R o o t e d . A l i v e .
The project ' Rooted. Alive. ' began in the summer of 2025, when I spent time in Japan. I became captivated by the trees I encountered there. Their presence felt markedly different from those I had known in London, denser, more saturated, and intensely alive.
At first, I made several drawings of trees. However, I quickly realised that I was not interested in translating their forms into visual language. What drew me in was not their appearance, but something less visible. An underlying energy. A sense of life existing within them.
Trees appear unchanged, yet they are constantly shifting. At some point, I began to understand that what I was responding to was not the image of a tree, but the condition of being alive.
This led me to monotype. Although I had been interested in the process for some time, I had never worked with it so exclusively before. It began to feel like a method that could engage directly with what I was drawn to, the hidden energy within plants, what I refer to as 생명력 (Saeng-myeong-ryeok).
Rather than a fixed definition, 생명력 describes a condition. It is the sense that something is actively alive, not static, but constantly shifting, expanding, and responding. It is not visible in a single form, but felt through change, through growth, decay, pressure, and resistance.
It is the force that keeps things in motion, even when they appear still.
Monotype produces a single, unrepeatable image. It involves drawing, transfer, and pressure between paint and surface. Because of this, each print holds both gesture and force. This quality felt aligned with the nature of life itself, something that appears, shifts, and cannot be repeated.
After returning to London, I began reinterpreting the monotypes I had produced in Japan. Although abstract, they carried a concentrated sense of energy. Many felt like condensed fragments of summer, holding within them the heat and intensity of that environment.
My focus gradually shifted away from their imagery towards what they contained. I became less interested in what they depicted, and more attentive to the force within them. What emerged was not a concern with plants or landscape, but with life itself.
Through this reflection, I arrived at a simple realisation. Change is not an attribute of life, but its foundation. When something stops changing, it is no longer alive.
This marked a shift in the work. I began focusing on the conditions that sustain living systems rather than their visible forms. The paintings no longer derive from observation, but from constructing a visual field capable of holding movement, tension, and transformation.
This condition relates to the Korean philosophical concept 정중동 (Jung-Joong-Dong), meaning movement within stillness and stillness within movement. A surface may appear stable, yet energy continues to circulate beneath it.
The Movement in Stillness series emerges from this shift. These paintings do not represent life as an image, but attempt to hold it as a state, something continuously changing, yet momentarily contained within the canvas.