STATEMENT This series of works, created this year, started with private images as the initial inspiration but gradually shied toward more public images-ones that have already circulated widely or even faded into obscurity. These include magazines from the 1980s and 1990s, early stereoscopic image cards, museum archival photographs, and more anonymous found images. The work reflects my obsession with and affinity for images, and my desire to create connections and intervene in them. The photographs, collages and found images in this exhibition weave together different spaces to create new narratives and explore the materiality of images. I believe the spaces I create, through archival images and my imagination, establish a connection with myself. Simultaneously, I hope to enable viewers to form their own connections with the space and the images-connections mediated by something distant.
When you see a scene and capture it with your phone or tablet, what exactly is your relationship with the image? Or with the scene itself? I’m drawn to what happens aerward-the life of these images, both private and public, as they circulate. These images carry a materiality embedded in their medium, whether paper or another form. When I enlarge images, the printing techniques of the magazine pages become visible. Instead of becoming blurred, the images reveal halone dots. Or I intentionally avoid seamlessly integrating images, leaving traces of colorful tape and hot glue in the process. Could this materiality manifest in new ways?
The images I research and collect are fleeting, symbolic objects that are unattainable or transient. Recently recurring elements include flowers, ceramic vessels, cultural artifacts, and interior spaces from various eras. These visual elements undergo scanning, printing, and repeated iterations; then reconstruction, model-making and image-making. I treat this process as an archaeology of images, revisiting eras I’ve never experienced. From the perspective of an outsider, I seek to understand and even intentionally mistranslate-the past, consciously using images to describe spaces that don’t exist in reality. Through this process, some images shed their original smoothness and instead develop this materiality, moving fluidly between dimensions and spaces.“