Young Man

Artspace H
2026. 6. 10. - 6. 20.

The summers of my childhood were always spent with my grandmother.

My grandmother, who sewed hanbok, would take out fabric each time the seasons changed and hold it up against me. White ramie, blue ramie, and ramie as soft pink as a flower petal. As a child, the pink made me a little shy, but her face as she beamed and said, “How lovely, my grandson,” remains in my memory warmer than any color.

As summer deepened, a galot was always waiting for me. The brown cloth, dyed with green persimmon, was stiff and cool. The moment a new galot touched my skin, I knew the holidays had begun. The brown fabric carried the smell of summer sunlight, and its texture became the sense of touch through which I remember the seasons of my childhood most vividly.

Summer was by my side on the way home from school, too. The slow walk home with my grandmother, who waited for me at the school gate; ice cream so cold it made my mouth tingle; the dazzling, scattering afternoon light. Even now, that time feels less like a photograph than something that remains as light and air itself.

Back home, I would lie on a cool straw mat in the breeze of the electric fan. As I lolled about watching television, the sewing machine kept up its steady rhythm beside me. Rat-a-tat-tat. The wind slipping through the window stirred the curtains, and sunlight moved slowly across the floor. Because nothing special happened in that scene, it stayed with me all the longer. In the repetition of ordinary afternoons, summer seeped into me little by little.

Looking back, what I remember are not stories but sensations: the light hue of ramie, the cool touch of the galot, the rhythm of the sewing machine, the breeze of the fan, and the sunlight filling the window. They have not vanished with time; they have piled up, layer upon layer, to make who I am today.

My work is a process of taking out those sensations of that time and looking at them again. Rather than reproducing a particular landscape, the layers of color built up on the canvas record the grain of the wind and the temperature of the light I once felt on my skin. Yellow-green and blue are the summer air brushing across the yard; pink is the afterimage of the ramie clothes my grandmother made for me; and the overlapping color fields are traces of childhood time folded layer upon layer.

The old sewing machine no longer moves, yet the summers of that time remain in the present tense. The colors flowing slowly across the canvas are not an attempt to hold on to lost time, but a way of looking at the landscape of memory that still lives and moves within me. Through painting, I want to call back the wind of those summers and carry on, in the language of color, the clear and bright season that once surrounded me.