2024-ongoing
Statement
The Misdelivered Letter addresses domestic violence. I grew up in a dysfunctional family, subjected to my father’s abuse since childhood. In 2022, I stopped avoiding his fists. A bruise blooming on my eyelid became the first blueprint of this work. But as I focused on physical wounds, I confronted a limitation—how easily such work could fall into self-pity and depression. I began searching for a more delicate approach, one that could evoke shared memory instead.
So I turned to my mother’s story. She endured the same violence alongside me, and at the same time, she was the reason I couldn’t leave. Knowing she had no family of her own, I understood that my leaving would mean abandoning her in pain. I felt guilty for wanting to escape. Caught in a tangle of conflicted emotions between us, I flailed for a long time before I chose literature and photography as my tools of resistance. To live through reality while still speaking out—this artistic act became a kind of compromise. I couldn’t leave, not yet. But I had to speak.
This project offers an alternative perspective on survival. Rather than legal retaliation or physical revenge, I chose quiet—perhaps passive, perhaps hesitant—ways of protecting and revealing. Is this weak, even foolish? Will this work remain unresolved as long as the violence continues? Where does healing begin? I continue to ask. And like the dull ache that lingers in my cheek, I remain uncertain of the ending.
The woman was born in Busan.
When her hometown called to her, she tried to head toward the sea, but her body swelled like the full moon.
Until the moon reached its peak,
the woman worked the sewing machines in a textile factory.
Life stirred in time with the machine’s hum,
and needles kept breaking before her eyes.
Her back curved like a shrimp as she fixed the fabric mishandled by the seamstress,
and the lullabies she played for her baby were mechanical, rhythmless, and keyless.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor said.
She dreamed of a basket of peaches on Olympic Boulevard.
Yesterday, she hemmed the cuffs of her hospital gown,
and today, she lay alone in a sterilized room.
She was used to being alone.
The shell of Saturday was damp.
On the slippery edge of dawn, the baby was born.
The city, riddled with syndromes, could not write its own name.
In the forest of symbols, newborn fingers were traded like commodities.
“Healthy,” the doctor said,
cutting the umbilical cord with surgical scissors.
The placenta supplied the thread for stitches.
Our destination is the Forsythia Plaza.
In a taxi winding through Ogeum-dong,
she thought of a name for the child.
Born in April, when butterflies fall into spring lethargy,
she hoped the baby might resemble something like spring.
But the city’s face was pale and cloudy,
like rust-stained water.
Caught between mistakes and excuses, the woman wept softly.
Magnolia leaves fell on the silent shoulders of the city,
and in the woman’s sleeves, the stamens of flowers ripened.
Someone had once foretold their deaths,
but the curse had dissolved before the birth.
The baby was called a blessing from God.
And so, no one named the girl after a season.
Remembering the Forgotten
Martha was the last known passenger pigeon, a species that went extinct in 1914. In the 18th century, their population was so large that it could darken the sky, but reckless hunting and slaughter led to a dramatic decline.
The Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio attempted to protect the species by housing a pair of pigeons, but the species became extinct after Martha’s death. I saw a parallel between this tragic extinction and the reckless abuse of the vulnerable. In this series, I represented my mother as a symbol of Martha, embodying the fragility and loss of something irreplaceable.
In this work, Martha symbolizes victims of domestic violence, including me and my mother. The last passenger pigeon, Martha, was easily killed due to relentless hunting and human violence. Her story reflects the extinction caused by indiscriminate aggression and the enduring trauma suffered by victims of targeted violence and discrimination.
Martha, with you, the passenger pigeon went extinct.
Once so numerous they darkened the skies,
humans coveted their bones and feathers,
burned forests, set up nets, and aimed guns.
They stole nests.
The sky opened,
but the ground was stained with bone dust,
and red monsoons soaked the grass.
There were days when three hundred tons of bodies piled up.
Amid human mockery, they died easily—
simply because they were born.
A pair raised at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio reminisced about the days they traversed the continent, aging like blueberries.
Hey, Martha, I must leave now.
All night, She dreamed of feathers plucked and falling into a pot.
A cheerful farewell from a friend tickled her ears.
She plucked the deepest feather from my body and pinned it to his chest.
Goodbye, friend.
I mustn’t know sadness,
being the last bird left, like a painting in a cage.
When the sunset turned red, evening came to the zoo.
When the mischievous children left, she pulled out the hidden note from beneath my nest and read it aloud.
Martha interpreted the language written on a maple leaf:
Martha, oh Martha,
it wasn’t your fault, being alone.
A polluted world shot down the migratory birds.
I’ll remember the violet love that lingered in lyricism.
I’ll build you a window and a bean field, just for you.
Martha, oh Martha,
in 1914, she fell from the branch.
With this vertical death, peace perished too.
And so, people called their stolen hope Martha.
Text, Tactility, and the Resistant
I wrote on a scrap of paper,
pages torn thin from a notebook,
the direction skewed just slightly.
Though I couldn’t distinguish sand from tomorrow,
you, audacious one,
knew how to tell hatred from pity.
A sorrow that was omitted all at once.
〒
A bird cried out,
as if it had been exiled.
It’s true I received a heart bundled with oats,
but the sender’s name was missing.
Like a Japanese white-eye flying north from the south,love needs a source.
I felt like a mistaken letter,
〒
On a postcard of blooming canola flowers,
the will of a towering cumulus poured down in blue.
The monsoon mocked unrequited love.
I couldn’t tolerate the anchor who embellished emotions
with thunder or stalled fronts for dramatic effect.
Sadness, like a leaf sinking,
was beautiful only in silence.
You didn’t come before the moon waned.
Every night, I rummaged through the mailbox as if it were a bean field.
But you arrived, addressed to me.
Not once had you sent it to the wrong place.
When my condemned chronicle
broke into lines and stanzas in your notebook,
I failed to notice who the original metaphor referred to—
or that I had once been a bird.
Though you often caught colds,
when your angry coughs were veiled by the daytime moon,
we could never part in the end.
I stroked your fevered back.
To me, cast out by the world, you—
you were spring and a poet.
I was your eternal recipient,
so at dawn, I etched you into scraps of paper.
The phrase shows the will to confront domestic violence through art, not physical force. This mobile comprises 23 fabric letters, each sewn with a sewing machine and stuffed with cotton to create pillow-like forms. The letters are suspended at varying heights and angles and arranged in a seemingly random order.
I chose fabric as the medium because of my mother, a seamstress. Sewing became a metaphor for not only my personal confrontation with violence but also our shared experience. This design makes the phrase initially unreadable, encouraging viewers to spend time deciphering the message.
This obscurity reflects contrasting attitudes toward violence. The softness of the material symbolizes my mother’s approach—choosing forgiveness and acceptance as her way of coping with my father’s actions. However, my decision to obscure the message conveys my struggle to fully embrace this approach, encouraging reflection on the complexities of resilience and response.
The handmade box set below is a crafted collection to engage viewers through touch and reflection. It contains a 100-page photobook with six original poems, a handwritten letter, a double-sided poster, a paper folder holding postcards, and a fallen leaf. The box and its contents are assembled by hand, using paper and glue, except for the photobook’s text block. By emphasizing craftsmanship and the physical experience of interacting with the materials, this piece invites viewers to slow down, connect with the tactile qualities of the work, and immerse themselves in the personal narratives woven throughout.