Song-i

This project traces mutable edges where land, sea, and self meet. On foraging trips to the Massachusetts and Oregon coasts, I followed song-i/matsutake mushrooms that grow only in rare terrain where pine meets sand.

I was born on the California coast, where the tides shaped my earliest sense of time. At thirty, I found myself pulled to water as a transformative element, mesmerized by the shoreline — that ever-shifting threshold between land and sea, and the conditions for song-i mushrooms to thrive.

Native to Korea and Japan – and, unexpectedly, also to both the East and West Coasts – these pine mushrooms mirrored my own geography: shaped by the Pacific, rooted in a Korean lineage, and moving between coasts.

These photographs observe the quiet exchanges between matter in ritual and memory – the way salt, metal, algae, and skin each record touch and time. The shoreline emerges not as a fixed boundary, but as a living field of entanglement – an ecological altar where transformation is constant, and where I recognize my own migrations reflected in the organisms that thrive at the edge.