950km — xhdpwl.com

I grew up moving between China and Korea. Conditions that define me — such as nationality, language, and even my birthday — have always made my identity unstable. This experience, which cannot be reduced to a single answer, has become the fundamental question that drives my work. I explore the uncertainty and fractures arising from a borderland identity, and attempt to extend them to a social dimension. Instead of concealing or mending my instability, I reveal and record it, seeking new relationships and meanings through the process.

오예지 Yeji Oh 吴礼智
xhdpwl@naver.com

950km, 판넬에 혼합재료, 162.2x336.3cm, 2024
Mixed media on panel

This is a work that transposes scrawls collected from two cities — Tianjin and Seoul — into abstract painting. These scrawls are anonymous marks inscribed onto the skin of a city: they attest to someone's existence, yet can be erased at any moment on the grounds that they mar the appearance of public space. I reproduce on the canvas the markings gathered from both cities, layering byproducts of memory as physical matter, and in doing so rehabilitate what is being erased into a sculptural language. 950km is both the physical distance between the two cities and the distance of sensory equivalence — the felt recognition that the skin of two different cities is worn away and left behind in the same way.