Space and Memory: Mapping Lived Experience Through Mixed Media Installation and Expanded Painting
Space and Memory (2024–25) traces the quiet emotional landscapes of home, memory, and belonging. Having lived across many countries, I carry fragments of each place—rooms, shadows, colours, and familiar objects. These fragments drift through time, neither fixed nor whole, suspended between past and present. Through this project, I return to these fleeting impressions, translating them into spatial and painterly gestures that express what it feels like to live between worlds.
My practice unfolds through expanded painting and installation, where everyday objects—tables, travel carriers, and fish sculptures—reappear as visual echoes of memory. Rendered in acrylic on unprimed canvas, they blur and dissolve, resisting definition. Each mark seeps into the surface like an emotional trace, forming a porous archive of what once was. Through layering and transparency, I explore how memory behaves—shifting, fragmented, yet deeply felt.
In this process, the idea of home becomes fluid—both shelter and distance, comfort and displacement. The installation brings together painting, object, and space to evoke the tension between familiarity and estrangement. By allowing materials to absorb, stain, and overlap, I create a quiet environment that invites reflection on the spaces we inhabit and carry within us.
Space and Memory is a meditation on belonging when one’s sense of home is scattered across time and geography. It asks viewers to slow down and linger—to sense how memory endures, shaping both place and self.
Home (2025) is one of the concluding works in the series, an unstretched scroll installation that traces the emotional contours of shifting domestic spaces. Painted solely in yellow and blue, it explores warmth and distance, presence and elsewhere. These hues fold into one another like sunlight and shadow, suggesting the oscillation between belonging and departure.
Across the scroll, familiar objects—kitchenware, slippers, beds—surface within faint architectural outlines, evoking memories of transient homes. The unstretched canvas hangs freely, suspended from the ceiling, allowing the work to exist between painting and space. Its open form invites viewers to move alongside it, to pause and notice how the work shifts through proximity and light.
Home becomes a quiet site of return—a moment where recollection unfolds not as an image but as a sensation. Between colour and form, presence and absence, the work reflects on how identity is continually shaped by the spaces we have lived, left, and carry within us.
Woo Hyun Kang is a visual artist who recently completed a Master of Fine Arts at RMIT University. Having lived across multiple countries from a young age, she draws inspiration from the layered experiences of belonging and displacement. Her practice spans mixed-media installation and expanded painting, exploring how memory, identity, and emotion inhabit everyday spaces. Kang translates personal yet cultural narratives into recreated memory forms that evoke the rhythms of lived experiences and emotions. She continues to expand her research-led practice, experimenting with material processes to deepen her exploration of memory, perception, the embodied sense of place and storytelling.