"Aspirations Ⅱ" Painting

National Pavilion of the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2026). Working across figuration and abstraction, she explores light, memory, and the invisible traces of existence through oil painting and UV-reactive pigments.

The Language of Light and Memory :
Everything that exists leaves a trace. My practice begins with the belief that light carries those traces, preserving fragments of memory, emotion, and presence beyond what can be immediately seen.
My work has developed through two parallel paths: figuration and abstraction. Flowers, landscapes, and living forms become vessels for memory, while my abstract works explore light, color, time, fragmentation, and entropy. Though these visual languages differ, they are connected by the same question: what remains when a moment, a memory, or a presence disappears from sight?
Recently, these two paths have begun to converge in my Crystal Flower series. While closely observing flowers, I began to recognize in the shapes of petals and the intricate networks of veins structures that echoed the crystalline forms I had explored in earlier works. This discovery opened a space where figuration and abstraction could coexist within a single image. Crystal Flower has become a way for me to explore how light, color, and form can preserve traces of memory, emotion, and existence.
UV-reactive pigments extend this inquiry beyond visible perception. Under ordinary light, a painting presents one reality; under ultraviolet light, hidden colors and forms emerge. I see these hidden forms as a metaphor for the unconscious: present within the work even when they cannot be seen, waiting for a particular condition to bring them into view. In this way, the work suggests that reality is not singular or fixed, but shaped by the conditions through which we perceive it.
Memory behaves in a similar way. It is continuously transformed, fragmented, and reconstructed by time. Some memories remain vivid, while others seem to disappear, only to return through a particular light, place, or sensation. Through fractured surfaces, crystalline structures, and layers of color, I explore how traces of love, loss, and longing persist even after their original forms have disappeared.
More recently, I have begun exploring how this visual language might extend beyond painting into sculpture and spatial installation.