Familiar Unfamiliar Residential Landscapes: The Tactility of Memory, Echoes of the Subconscious, and Spiritual Space in Painting
This thesis explores how painting and material surface can function as a spiritual space within homogenized contemporary living environments. My research begins from a personal and bodily experience of residential space: repeated interiors, standardized layouts, and over-familiar surroundings often create a subtle emotional flattening, making it difficult for the body to pause, feel, or reconnect with memory. In response, I use painting not to represent a room directly, but to construct a surface that can hold delay, ambiguity, and quiet psychological tension.
Through a practice-led methodology grounded in observation, translation, and material experimentation, I transform fragments of everyday residential space into works that slow perception and reactivate bodily awareness. Wood, silk, mineral pigments, ink, and irregular framing structures are central to this process. These materials do not simply support the image; they shape how space is sensed, how memory is carried, and how a viewer encounters instability within the familiar.
Across a series of small wooden panel works, silk paintings, and installation-based experiments, this thesis examines how ordinary spatial elements—such as thresholds, corners, walls, shadows, and furniture—can become sites of affective and perceptual shift. Rather than offering a narrative of home, the work opens a suspended space between recognition and estrangement, where suppressed memory, emotional residue, and bodily hesitation can surface again.
Ultimately, this thesis argues that painting can create a subtle form of resistance to the emotional and spatial standardization of contemporary life. By loosening familiar order and making room for pause, the work proposes painting as a lived and sensorial container: a place where memory, tension, and inner space may re-emerge.