My work explores how objects shift in meaning and value as they move between places and contexts. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, I use ordinary objects and architectural and industrial materials—fences, barriers, security devices, coins, furniture, military ribbons, and building fragments.

These materials embody systems of order and control: they establish boundaries, regulate movement, assign value, and organize social space. By altering, combining, and repositioning them, I unsettle their intended functions to examine how power, protection, exclusion, memory, and value become embedded in everyday environments. A fence can embody both protection and exclusion; a security device can promise safety while enabling surveillance; a coin can shift between currency, commodity, and sculpture. My work thrives on the tension between rigid structures that seek to stabilize experience and dynamic forces that unsettle, dissolve, and reconfigure them.

As an immigrant moving between Korean and English, my experience has deepened my interest in how meaning shifts across languages and contexts. Like language, objects are transformed as they move from one place to another, leaving something behind while acquiring new meanings. I view this movement not merely as physical displacement, but as a process through which objects accumulate, lose, and transform their cultural and symbolic associations.

My perspective is shaped by the histories of authoritarianism, rapid modernization, and democratization in Korea, as well as by migration. Living in the United States allows me to reconsider these histories within a different social and political landscape while observing American society from a position of cultural and social displacement. My work emerges from this unsettled position—a space where order and disruption, protection and exclusion, stability and displacement continuously intersect, and where identity is continually negotiated and reconfigured.