Installation view of 《Afterimages of Blurred Boundaries》 (Incheon Art Platform, 2025) © Incheon Art Platform

Artist’s Note (2025)

1. Boundary
Boundaries once clearly existed. The lines that divided inside and outside, you and me, here and there were standards that ordered our world, and by those lines we were able to understand our own positions. Yet at some point, those lines began to slowly blur. Or perhaps, from the beginning, they were never solid supports, but merely unstable divisions drawn temporarily.

2. Collapse
In the end, everything collapsed helplessly. Amid landscapes demolished and overlaid under the name of “redevelopment,” space continually forms new scenery. Among the residues of sensation that gradually sink through several stages, my questions become even clearer.

Where are we standing now?
Is the place on which we stand really the same place as yesterday?

Eum Kixung, The Fantasy of Songwol-dong, 2025, Ceramics, Digital ceramic decal, 36x31x52cm © Eum Kixung

3. Origin
My creation begins from an ambiguous layer of sensation. As I wandered through areas that had become ruins, I collected fragments of time sensed in demolished walls, collapsed structures and debris, and the gaps of vanished routes. In order to compress the numerous layers I had collected, I carry out a more concrete methodological practice as an act of sculpture.

Clay is the sensory skin that holds all these afterimages. Damp clay preserves intact the pressure of the hand and the layers of time. The sculptural surfaces, full of cracks, bends, and flows, summon the physical memory and sensation of the city left behind in an incomplete state. Rather than formal completion, they aim toward a temporary and variable state, expressed as a flow that slowly disappears.

And I explore the collapse of placeness and identity, as well as the emotional strata that seep into the gaps. It is also a metaphor for the invisible lines between memory and oblivion, presence and absence, personal experience and social structure. Perhaps it is a sorrowful affection for things that are collapsing without ever being defined—the presence of space, the temperature of memory, and fragments of fragmented existence.

4. Question
Through this sculptural exploration, I want to ask: What boundaries do we remember, and what boundaries have we lost? And in what ways do the afterimages of those vanished boundaries remain here and now, in my body and senses?

On this blurred and unstable line, I wish to feel out sensations that cannot be spoken in concrete form, the quiet voices of things that are disappearing. In the end, might this work be a material monument for things that disappear, and a sculptural resistance to hold onto what is being forgotten?

5. Traces and New Experiments
In Hyperart Thomasson1), structures and objects on the street that no longer have a use or function are called Thomassons. Perhaps, in the time and space of ruins that have now fallen into the state of Thomassons, I discovered cross-sectional fragments of countless accumulated memories beneath the uniform layers of concrete. At this point, I decide to attempt a new experiment in creation.

Filling the gaps of traces through the method of rubbing, I continue experiments that move across the boundaries between past and present, flat surface and three-dimensional form, hyperart and visual art, through the process of reshaping.


1) Genpei Akasegawa, translated by Seo Hana, Hyperart Thomasson, Ahn Graphics, 2023.

References