In my country, South Korea, a pressing crisis is unfolding: the disappearance of children. The elementary school I attended is now on the brink of closure due to a drastic decline in student enrollment, which has halved since my time there. Our birth rate is falling more rapidly than in other OECD countries, making it a critical issue. It's alarming how our government and society are not addressing this problem with the urgency it deserves. Amid rampant inflation, soaring housing prices, and increasing marital breakdowns, this issue only becomes more dire.

Walking through the streets, I encounter numerous playgrounds, mere minutes apart, in my city near Seoul. Yet, these spaces are eerily void of children. This stark reality inspired my project, No More Children in My Motherland. Capturing images of deserted playgrounds was hauntingly effortless; devoid of their intended users, these vibrant structures stood like functionless sculptures. What were once symbols of hope have become visual representations of a dystopian reality, a sorrowful landscape alarmingly close to my reality.

The creative process of this project mirrored a game of hide-and-seek: myself, the photographer, in search of the elusive subjects - the children. This quest began at a playground just 200 feet from my home and expanded to the southernmost island. Over the course of years, encounters with children were a rarity. If no effective solutions are implemented, South Korea faces a risk of fading into obscurity. My project represents a personal crusade to report on and halt this impending disaster.

sequence

book archive

PhMuseum︎︎︎

Your Local News Stand︎︎︎

Cargo.Photo︎︎︎

POYAsia︎︎︎

playgrounds map

︎︎︎/imagine prompt
: a swimming pool for artist

     The series /imagine prompt: a swimming pool for artist is generated by an AI image generator program Midjourney, and it is an assemblage of personal imagination toward artists’ swimming pool as the title literally indicates. The title is literally the command used to make this series. The author wrote down the command as simple as possible to let AI use its creativity. Creativity. It is not an exclusive human property anymore. Create means to make new thing based on accumulated data. When it comes to data, AI has already been overwhelmed individuals. So the author strived to imagine posthumous and contemporary artist’s swimming pool in this work. The author spent several days and nights to select photographs. Some photographs came out meaningfully, and others not. The process repeated over and over. The author spent most of time to select images. Finally, more than a hundred photographs came out as final results.

     The photographer was still her, not AI, as she was still final decision-holder. Who press the shutter button is not important anymore. Shutter releases are even unnecessary. Concept and context became everything. Before subject matter, the author focused on what types of photographs can only exist in AI world, not in the real world. In this point, it joins with her point of view: one has to choose the best medium to express certain message. She always think of ‘what kind of subjects can be only available or the most meaningful by taking photographs?’. And she has to consider one more thing ― which one is the best subject matter Then she finally came up with the topic ― swimming pools of admired artists. There's also a handmade book case with this Ai photo book. It is made by ceramic tiles, silicon, paper clay, and hard paper. The contrast between the Ai book and the handmade case makes this project look more aesthetic.

     This project is invited to the <2023 docking!> which is a public offering program that helps the publication of the author's first book working in the field of visual art. It was started in 2018 by the same people in VOSTOK PRESS︎︎︎, and published the first books of three photographers with different personalities for three years.

host｜whatreallymatters
plan｜VOSTOK PRESS

❷ DUMMY AWARD ‘24︎︎︎

     The Dummy Award is the international competition for the best unpublished photobook dummies of the year.

The Dummy Award, formerly known as the Kassel Dummy Award, is the international competition for the best unpublished photobook dummies of the year. Starting 2023 the PhotoBookMuseum, Cologne together with its sponsor and partner MAS Matbaa; Istanbul has taken over the award and will lead it into a bright future.

The swimming pool book is selected for this shortlist! The final rank will be announced in 2025.

❸ Group Exhibition
<Fake is Real> @CICA Museum︎︎︎

 <Fake is Real> is a group exhibition of Ai artworks which is held at CICA Museum in April, 2024.

❹ Group Exhibition
<Dummy Book San Dumee> @00.00.Seoul︎︎︎

 The Pigeon Posts is a selfmade newspaper which is a hommage of The New York Times. In the form of a prestigious newpaper, project Pigeon Phobia is based on personal phobia toward birds ― particularly city pigeons.
By collecting these images·information·texts of pigeons, I tried to overcome phobia and look pigeons aesthetically.

