I construct fictional narratives across multiple media, including drawing and writing. Stories that once took the form of short fiction undergo fragmentation of scenes and sensations as they move across media and become materialized. Viewers selective...
I construct fictional narratives across multiple media, including drawing and writing. Stories that once took the form of short fiction undergo fragmentation of scenes and sensations as they move across media and become materialized. Viewers selectively encounter these disassembled fragments of the story. As a result, the narrative transforms into a nonlinear structure that shifts according to the viewer’s perception and movement. However, even within this nonlinear structure, each medium maintains its own specificity while ultimately converging into a structure reminiscent of a book as the fundamental form of the novel. Accordingly, my practice can be defined as a “sensorially experienced book.”
This thesis begins with the question of whether a story with a novel-like plot can be conveyed in a nonlinear and open manner. Through an analysis of my works, it examines how the transfer of sensations, rather than causal progression, shapes narrative formation and the way it is experienced.
The fictional stories I have created feature figures who are already dead or approaching death. I reconstruct signs of death encountered in everyday life into short stories, narrativizing deaths that can only be imagined. This is an attempt to translate death into a comprehensible language. In this process, fictional proxies emerge. These figures endure loss and perform the labor of mourning on my behalf, functioning as channels that open private experiences to the outside. For me, mourning is a process of recalling and giving form to absence. Through writing that reveals the boundary between fact and fiction, mourning reaches others.
My inquiry into the sensory structures through which stories of mourning physically reach others unfolds through an exploration of the relationship between drawing and writing. When the two media are placed side by side on a single surface, images fix the imaginative possibilities of the text into a single form, while the text confines the unintelligibility of images to a singular explanation. As a result, the narrative remains within a closed structure. In response, I seek methods such as drawing text as image or employing temporal gaps between seeing and reading. This critical awareness also leads to experiments in printmaking. When the same plate is arranged differently or placed in a new context, the way the image is perceived and interpreted changes. Through this process, I demonstrate that even without text, narrative can modulate its meaning through repetition of images and expand into an open structure.
In my recent works, narrative no longer remains confined to visual form. Text transforms into image, and image into material texture, forming tactile and olfactory scenes. Scenes and objects come together to occupy space, and fictional proxies perform within this space, drawing the site of narrative into the sensory realm of reality.
This mode of practice arises from understanding the artist’s book as an open space that investigates how far a book can expand. Ultimately, narrative assumes a nonlinear and open structure through its movement across multiple media and is experienced as a sensorial book in which visual, auditory, and tactile sensations overlap. I refer to this structure as a “Multisensory Book”.
This thesis therefore proposes that through the Multisensory Book, narrative can exist in a state open to others, without being confined to a single format or sequential pages, but rather through sensory movement. It further explores how this mode of narrative transmission can extend individual experiences of loss into collective mourning.