Disobedience II

Year: 2025

Material: Performance based Photography

Description: Disobedience II (2025) is a performance-based photographic work that explores Han (한) through the relationship between the body, unfired ceramic vessels, and photographic representation. I approach Han as a complex emotional state associated with suppressed sorrow, frustration, endurance, and unresolved feelings within Korean cultural and personal memory.

The work particularly considers the experience of women whose emotions and desires have historically been shaped by social expectations, restraint, and circumstances beyond their control. Rather than defining Han as a fixed or universal characteristic of Korean identity, I approach it through my own embodied experience as a space where suppressed emotions can coexist with outward composure.

Inspired by the Korean proverb, “A woman carrying resentment can bring frost even in midsummer,” the performance presents a contrast between an outwardly calm and composed body and the anger held beneath that surface. The unfired ceramic vessels function as extensions of the body, carrying a sense of fragility, pressure, and emotional weight. Through the photographic process, these physical and emotional tensions are preserved as traces of the performance.

The title Disobedience refers to the act of confronting and releasing emotions that are often suppressed by social and cultural expectations. Through the relationship between body, ceramic material, and image, the work explores the tension between restraint and resistance, silence and expression, and vulnerability and liberation.

Group Exhibition

Year: 2025

Location: Space Sophora Gallery, Seoul, South Korea