Habitat

2022 ~ ongoing

Various sizes

Silk, old ramie, silk threads, hand sewn

Ongoing project from the year of 2022

Displayed in the exhibition, 식구 SIKGU , Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA (2023)

I collect loose threads and fragments of cloth that emerge in the course of my making, and build houses out of them. Each house becomes a dwelling of memory—accumulated time, touch, and days lived. These houses live alongside me, holding past, present, and the time to come, quietly preserving the value of seemingly insignificant things.

As an immigrant who changed countries in midlife, the idea of home carries for me both the promise of stability and the still-unfinished longing for settlement. A house is conventionally understood as a solid structure that shelters and protects, yet the silk houses in my Habitat series are deliberately fragile, mirroring my own sense of incomplete belonging.

Textiles are not merely an alternative to pigment or pencil; they are my way of world-building—a means of constructing living entities that embody what it means to live between two cultures, continually negotiating language and identity. The process is intimate, laborious, and durational, standing in quiet contrast to the speed with which images are consumed today. Using Korean silk and hand-stitching techniques derived from bojagi (Korean wrapping cloth), I build homes slowly, day after day, in a foreign land. Habitat is an ongoing project that began in 2022.