Your daily routine includes writing dream journals and exploring the city through photography. How do these activities contribute to your vision?

As I mentioned earlier, writing is crucial, including keeping a dream journal. I remember my dreams well. The narrator in my dream often appears as someone other than myself, and stories are like movies. It is inspiring to come across surrealistic stories while dreaming. I've been keeping a dream journal for about 15 years.  After writing them down, I found some commonalities between dreams and my thoughts. For the past five years, my dreams have been about relationships, love, etc. They are subconsciously integrated into my dreams, and I can reflect on my deeper voice through dreams. It influences the development of writing in the process. The same goes for photography. As an international artist, I visit many cities and photograph what I observe in different areas. Lately, it's a stone. I record them like a dream diary, and there comes a moment when they seem to speak to me, and then I turn them into work.

You mention collecting images and objects that are familiar and domestic, which you then reassemble into your practice. Could you elaborate on your process of selection and reassembly, and how does this contribute to the overall narrative or atmosphere in your pieces?

I think of the process of reassembly as drawing, and sometimes I draw in real-time as I'm observing, or I pick up objects left at the site, or if that's not possible, I take as many photographs as possible. It's all part of the documentation process. I take a long time to come up with an image. I have a lot of different windows in my head, and I develop ideas by putting them together over time. I try to create a narrative by combining and subtracting images that I've shot in different ways to build a narrative. When I select objects, I choose that have familiar feelings and intimacy, like pillows or bed sheets. Intuitively, there are times when I feel like they're talking to me. That's when I started capturing them and putting them together. When they come into my imagery, it maximizes that sense of intimacy but also of discomfort or strangeness. Nothing in the world means not just one thing, and I like to capture the qualities of two opposites, then play with the tension and release it visually.

Your work oscillates between concealing and revealing, always with a subtle sense. How do you find the balance between concealment and revelation in your work?

The way I reveal and hide is theatrical. I think about how to position objects for a narrative. I often zoom in on them very large. Something I've been fascinated with lately is making black monsters. I imagine imaginary black furry creatures and incorporate them into my paintings, or I represent them as spheres with very smooth surfaces. I add textures to these things that could be used as industrial materials. I make something artificial and blend in as if in nature, so it's familiar yet surreal. Or a combination of fragile and rough, familiar and mysterious. This is how I balance concealing and revealing in my artistic language.

Your work invites viewers to engage with their emotions and memories. How do you envision this emotional engagement, and are there specific reactions or responses from viewers that you find particularly meaningful or impactful?

I use familiar places or situations many people can relate to as devices. The ability to interact with others is what I look forward to most about art. I got into art because I was moved to tears by great work, so I create in the hope that it will touch at least one other person. The audience will evoke their own emotions from their memories. For example, in my painting ‘Dance with our eyes-closed,’ When I showed it, a viewer from California said it reminded her of her hometown. She left the U.S. to work in Europe, bringing her back to her old memories. I love to see people like that. Another time I presented a moving sculpture installation, one of the viewers said, “I don’t know why, but they just like me. It reminded me of myself.” When I hear that, it touches me, too. Nothing is more rewarding than seeing the work resonate with people throughout the process. 

The eerie quality in your representation of intimate moments and places is important for you. What draws you to this eerie quality, and how do you believe it enhances the storytelling aspect of your art?

I've always questioned the discomfort that comes with intimacy, like love. Love is so beautiful, but it's more cautious and, sometimes, challenging because it's intimate. There isn't anything that I find absolutely having only beautiful or good aspects. I want to capture these subtle and ambivalent gaps to talk about the vulnerability that exists in human nature. The eerie atmosphere is my way of communicating these things effectively. I have a book called Beautiful and Scary Creatures, and my favorite creature in it is the orchid mantis, whose body is like a flower petal, so it's very transparent and beautifully colored. Still, simultaneously, the mantis is a terrifying creature. These kinds of creatures inspire me. I also like nature's way of mixing a bit of the creepy with something thin and beautiful, and they maximize the subtlety of what I'm trying to say.

In the process of reassembling familiar and domestic images and objects into your work, do you find that your personal experiences or memories play a significant role in shaping the narrative, or do you intentionally aim for a more universal interpretation? Describe a real-life situation that inspired you.

My personal experiences influence my work a lot. But they inspire me in the early stages of developing ideas, and I don't want to tell them as personal stories. I want them to have a universal interpretation. So, I use familiar objects everyone can recognize to create a sense of relation—chairs, beds, sofas, cups, and stones. I place them in the work, hoping that the smells and memories automatically triggered by seeing something you already know will create a narrative. I am busy in real life, meeting people, loving, painting, and walking. Everything that drives me to paint and sculpt is in it.