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Island, Alone (섬, 홀로)

Deu-meu / Artist’s book & solo exhibition / 2024

Island, Alone is a limited-edition artist’s book that explores the physical and conceptual form of a book through hanji, traditional Korean paper, and sustainable materials. A triangular structure, scroll format, reflective essays, and pencils bring literature and the visual arts together.

Produced with support from B-PLATFORM LAB, the work was presented in a solo exhibition in 2024. Its essays explore solitude, freedom, and the traces of everyday life.

Exhibition Gallery / 33 photographs

Island, Alone — Leaving the familiar, arriving elsewhere, making room for light. I left my everyday place and arrived with only myself. In a pause between times, I watched light touch the water. I returned to where I had been, but that light still shines within. Island, Alone: time to become wholly yourself.
Island, Alone — In the moment I felt the shape of my own existence, I placed fragments of wind and sunlight onto hanji and rolled them around pencils. Like this paper—warm, delicate, yet resilient—I want my writing to hold even the small traces of life with care.
1. Place — Sentences about the places I inhabited, everyday places, and my place as a patient are woven into a triangle. The first face, with its loosely interlaced mulberry fibres, carries the essay’s title; the second bears a sentence from it.
2. Elsewhere — Sentences from Island, Alone are freely placed on hanji that resembles the sea. The essays Somewhere Between the Land and the Water and The Place With an Empty Chair grew from walks along the shore. Wander among the suspended sentences as you might stroll by the sea.
3. A Pause / Light — Beside the sea, I spent most of my time watching light shimmer on the water. The Korean word teum can mean a gap, or a moment of leisure. To me, it is light pouring between forms. Following those openings of light helps me live again. We do not live alone. There is so much to love about being alive. Let us keep breathing.
Material: Hanji — I wanted to share the beauty of hanji’s colours. Cutting, tearing, and joining the paper, I considered where each letter should rest. The sentences I had written met the paper’s grain and light.
Island, Alone — Photograph 7
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Writing workshop: Finding the Triangle of My Life — What are the three things that sustain you? Small triangles made of hanji invited visitors to pause and fill them with three things that make them themselves. I hoped they would find three sources of strength within.
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