“Vestige” exhibition in Busan - South Korea
Last December, I opened my solo exhibition, Vestige, at Arise Art Space in Busan. It's taken me a while to write about it here, but with the year winding down, it felt like the right time to look back and share the project properly.
The project centers on Bogwang-dong, once a bustling district in the heart of Seoul, now standing empty. Its disappearance is not only physical but emotional — a quiet removal of the city's memory. The work begins in the space between what was once inhabited and what has been erased, searching for the traces that remain when a neighborhood loses its physical form.
Through the transformation of found remnants into new images and objects, the project invites reflection on how urban memory is built, displaced, and rewritten. The act of reclaiming what was left behind becomes a way to resist the clean erasure of redevelopment — a fragile attempt to preserve something that no longer has a place in Seoul's future.
At the heart of the project lies the question of heritage and continuity: when a city constantly rebuilds itself, what happens to the collective memory that connects its spaces and lives? What is lost when progress demands forgetting, and what does it mean to remember in a place that no longer exists?
Ultimately, Vestige examines the role of memory within the urban structure — how it shapes a city's identity and forms part of the cultural heritage shared by its people. By revisiting what has been displaced or erased, the project underlines that memory is not a passive trace of the past, but an active foundation for how a community understands itself and its future.
This is what was exhibited at Arise Art Space in Busan.
