Edges of Arrival
2026
215x 215 x 520 (mm)
Mixed Media
2025
After moving to the UK, this question became increasingly difficult to ignore. How would the relationship between proximity and distance be understood outside Korea? What does it mean to encounter someone who is, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly unfamiliar?
Living near New Malden, home to one of the largest Korean communities in Europe, I found myself drawn to North Korean refugees—the closest yet most distant others in my own cultural landscape. Sharing the same language, history, and cultural roots did not erase the invisible boundaries that separated us. Instead, it revealed how political histories, collective memory, and inherited assumptions continue to shape the ways we perceive one another.
The moth became a metaphor for this condition. As urbanisation destroys their natural habitats, moths are increasingly drawn towards artificial light, where they must continuously adapt in order to survive. Their movement reflects not only migration, but the fragile process of negotiating belonging, identity, and coexistence.
Through light, publications, and participatory workshops, this project considers how invisible boundaries are formed, maintained, and perhaps transformed—not by speaking for those who have crossed them, but by questioning the assumptions that created them in the first place.