Around the time applications opened for the 15th SLAP program, I lost the dog who had been with me for fifteen years. It felt as if something deeply familiar in my life had disappeared all at once, and questions I had never considered before began to emerge. Unable to find clear answers and left only with a sense of frustration, I decided to apply to SLAP because I wanted to tell my story through photography, the act most familiar to me.
That was how I first turned my own story into a body of work and communicated it through images. Photographs I had personally set aside sometimes became the ones people responded to most strongly, while others noticed things I had failed to see myself. The work rarely unfolded as I expected, and those moments when my predictions and judgments were overturned also became part of my growth.
Once the exhibition opened, I witnessed directly in the gallery what images could do, how the people around me responded to them, and what I had overlooked or what newly emerged through the work. Watching viewers discover other stories connected to themselves through their own distinct ways of seeing made me believe in the possibilities created by different perspectives.
The experiences and time I spent there later became an important foundation for expanding Relationships into the Connections Trilogy. The attitude of building the world of my work while thinking about points of contact with the audience also began there.
Looking back, SLAP was where the questions I continue to ask today began, and where I created my first response to them.