Installation view of 《Takvonsuzip Project 01 - Site Records》 (Buyeon, 2026) © Eum Kixung. Photo: Choi Chul Lim.

Humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, translated by Sim Seunghee and Gu Donghoe, Daeyoon, 2005.) proposed “Space” and “Place” as key frameworks for understanding the world we experience as we live, and stated that vague and abstract space becomes a place imbued with attachment only when it passes through human experience and memory.

Furthermore, he defined the human body, bound to its environment through the senses, as “place,” and the human mind, released from such sensory bonds, as “space.” The “place” that I focus on here is constantly transforming, and the traces of time accumulated on its surface unknowingly enter a trajectory of disappearance.

Whether it is part of a city artificially designed by humans or land weathered within the order of nature, everything that exists evaporates without exception before the weathering of time.

The ‘Takvonsuzip Project’, which began last year, is an uncompromising and archaeological act of archiving: I walk into rapidly changing and dry sites, press my body against the physical skin of the city, which seems as though it might soon flow away, and restore it to the level of material existence.

Here, “rubbing” does not remain merely at the instrumental level of visually reproducing or restating a specific place or object. Rather than being a final result that fixes an object, it is closer to an initial medium that physically awakens and taps on the life and history held by a place.

Installation view of 《Takvonsuzip Project 01 - Site Records》 (Buyeon, 2026) © Eum Kixung. Photo: Choi Chul Lim.

The exhibition 《Takvonsuzip Project 01 – Site Records》, held in this context, includes new works ranging from the flat series Songwol-dong Red Clay (mined clay on ceramic plate, 31x62cm, 2026), which analyzes geological samples as raw materials and translates them into flat surfaces, to the mixed-media series Terra-Cart (2-channel sound, speakers, mined clay, steel plate, wheels, wires, photographs, dimensions variable, 2026), which shows the process of dislocating the placeness of a place and moving it into another time and space.

Here and now, I would like to share the results of a series of small projects that, based on field studies conducted from last year to early this year, sought to redefine geographical indicators and gradually create an ontological journey of materials crossing time and space.

References