I Want To Check The Shape Of Trees

This photographic series, initiated three years ago, developed through the COVID-19 pandemic, personal transitions, and relocation. It examines four intersecting relationships: outside, inside the home, others, and the self.

This project explores how the world is constructed through the intersecting relationships of “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “others.” Beginning from the premise that reality can only be perceived through one’s own subjectivity, the work examines the tension between the poetic qualities embedded in images and the possibility of their independent existence as objects.

In this context, “poetic quality” refers to the interpretive force and evocative potential shaped by my perception of the world, while “objecthood” describes the presence of an image stripped of subjective intention. During my academic years, I moved away from painting, where accumulated time, gesture, and materiality stood between the viewer and the image, making it difficult to encounter the image as a pure visual experience. Photography offered a way to produce more anonymous images, allowing a distance between myself and the work. However, this shift raised a fundamental question: can an image ever truly exist independently of the subject who perceives it, or is such objecthood always entangled with the viewer’s presence?

This question developed through a renewed awareness of the relationship between inside and outside. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s idea that space becomes place through human experience, my earlier works focused on traveling to external sites and constructing relationships between location and subject. The outside world functioned as a space of exploration and unknown potential, while the home became a place where these experiences were brought back, reconsidered, and transformed into images. The photographic act itself became a form of movement between these two conditions.

The pandemic disrupted this dynamic. The outside, once associated with freedom and expansion, became intertwined with uncertainty and the presence of death, while the home gained new significance as a site of safety and containment. In response, I began to reconsider these spaces not as opposites but as interdependent conditions. Objects entering the home—deliveries, plants, everyday items—gradually integrate into the interior and reshape it, revealing traces of the outside within the domestic environment. The boundary between the two becomes increasingly unstable.

By photographing the home, where inside and outside intersect, the boundaries between subject and object, self and other, begin to blur. The act of looking at the interior becomes inseparable from looking outward, and the space of the image emerges as a site where these relationships continuously overlap. In this process, poetic quality and objecthood do not resolve into opposition but remain in tension, forming an ongoing structure through which my perception of the world is continuously constructed and reconfigured.