Unoccupied
Graphite on paper and mounted on aluminium panel
67.5cm x 100cm
2026

Unoccupied
Graphite on paper
67.5cm x 100cm
2026

A Long Wait
Graphite and oil on blackout blind
145cm x 190cm
2026

Borderline
oil, marble dust, flocking powder, graphite, and sewing pins on cotton
160cm x 190cm
2025

No Boundaries
Oil, marble dust and graphite on canvas
84cm x 59cm
2024

Harin Park

I depict furniture and the environment in which it is placed. The furniture is rendered as
empty outlines, while the surrounding space is densely filled with texture. This contrast
reveals a relationship between an emptied subject and an excessive environment.
Graphite is a controllable medium, yet I deliberately avoid making corrections. By
refusing revision despite its possibility, I attempt to maintain a state in which control is
present but continuously deferred. In this process, completion is constantly delayed, not to reach perfection, but rather to avoid bringing the state to an end.
Through the work, I engage with both activity and passivity at once. The words Passion
and Passive both derive from the Latin passio. I reconstruct the domestic space as a
world that once existed in an emotional and passive condition, as an attempt to regain
control and agency within it. The empty structure of the furniture fully exposes its interior, while simultaneously inviting a gaze upon it. In this way, the work holds a double perspective in which a passively exposed state and an actively voyeuristic position overlap.
I measure an unstable world with a ruler and draw lines in pencil to understand it,
reconfiguring it into a coherent order through which I attempt to reclaim agency.
However, the process of reaching this sense of completion is obsessive and labour-
intensive, and in doing so it paradoxically delays and distances the work from
completion. At some point, I inevitably put down the pencil, and I attempt to accept this incomplete form of perfection.

I kept looking at the house. What was there for a child to do in a house that large? I looked at the ceiling, the floor, the stereo, my grandmother’s lipstick. Lying on the wooden floor, I watched rice weevils. Aimlessly, I wandered through the five rooms, looking over and over again at the traces left behind by the people who lived in them. I wanted to be absorbed into that place. I wanted to become a part of the house. Perhaps I was already one part of it.

To reach the middle of the dining table that seated seven people, even standing on tiptoe was not enough. I was far below their line of sight. They say people grow only more stubborn with age, and perhaps they do. When they shouted and fought themselves hoarse, made stubborn by nothing but their own certainties, they never thought to look around them. When the daughter of this house was being cursed at by a son-in-law who had come from somewhere else, they chose not to see what was happening, even when it was right before their eyes.

The shadow of the tree that fell across the wooden floor seemed to seep into the house. To trespass upon it. No—to intervene. No—to punish. No—to save. No—to shelter.

“I see everything,” it seemed to say. “You are not the only one who sees, little one.”

Lying on the smooth floorboards, I ran my hand across them. I touched the wood again and again. This floor was yesterday’s floor, and it was today’s floor. I was yesterday’s self, and I was today’s self.

Yesterday, I saw.

What made my chest feel ready to burst was not that no one else had seen. It was that there was no one who would say, “I saw it too.”

In truth, it was not that no one had seen. There was simply no companion who would say, “Like you, I saw it too.”

So I looked at the CD cabinet, the sofa, the potted plants, and asked them, “Did you see it too?”

We believed we had.

I thought we resembled one another. We see, and yet we cannot say that we have seen. And so I became a wall, a back, a chair. Perhaps that would be easier. Then I could neither see nor speak.