Room for jeong

On Jeong (情) · 2026

In Korea there's a feeling we call jeong (情). It's the tender bond that builds up slowly between people, and between people and their things — the longer you keep something close, the more you share with it.

Once jeong is there, it doesn't break easily.

I want to make things that leave room for jeong.

Contact, and the edge that might give way

On Cracks · 2026

A log splits on its own. Nobody decides it. It dries, it opens, and by the time it reaches me the opening is already old.

On top of that time I cut flat planes, stepped like a stair, and filled them with lacquer until they went black. The black is the part I made. The rest was made without me.

Between the two there is a thin grey line. That line is what I am actually working on.

I keep it as fine as I can — fine enough that it looks about to give way. If it were comfortably wide you could rest a hand there and the matter would be settled. Kept thin, the hand comes and then stops. What gets made is not a meeting but the moment just before one.

So the piece holds time running in two directions. The splitting has already happened. The edge has not broken yet. Standing in front of it you are looking at something on its way somewhere, not something finished.

Where the crack runs across the line, the line goes missing for a stretch. I have not decided whether to leave those places or repair them. An edge that is whole all the way round reads as skill. An edge already lost in one spot reads as an event. They are not the same thing, and I am still choosing.

Seeds of time

On Seeds of Time · 2026

A piece of log, good for nothing at all. Could something start again even in there?

I think of what I make as seeds of time. One leaves my hands, reaches someone, and slowly opens inside their days. I'm rooting for it from here.

Useful and useless, stumbling stone and stepping stone, a single day and forever — the pleasure is in crossing between them. Somewhere on the border of the everyday and art, I keep walking, a step at a time.

I've been carving and shaping wood since 2016. Every mark, every change of colour on a seed that left my hands, is time it has spent with you. I hope beauty comes to dwell in the days the seed takes to open.