About this work:

This work grew from realising that, for a nomad, home is never a fixed place. The imagined arch and hill in this painting hold more than one place at once, Seoul, New York, London, Kyoto, and the many other places carried between them. Moving through so many places over the years, I came to feel this in my own life. Wherever he was with me, that place became home. Home here is not arrived at but assembled, again and again, out of memory and the person beside me.

For most of my adult life, I have thought of myself as a nomad. Thirty years in South Korea, then New York to learn English after design school, then years of travel before London. My own history had already forced me to keep asking what it means to belong somewhere.

Recently, I joined a workshop by chance, held at my local library, and the theme happened to be home again. There were only five of us in the room, all from different countries, all living as nomads in London. The word came up again during our conversation, nomad, and hearing it out loud, I understood that this restlessness was never mine alone. I had lived in this city for fifteen years and had somehow forgotten that London itself is a melting pot of nomads like us.

Thinking about home again, I arrived at something simple. For a nomad, home can never be a fixed place. This painting grew out of that realisation, entirely from imagination, with no photograph or place behind it. Branches gather overhead into the shape of an arch, and beneath it a hill glows in hot pink, with one small tree standing at its top. I didn’t set out knowing what the arch meant, and I still don’t have a fixed answer, only that it feels like a threshold rather than an ending, one landscape opening onto another the way memory sits over the place we now stand.

I met my husband in design school in South Korea. From there, we went to New York, then travelled for a long stretch, and then settled in London. Fifteen years have passed since we arrived, and looking back, no single city was ever the destination. The constant was him, beside me, through every move.

That is how I understand this journey now, as an artist, as a wife, as a nomad. It does not arrive anywhere and stop. It continues, for as long as I do. Home was never a place I was walking toward. It was always the person I was walking with.