We yearn for our lost continuity.” – Georges Bataille

This longing, as Bataille described, is bound to the sacred — sought through eroticism, and more precisely, through the transgression of what is prohibited. In my work, this yearning resonates with the prohibited demands of vorarephilia: the desire to consume and be consumed, to dissolve the boundaries between self and other.

My art practice is an exploration of absence, memory, and love, realized through figures wandering layers of memory, holding hopes of fleeting fulfillments — events that arise suddenly and vanish just as quickly. The figures and gestures that emerge on the canvas are continually striving; they expand and contract, always arriving and receding within memory.

These wandering figures take root in the Korean ritual of Gijesa — a Confucian mourning rite in which ancestors are honored at dawn on the anniversary of their death, with offerings of food prepared the night before. I reimagine this cultural practice as an imaginary space where absent loves might be temporarily encountered, recognized in their incompleteness. The act of painting becomes my own ritual: a ceremony of mourning, invocation, and the summoning of the “yet not appeared.”

Each work unfolds through three essential components: Figure (Actor), Gesture (Act), and Ground (Table). I position myself as both host and guest — preparing the space, inviting others, and embodying multiple forms within the canvas. The figures, as extensions of myself, are laid upon the table as offerings, sacrifices, and witnesses.

Every painted gesture is both devotion and disruption. The figure emerges from the ground, contracting and expanding through strata of memory, moving in a state of stillness within motion (靜中動). These gestures pierce the fabric of structured desires, allowing intimacy, loss, and the fleeting, contingent presence of fulfillment to coexist. In this way, my paintings are not mere depictions but sites of transgression — spaces where the sacred, the prohibited, and the ephemeral events of yearning meet.