 And all of information about the project is inside of the newspaper.

 e.g. inspiration, process, meaning …

 So I highly recommend you to read this newpaper ︎︎︎HERE  and ︎︎︎︎.

This project was initially displayed at 00 Space by participating Dividing the Pie, a squat exhibition  in July 2023.

 It was displayed only for 3 days in summer. 10 newpapers were displayed and 2 of 10 were taken away after the exhibition. Actually, it was not allowed to take newpapers but it happened.
It was predictable happening as I didn’t write down any words like Do not Take it.

#2 NEWBODIES/NOBODIES
at King’s Street Gallery, Montgomery College, MR, U.S.A.

This project was also displayed at King’s Street Gallery by participating NEWBODIES/NOBODIES, a group exhibition  from March to April, 2024.

      This project is is a photographic journey to find subjects who have the same birthday as the photographer have. It is a series of collecting their portraits and still lives. Its purpose is to meet a various set of people based on unchangeable personal information and to photograph them in order to forge fraternal connections between the subjects and the photographer. Same birthday is an unique set-up to meet various people and situation. The photographer believes this project maximize the surrealistic point of reality when these photographs are displayed with their titles which give information about their same birthday. These portraits also act as the photographer’s various self-portraits. It is an effort to make the deepest personal images that she can take, to reflect herself through them, and to realize herself. This project not only includes the portraits but also still lives of subjects’ memorable birthday presents that is received in the past, or cakes which the photographer prepared for their coming birthday. These products play a role as a visual bridge between them(portraits) and their birthday(cakes), or them(subjects) and her(photographer), or even pasts(last birthdays) and futures(coming birthdays). The artist believes it is the largest image-world that she could personally imagine and own.

     In the end of this project, there is a plan to invite every ‘birthday brothers’ to a grand birthday party and take a group portrait. The photographer hope this last photograph could suggest a brand new aesthetics to viewers. Through people whose age is exactly 365 days apart, she expect that every ages of her ego are going to be found. Viewers could reminisce the past from younger subjects, and imagine the future from older subjects. After that, it is about equality regardless of not only age but also gender, nationality, etc, as the artist is going to expand this image-world as broad as possible untill she die.

     I have always been an image collector, since I’ve got a private telephone ― when I was just 9-years-old. I was indiscriminate in collecting pictures on the net to change my lock screen or wall paper put in on the screen. It was the first time that I became to be possessive toward image. To collect unique and unidentified pictures was my only hobby through which I could display my personal taste. I surfed Tumblr or Pinterest and made a collection of pictures all day. When I arrived at puberty, I remember my profile picture was once a toughly photoshop-ed, low-resolution picture of a pink centipede. My adolescent sensitivity used to be consoled by such fragments of superficial image. This is the reason why my body of work looks like ostensibly instant, random, spontaneous, and fancy. However, I never want commercial photographs ultimately. My purpose as a photographer is to give shape to my image-world by incorporating my imagination into reality. Image-world exists in the gap between real world and my own reality. What I see and experience is not reality for other people. I hope to show this personal world through my photographs. This type of surrealism only exists in photography, not in other media, as its surrealistic point paradoxically comes from real world. This is why I called it image- world.

    This is fully fruity photography project practiced in 2022. ‘Tutti frutti’ means “every fruits” from Italian.  It consists of 26 artificially processed fruits that starts with 'from A to Z' and now other fruits are added.

     This project is practiced across ideological images and fantasies of fruitsthat personally thinks of. Some characteristics were needed enough to be exaggerated, while I felt free from the rules of ‘fruits should be like this’ at the same time. Images harshly distorted until it arrived to my personal ideology about fruits. The process repeated until image seems fully expressthe physical combination of punctum and studium about fruits.

     Insadong-gil is the main street of Insadong, which is connected to a multitude of alleys that lead deeper into the district, with modern galleries and tea shops. Historically, it was the largest market for antiques and artwork in Korea.