Weight of Leaving — 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

Weight of Leaving, 아빠의 캐리어, 옷, 가방, 위생랩, 테이프, 레진, 가변설치, 2025
Dad’s travel trunk, clothes, bag, fabric, plastic wrap, tape, resin, variable installation
photo © KyeongJin Nam

This is an installation work that reveals the material conditions of migration and displacement through embodied objects. A father's suitcase functions as a tool for movement, yet the clothes that should have been carried within it remain hardened into a heavy, solidified mass, cured in resin. Clothing, as a repository of bodily scent and trace, is an extension of the body itself — but in the moment of hardening, it transforms into a monument that seals identity in place. The mobility that should be free and light is inverted into a fixed stigma, and departure is revealed not as liberation but as a weight that persists, like tears. This work fractures the romanticizing gaze that narrates migration as a story of choice and freedom, rendering visible the materiality of loss — inscribed upon the body even after leaving, refusing to disappear.