a vast web of relationships. Some connections grow from a heartfelt bond, while others originate from the weight of obligation. Within that space, the boundary between what is freely chosen and what is maintained out of necessity frequently blurs. Human connections are brilliantly beautiful, yet at times they can heavily burden the mind.

Allowing instinct to guide her hands, she moves the brush across wet paper, moving between spontaneity and control. Each time the ink seeps into the surface, the bleeds and dots generate unpredictability, and from that specific moment she finds the intentional forms that can only bloom there. Lines that extend thick and thin, sometimes trembling and sharp, become the delicate and hazy boundaries within our ties, showing the intricate complexity of human relationships. Much like the facets of life shaped by the intersection of intention and chance, she wants to capture on canvas the dual nature of these connections, the coexistence of their beauty and their weight.

Ongoing Project: AfterThoughts

Questions like 'What is life, and how should one live it?', 'What kind of being am I, with what thoughts and struggles?', and 'How should I view the world around me?' came to feel closer than ever to the artist. She feels a longing for depth of thought, and an uncertainty in her attitude toward everyday life. Saying that she never used to belong to the kind of person who reads books helps explain her current behaviour.

After Liberty

John Stuart Mill's 『On Liberty』, which she began reading last December, was deepening the questions that had been vaguely surfacing in her mind. First published in 1859, its discussions of individuality and freedom, the diversity of circumstance and individual development, and the warning against the tyranny of the majority provoked a fierce inner reaction in her.

Though these might feel like obvious truths from today's perspective, it felt like clenched fists pounding again and again at the society she had lived in, the environment she had lived in, and the thoughts she had lived by. A curiosity for philosophical questions and reflection arose in her. She read, one after another, Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and the Zhuangzi, and the list of books she wanted to read next kept growing by the day.

The emotional stirrings brought on by passages from these books passionately pushed her toward abstract visualization and musical composition. 『On Liberty』 is the very first meeting point of art and philosophy for her. This process of boldly looking into a philosophical message, reflecting on it, and talking it through will become not only a subject for art but an important material that colours her life anew.

After Liberty