L) Snowy village #25.1, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2025, 72.7x53 Cm    R) Snowy village #24.1, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2024, 116.7X91 Cm

 

 

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3. What process do you go through when developing a new work, from concept to completion?

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I love traveling. For me, travel is not simply movement to an unfamiliar place, but a process of temporarily stepping outside familiar systems of perception and thought in order to see the world through a renewed perspective. In that sense, travel itself becomes an extension of my artistic practice and another form of creative process.

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In some cities, I find myself captivated by traces of time embedded in old architectural walls. In others, the expressions of passing strangers or the colors of the streets remain vividly in my memory. Sometimes I even imagine compositional structures while walking through unfamiliar alleys. Rather than searching only for extraordinary scenes, I try to absorb the atmosphere and emotional texture of each place. Over time, these sensations re-emerge within my work in transformed visual forms.

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Travel also leads me to reflect deeply on relationships. Even within unfamiliar languages and cultures, people understand and communicate through eye contact, gestures, and atmosphere. This is possible because we naturally acknowledge that we come from different cultural backgrounds — an idea closely connected to my Imagine series. Travel also greatly influences my sense of color. The tones and moods I experience in different places accumulate within my memory and later appear as colors and lines in my paintings.

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Unexpected encounters often occur during travel, and sometimes the greatest inspiration comes from unplanned places and moments. I deeply value these accidental experiences. Before beginning a new body of work, I intentionally step away from daily life and travel, even briefly. This process reconnects me with the world and becomes the seed of new work. While travel allows me to encounter a broader world, it also brings me face to face with myself.

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These experiences are translated into layered narratives of color and relationships through diverse materials and multiple visual layers. I work with acrylic paint, fabric, paper, newspaper, and mixed media using drawing, collage, and action painting techniques to build dense textured surfaces. The process through which different materials merge to create new imagery becomes, for me, the very beginning of communication. I then connect these layers through lines that complete the composition.

This process takes considerable time. Waiting itself becomes an extension of communication and requires patience and restraint. I constantly question where to connect, how far to continue, and when to stop. I spend long hours facing the canvas, engaging in an ongoing dialogue with the work until it reaches completion. I often feel that artworks, too, can only be completed through care, attention, and love.

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4. What inspires your work, and how does your surrounding environment influence your creative process?

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For a long time, I have had the habit of transforming fleeting moments from everyday life into visual images. I am drawn to simplifying the shapes of mountains, buildings, people’s expressions, shadows, and ordinary objects into abstract visual forms. For example, I may be inspired by people sitting in a café looking in different directions, faces absorbed in smartphones on the subway, or reflections of light spreading across wet streets on a rainy day.

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I mentally translate these scenes into circles, squares, triangles, or cylindrical forms and store them within my memory. These visual fragments accumulate emotionally and later emerge within my work. Through this process, ordinary moments are transformed into abstract colors, lines, and forms that convey emotional movement and relational flow. Everyday scenes pass through my inner world and are reconstructed into another sensory language.

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I am especially interested in the distance and gaze between people. Contemporary individuals often occupy the same physical space while living within entirely separate emotional and psychological worlds. This condition becomes a recurring motif in my work, particularly within the Connect series, which addresses invisible emotions and emotional disconnection. Within the closest spaces, I seek to reveal both the loneliness of human existence and the possibility of relationships.

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For me, daily life itself is a living environment continuously generating new images and sensations. By observing both visible and invisible emotions within ordinary moments, I attempt to continue telling stories about hidden relationships and sensory experiences through my work.

Because my living space and studio are located close to one another, I am able to work without major restrictions on time. My practice requires layers of accumulated time, and this environment allows me to sustain long-term processes while continuously maintaining my artistic sensibility through daily work.