My path to art began in the classroom. As a professor of communication, I discovered that the theories I taught—how silence spreads, how perception shapes what we believe is real—became clearest when I gave them visual form. What began as diagrams for students became a practice of its own: the realization that some ideas can only be fully thought in color, form, and space. I brought with me everything the academy taught me—research, psychology, the study of how meaning moves through culture—and turned it toward painting.

 

At the heart of my practice is the belief that materials possess their own agency. Paint, beeswax, hanji, wood, metal, folded paper—each carries properties and histories that shape the work as surely as my hand does. Meaning is not applied to a surface; it emerges between perception and matter, in the resistance and generosity of the material itself.

 

In recent years this inquiry has drawn me home—to the visual language of Korea, where I was born and raised. The moon jar, bojagi, Ilwolobongdo, obangsaek: these serve as points of departure rather than historical references. Through geometric abstraction, layered color, and spatial reconfiguration, I examine how cultural memory evolves across time, geography, and identity—not preserving tradition as a fixed image of the past, but revealing its continuing relevance within contemporary life.

 

Each work begins as a conceptual seed—a question shaped by research, memory, and intuition—and unfolds through the dialogue between artist, material, and form. Across realism, abstraction, and surrealism, the same questions return: what a vessel holds, what a color remembers, what stillness makes possible. Form, texture, and pattern balance intellectual rigor with visual pleasure, so that meaning arrives through the senses first.