have a mother — 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

have a mother, 종이에 에칭, 20x15cm, 2024
Etching on paper

This is an etching work derived as an independent piece from a single page of the mother's diary previously encountered in Two Half Homelands. On that page, traces of repeated handwriting practice of the phrase "have a mother" coexist alongside childhood scribbles left by my own hand, with two generations of time layered upon a single sheet of paper. The act of learning a language and the act of leaving a scrawl are both modes of inscribing marks onto a surface, revealing the strata of identity formed within an immigrant household — moving back and forth between a mother tongue and an acquired language.