The Nyang Eopsin works created in Yangpyeong explore personal roots and the memory of place through the earth and fire of my family’s ancestral home. Yangpyeong is where my family has lived for generations, beginning with my great-great-grandfather. Although I no longer live there, the area remains an important foundation of my identity, carrying the accumulated memories of my family’s lives across generations.

For these works, I used clay gathered directly from the land in Yangpyeong. Rather than relying on refined and standardized commercial clay, I sought to preserve the particles, impurities, colors, and physical qualities of the local earth. Collecting and handling this material was more than an experiment with a different clay body. It became a physical encounter with the same land on which my ancestors had lived. The clay functioned not only as a material for constructing the work, but also as a medium carrying family history and the memory of place.

After forming the works, I fired them outdoors on the land in Yangpyeong. This process recalled the earliest forms of ceramic production, when people dug into the ground where they lived, shaped vessels and objects from nearby earth, and fired them directly with fire built on or within the land. Rather than fully controlling the temperature and movement of the flames, I allowed the clay, wood, ash, smoke, and surrounding environment to react with one another. Soot, stains, irregular colors, and rough textures became records of the firing process and traces left by the site itself.

Shaping figures from Yangpyeong clay and firing them on the same land did not mean attempting to reproduce the lives of my ancestors. Instead, it allowed me to establish a sensory connection with the place where they had lived. Through the fundamental ceramic acts of touching earth and working with fire, I experienced a sense of continuity between past and present, ancestral life and my own practice. The Nyang Eopsin figures created in Yangpyeong are therefore not only guardians that carry a wish for well-being, but also presences that bring the accumulated time of my family and the memory of the land into the present.