Introduction

I decided to write this “introduction” because I felt it necessary to explain why and for what purpose I am participating here at 벗(but) before sharing my writing.

I have usually thought that the artist's intention doesn’t really matter to the viewer. Because I myself also believed that a work, after its birth, becomes an independent entity, leaving its parents’ embrace and acquiring its own time and history. Nevertheless, since all beings, once born, come to ask why they were born and why they came to exist here, I felt obliged to reveal my thoughts to represent my works.

I have been working with ceramics since 2015, nearly a decade now. The environment in which I work reflects the perspective and interests of a woman born in 1995, educated in Korea.

My favorite words are freedom and compassion.

The field of ceramics begins with minerals and oxides–limestone, silica, feldspar, iron oxide, and copper oxide–formed deep in the earth, over vast periods of time. In today’s society, where the origins, methods of production, and processes of distribution behind the materials that make up things are gradually erased, this medium, which allows me to independently study substances from materials to production methods, has taught me freedom and an ethical sensibility. I realized that it could function as the language of our times.

From my student days, it wasn’t the minute layers hidden behind the names of clay and glaze that I was interested in; initially, I was interested in the chemical reactions brought about by temperature. It created forms, colors, and textures I had never seen before. These phenomena stirred in me a sense of what I would call 'contingency,' and gave me a feeling that there exists some absolute formula constituting the world that I cannot sense directly. I experienced the thrill of discovery in the process of revealing that hidden formula as phenomenon. The sense of wonder, surprise, and marvel that 'contingency' brings us feels all the more dramatic because its causes remain unclear. That drama will continue as long as we live as human beings.

The contingency I came to sense through ceramics expanded into connections with the world, from my own birth to encounters with those around me, and at times to lovers, news articles, wars, disease, and death. The chemical results I discovered while kneading and firing minerals and oxides reminded me that everything that makes up the world is composed of chemical substances, that is, elements. This sense of things expanded my perception of inorganic matter, which I had assumed would exist forever, and blurred the boundary between the living and the nonliving. Within this sensation that everything is connected—encompassing even concepts thought to be opposites—I began writing down, in informal prose, what I felt in daily life and in my practice. I am grateful that these raw writings were met with an affectionate eye and that I was invited to share them here. It was with joy that I was able to gather and organize writings I would have kept putting off had I been on my own. I wish to share the writings produced in that process as well, and to make this space both a companion to my practice and a site of communication that traverses a long stretch of time.

In conclusion, I’m not sure how I arrived at this place in this era of hyper-connection. I hope this encounter, transcending time and space, may give rise to another new contingency.

• I write these pieces in short sentences, numbered 1, 2, 3, regardless of year or theme.
• The title was inspired by my favorite film director Hirokazu Koreeda’s autobiography
  
  

  

1. Soil made me wonder how the world was created. When I first touched clay and fired it, I felt that there was an incomprehensible realm between myself and the world. That unknown realm felt like God’s formula. I live in a world before firing. Our world—one that passes beyond the incomprehensible realm and returns to the comprehensible. (2024.01.10)

2. When I sleep, I often experience what is called sleep paralysis. Even with my eyes closed, I see the spaces of my room, or I have the tactile sensation of someone in my dream caressing me, when nobody’s there. It happens especially when I’m taking a nap. What happens in dreams disappears immediately. The clarity I had when I just woke up disappears, and I rise with a heavy head, cutting through the air. Even in my dreams, I’m not alone. (2025.05.28)

3. “Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculptor with wax. And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something else. Each exists only briefly. It does the container no harm to be put together, and none to be taken apart.” Meditations 7:23, Marcus Aurelius

I opened Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations before going to sleep, and today this sentence lingers in my mind. Sometimes I fire the same piece several times. Then, it changes from its original state. If I refire a piece upright that was first fired lying down, its form changes. Even if I fire something according to a recipe, it does not always result in an identical form. Even the things that look finished can be broken apart and fired again. Within this infinite cycle of possibility, I ask myself, as I myself am merely a piece of matter, what kinds of characteristics I was born with. (2025.06.18)

4. In August 2024, there were frequent rains that came suddenly and disappeared just as quickly, like sudden showers orsun showers. We found ourselves greeting rain falling from a clear sky. Once, I got on the highway, and the heavy rain before and after the tunnel disappeared in a flash. Heavy rain or light sun shower, this unexpected natural phenomenon sharpened my senses. This brought me back to reality. (2024.08)

5. The Banyan tree I received as a gift two years ago has grown so much that I can no longer count its leaves. Small twigs have sprouted where there were only thick branches. They said I need to prune the small twigs to make it grow upward, but I let them be because I didn’t want to break them with my own hands. The small twigs, here and there, have grown thick, forming a weird shape. The tree, not tamed, solidifying its wildness, is steadily establishing its own territory. It has actually grown so lush that it obstructs passage. (2024.05.01)

6. In our recent conversation, he said, “…being born, I think, is something I had no reason for. Moreover, it certainly was not something I chose; it just happened naturally.” (2024.05.03)

7. Soil is an incredibly spiritual material. When I die someday and am buried in the earth, soil will work together with other organic matter and integrate my existence into this world’s cycle. Perhaps, then, I will be able to lay down the weight of my name. What we call the earth, people, trees, and sky are all but momentary names. Yet, the weight of the name that allows me to call you, find you, and recognize you—that weight tells me you are here. Therefore, while I live on this earth, having weight is important. (2024.05.05/ revised 2026.02.21)

8. In my early twenties, I liked Descartes’s sentence, “I think, therefore I am.” Now, ten years later, I like Stendhal’s “He lived, he wrote, and he loved.” The self, the other, and the nature I cannot control; the uncontrollable things exist inside my human body as well. It is the “breath,” and “sweat,” and “the beating of the heart,” and those uncontrollable things keep me alive. The self, as long as it’s alive, collides with the world since it cannot escape until it exhausts the weight of my name, which was determined before my birth. The blank spaces in our lives bloom out of childhood, the night, the hometown, and the innocence and purity found there. (2024.05.08)

9. If my small work could acquire a small territory in this world, I hope that world will be a place where the self can rest, where it is perfectly okay to lose ‘I’ while being active. However, the weight of my name is so powerful that the ‘I’ becomes clearer and more distinct in everything I encounter in the world. That is why people often turn to alcohol or travel in order to escape that cruelty by losing themselves.
   “Contingency” is like a birth, impulse, collision, encounter, in-yeon(karmic tie), discovery, catalyst, and calling. Contingency is revelatory because it makes the invisible visible. It approaches fatalism through its very act of revealing. I view my work as a stepping stone connecting the self and the environment that surrounds the self, like a hidden origin story of an unknown world. I see soil’s vast embrace as the material through which that revelation and calling can be expressed. (2024.05.08)

10. Today I made about fifty test tiles for glaze experiments. I used a commercially available white porcelain clay. It had been a while since I'd touched clay I hadn't mixed myself, and as I handled the well-blended, springy body, a thought came to me: to treat ceramics as a purely visual medium might be to love only half of what ceramics is. Lately I've been returning to a clock piece I started in 2024. The clocks I made back then were closer to flat forms than three-dimensional ones, but the current work is moving in a more sculptural direction. Still, the hour and minute hands remain blurred.
    Thinking about these clocks, I found myself reflecting on states that are visible but unreadable, present but untouchable. That led me, naturally, to braille—a language that mediates between the seen and the unseen through touch. A surface that can be touched, that invites touch, and that generates meaning not by wearing away but through ever more contact and relation. I wonder if this kind of sensory layering could be realized through the material of ceramics. (2026.03.20)