Unfamiliar Familiarity
Oak wood, Magnet
1306*475*1933(mm)
This project comes from my childhood memories of the lattice patterns in my grandmother’s house. They felt warm and familiar back then, but later I realised that these patterns were actually part of a strict social hierarchy from the Joseon dynasty. People at that time accepted this hierarchy as something “natural”, and that made me wonder whether we — even today — can ever really step outside the systems we grow up with.
‘Unfamiliar Familiarity’ is an interactive installation that reconstructs traditional lattice patterns into modular forms. By placing a single upper-class motif onto a lower-class framework, past authority becomes unstable and fragmentary. As viewers rearrange the modules, the traditional logic breaks apart into glitches. But at the same time, their participation is still limited within the system I designed. That contradiction suggests that, just like the past, we’re still moving inside structures we can’t fully escape. This project asks, through the process of revealing these hidden hierarchies, whether we can truly step outside the systems that shape us.
“Can we ever truly step outside the order we belong to?”