My work explores how we live with what cannot be resolved.
My practice explores the body as a site where emotional and existential conditions become visible.
Working across fashion, textile, moving image, and text, I approach garments not as objects to be worn, but as extensions of internal states. Through movement, collaboration, and material exploration, the body becomes a space where experiences such as vulnerability, memory, exposure, and suffering are carried, negotiated, and transformed.
My earlier works begin from personal introspection—exploring shyness, emotional distance, and inherited memory. In these projects, the garment functions as a protective or distancing structure, creating space between the self and the world.
This gradually shifts toward a more direct engagement with the body. In Utopia, I question honesty and exposure, asking what it means to exist without concealment. The body becomes a site of openness, where identity is no longer performed but revealed.
In We came empty handed, we leave empty handed, this exploration extends into impermanence. Influenced by Buddhist philosophy, the work reflects on the transient nature of the body and existence. Through collaborative movement and transparent materials, the body appears and disappears, holding both presence and absence at once.
My graduation project, The Suffer Hill – It Was a Forest, marks a turning point. Rather than observing or conceptualizing these conditions, I enter them. Drawing from the Korean Monk’s Dance (Seung-mu), I explore suffering as an embodied and continuous process. Here, garments become carriers of weight, time, and repetition that extend the body through long sleeves and flowing structures that move between control and release.
Across my practice, I am interested in how we live with what cannot be resolved. The works do not aim to provide answers, but to create spaces where states of being such as fragility, endurance, connection that can be experienced collectively.
There is always a distance between individuals that cannot be fully crossed. Through my work, I attempt to approach that distance, using the body, movement, and material as a way to connect.
장정윤
The Hague, The Netherlands
