In a movie theater, viewers give themselves over to linear time almost without thinking. In a gallery, that same patience for moving images tends to dissolve within minutes. My work begins in this gap—using video and spatial installation to translate cinematic temporality into something that can be inhabited, walked through, returned to. This is the core objective behind my thesis exhibition Moon Shaped Pool, a three-part video installation that reconstructs a time-based audiovisual experience as a spatial field.

The path here moved through several mediums. My early photography practice attempted to establish agency beyond clicking the shutter, relying on set design and post-production—but I came to realize that the two-dimensional photograph is inevitably confined by static time. During my transition to moving images, I was drawn to American avant-garde cinema—Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1942), Pat O'Neill's Water and Power (1989)—alongside the deconstruction of time and memory in Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975), and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962). From archival editing to my fully self-produced video Bark (2024), viewing has shifted, for me, away from grand historical frameworks and toward intensely personal projection.

This trajectory mirrors the stages of my own life. I arrived in the US at 18 to study Neurobiology at UCSD, where I found that rational scientific method could not hold the curiosity I actually carried; I turned to the art world. At first I treated photography and graphic design as a kind of laboratory work—observe, record, archive, repeat. But when meaning gave way to pure objectivity or commercial function, the loss of subjectivity became unsustainable.

I remember standing in front of a Mark Rothko and feeling genuinely conflicted: if meaning is what truly matters, why not just use text? For a long time, the tension between expressive method and content made artistic creation feel inherently contradictory. After working through fine art and graphic design, I have come to accept this tension as a continuous premise of the work rather than a problem to solve. Making art need not cater to the times—it can simply be a process of returning to one's subjectivity. What I read in Rothko is that for him, expansive fields of color were the only adequate language. For me, at this moment, video and space are mine.