Artist's Note
# Becoming Forest
In the winter of the year I lost my father, I began to enter the forest.
My father passed away that summer, at the age of ninety-three. During the final two months I spent beside him in the hospital, I began, perhaps for the first time, to glimpse the solitude and the weight of time that a single human life carries. A few months later, standing before the bare winter trees of the Dalseong Wetlands, I saw my father's face in his final days overlap with the passing years of my own life. I stood there for a long time.
From that moment on, the forest was no longer merely a landscape.
Here, the seasons do not erase one another. The empty branches of winter still hold traces of the summer that has passed, while beneath the silent earth, the stirrings of a spring yet to come are already present. Fallen trees return to the soil, and from that same ground, new life emerges. Within a single landscape, many different times coexist.
One day, while walking through the forest, I recalled the final lines of Goethe's *Wanderer's Nightsong*, which I had read during my university years.
*Warte nur, balde*
*Ruhest du auch.*
*Just wait; soon*
*You too shall rest.*
In my youth, these words had seemed no more than beautiful poetry. But in the winter forest, they spoke to me in an entirely different way. In the forest, rest was not an ending. What disappears becomes part of the soil, the grass, and other living things. Dissolution is not absolute absence, but a process of becoming something else.
I recorded this passage of time on film. The slow rhythm of analog photography—exposing, waiting, developing, and only then encountering the image—seemed to mirror the passage of time within the forest. At times, I chose to preserve the imperfections of the developing process: light that had seeped into the film, stains, and blurred forms. These were not flaws, but traces of one season carried into the next, and reflections of how memory itself changes with time.
*Becoming Forest* is not a photographic record of forest landscapes. It is a record of the process through which, after losing someone, I began to contemplate the passage of my own time alongside that of nature, and gradually came to accept that I, too, will one day become part of the forest.
My father is gone, yet his time remains within me. And one day, my own time will become part of another existence.
Perhaps, little by little, we are all becoming forest.