Do We Ever Think About What Stays After?, 2026
다 지나간 후에, 남는 것들에 대해 우리는 생각할까
Somehow Desire, Yale Painting/Printmaking MFA Thesis Exhibition
February 7 – 17, 2026
February 7 – 17, 2026
Photo credit: Jackie Furtado, Paloma Dooley
My work moves slowly, like something breathing.
I often think about what stays after something has passed — after a moment, a relationship, or a place we’ve moved through. Paper becomes a way of tracing those quiet residues. These surfaces absorb light, dust, moisture, and touch, allowing the environment to shape their form over time.
Cast skins peeled from temporary structures and lifted grounds formed through exposure to light, dust, moisture, wind, and human presence hold the memory of contact long after the moment has passed. They sag, soften, collapse, and gather themselves again, adapting to the conditions they inhabit, much like we do within the environments and relationships we move through.
Left bare,
the paper acts less as an image than as a witness, holding time within its fibers.
Alongside the work are diary fragments written in Korean, intimate yet not fully accessible.
Their presence marks the passage of time and the assertion of a self moving through it. This tension between legibility and opacity echoes across the surfaces, where tears, stains, and imprints accumulate without a single clear origin.
Together, the works propose a slower way of looking:
to notice subtle forces at work,
to return to what has shaped us, and
to tend gently to what remains as we continue becoming.