Exploring Family, Light, and the Spaces Between
Lindsey PorembaJiwoong
PorembaJiwoong (b. 1985, Seoul) may be New York City’s slowest walker. When we visited the show Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear at the Museum of Modern Art, I squirmed in discomfort over the plodding pace with which we waded through the retrospective. We spent at least two hours in the exhibition, paying little mind to the wall labels. Jiwoong moved through each gallery with care, spending time with the individual works and thinking about the narrative structure of the exhibition as a whole.
Jiwoong’s considerate observation expresses itself in his own work. He notices what exists in the margins and illuminates what others overlook. His earlier photography practice emerged from his night walks through New York City. In doing so, Jiwoong exposes sights most never see as they sleep. His eyes and lens are drawn to the corners and edges of buildings. He sees what collects in the sidewalk corners. Light and shadow, drawn from infinitesimal movements of the sun and moon alike, become his subjects. As a medium, photography exists only in the past. Maddeningly, the moment a photograph is taken, the moment is gone. What remains is a trace. In a series of fleeting moments, Jiwoong captures that which should be a memory.
Memory of places and people are foundational to his work, and the act of remembering creates bridges between past and present. In 2021, Jiwoong traveled to Korea to visit family, returning with photographs of his family home. His recent debut solo show at Blade Study (tread water, 6 November-19 December 2025) tells a story of his uncle Kyungmin Joo (1975-2024). After his uncle survived a motorcycle accident, he became more reclusive. Joo retreated into his hobbies: watching baseball, smoking, and talking on the phone. To Jiwoong, these simple acts remain as signifiers of his late uncle. Jiwoong uses sculpture and photography throughout the spatial installation to reconstruct his memories, exploring personal narratives while inviting viewers to bring their own.
Our conception of self often comes from those we know and love. Subsequently, the question of how well we know ourselves and others is tested throughout the exhibition. The image of his uncle undergoes displacement in the exhibition as Jiwoong processes grief and distance. Found objects, already removed from their initial contexts, become surreal in Jiwoong’s hands. Calling I is a transparent landline telephone filled with cigarettes, physically combining two disparate elements of talking on the phone and smoking, as if in a dream. Another found phone, Calling II, hole-punched through the opaque plastic, emits a red glow, its receiver left off the hook. Both telephones are inoperable. What would we say to those we loved if we still had time? Receiving a message, or sending one, often leaves more unsaid, and us seeking meaning between lines.
Jiwoong references his archive of family photographs, finding a bustling and messy family picnic scene eerily prophetic of the chaos in his uncle’s accident. In Squint, this photograph becomes distorted. Jiwoong fractures the original image into twelve parts, displayed in a grid mimicking a telephone keypad. Notably, Squint includes the only image of Jiwoong’s uncle. But we can hardly make out his features. The fragmented scene is blurred, a cacophony of discarded shoes, and bright blades of green grass. Even if we could see him clearly, it brings us no closer to understanding the man at the center of this narrative. Jiwoong goes so far as to playfully put us in his Joo’s shoes with Water Vessels. These welded and sloping metal sculptures with staggered heights help us envision stepping with his uncle’s post-accident limp. Much like Tillmans, Jiwoong shares similar concerns for how one moves through his spatial installation and how his work may be experienced. Working in post-photography, Jiwoong’s practice continues to expand to new mediums and materials when called for, incorporating factors of chance with found objects, or challenges like welding. In his earlier series Light Vessels, Jiwoong applied a silver gelatin photographic emulsion over ceramic stones, allowing photographic gestures to meet new surfaces. Jiwoong feels “...drawn to what becomes possible when mediums meet, creating friction, resonance, and multiple entry points for viewers. I try to make spaces where people can move through the work, interpret it, and locate themselves within it rather than receive a fixed reading.”
In life, more often than not, we feel ourselves ‘treading water,’ bobbing up and down only to stay in one place, to borrow from the title of his Blade Study exhibition. But Jiwoong’s work is hardly vertical. Rather, it expands horizontally, rippling outward through his series of recurring motifs that echo through fragmented memories. Studies of light emerge in this body of work as a sunset, which Jiwoong associates with hearing the news of his uncle’s accident from his mother. Bordering light and dark, constantly in a state of change, the fragile sunset nevertheless recurs daily. Circularity is not a problem to be resolved, but an experience. Memories reanimate in the present through reconsideration and close attention, filtered through time and distance, and augmented by imagination. In Jiwoong’s work, repetitions offer us a way forward, not through sameness, but through the unfolding possibilities of looking, and then looking again.
Lindsey Poremba
Email: lindseyporemba@gmail.com | Phone: (603) 714-9632
Lindsey Poremba is an emerging art historian and curator, currently completing her MA in Art History with a Curatorial Certificate at Hunter College (anticipated Spring 2026). She holds a BA in Art History and Arts Administration from Skidmore College, Magna Cum Laude (2018), with international study experience at University College Dublin.
She has extensive professional experience in gallery and museum settings, including Michael Werner Gallery, Morgan Library and Museum, and the Currier Museum of Art, supporting exhibitions, art fairs, curatorial research, and educational programming.
Her curatorial work includes solo and group exhibitions such as “This Delicious Garden” (Frisson Gallery, 2025) and “Glass, Concrete & Stone” (Hunter College, 2024), as well as participation in the Alexis Gregory Curatorial Practice Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023). Lindsey’s projects demonstrate a strong commitment to contemporary art, archival research, and public engagement.
