VERONA CERAMIC
Research Journal
A little sharing about where all these ideas began, emerged, and took shape.
01
Where Did This Come From?
This project began with a personal question: what does it mean to be human today?
Every generation imagines the future differently. During the Industrial Revolution, artists like Umberto Boccioni celebrated machines and speed. Early science fiction imagined new worlds and new forms of life. Today, we are experiencing another major shift through the internet, smartphones, and AI.
As the world changes faster and faster, I began questioning my own place within it. Who am I? What is our role as humans in an increasingly technological world?
These questions led me to think about identity not as something fixed, but as something constantly shaped through our relationships with technology, materials, and the environment.
Those questions became the foundation of this work.
02
Scientific research
My first research started with science. I became interested in theories that challenge how we normally understand reality and the human body.
For example, particle theory suggests that everything around us, including our bodies, is made of constantly moving particles. What appears solid and stable is actually a temporary arrangement of invisible activity.
I was also drawn to ideas such as string theory and higher dimensions, which propose that reality may be far more complex than what we can directly perceive. These theories suggest that what we experience is only a small part of a much larger system.
This research made me question the idea of the body as a fixed and separate object. Instead, I began to think of the body as something relational and connected to its surroundings. It also led me to become interested in boundaries, surfaces, and walls — things that appear solid but are actually formed through invisible structures and forces.
These ideas became an important starting point for the sculptural language that developed later in the project.
03
Where Is the Boundary of the Body?
After thinking about the body through scientific theories, I became interested in a simpler question: where does the body actually end?
We often assume that the boundary of the body is the surface of the skin. However, our experience of the body is much more complex. We constantly extend ourselves through clothing, tools, technology, relationships, and the spaces we occupy.
This led me to question whether the visible outline of the body is really its true boundary. If our interactions, perceptions, and surroundings continuously shape who we are, then perhaps the body extends beyond its physical form.
I was inspired by artists such as Pipilotti Rist and Andrew Scott, whose works blur the distinction between body, object, and environment. Their works suggest that boundaries are not fixed lines, but shifting zones of exchange and interaction.
Rather than seeing the body as a closed object, I began to understand it as a threshold — something that is constantly negotiating between inside and outside, self and world.
This idea became central to my sculptural practice and eventually led me to the concept of the wall as both a boundary and a point of connection.
" The concept of the ‘future’ is never a fixed destination, it acts as a mirror reflecting the anxiety and aspiration of the people living in the present..."
04
Object-hood as a Method?
How Can Objects Think About Human existence
The shift from futurism to permanence fundamentally changed the way I approached my practice. Once my research moved away from predicting the future, I was no longer interested in representing contemporary issues or illustrating speculative futures. Instead, I wanted to investigate a more fundamental question: how can human existence itself be understood?
Rather than a straightforward illustration of the human body as an image or symbol, I began to consider whether objects*_-anything that can be seen, touched, or perceived--might provide another way of thinking about existence. This marked the transition from representation to objecthood as the central methodology of my project.
Working through the concept of objecthood rather than figurative representation was with intention. The human body is immediately associated with identity, carrying assumptions about gender, race, age, emotion, and culture. These characteristics inevitably shape how a viewer interprets the work before more fundamental questions can be considered.
Objects, by contrast, begin without these social categories: they simply exist. This apparent neutrality allows them to become conceptual tools through which broader questions about existence can be explored. Rather than functioning as representations of the body, the ceramic forms become material propositions that ask how existence itself might be understood.
Within my work, objects are never isolated forms. They exist only through their relationship with the space around them.They compress space, divide it, contain it, or allow it to pass through. In this sense, space is not an empty background surrounding the object but an active material that participates in its meaning. This understanding gradually led me to reconsider the body itself.
What if the body is not defined by its physical surface alone, but by its continuous relationship with the space that surrounds and flows through it?
Rather than treating the body as a closed and autonomous object, I began to imagine it as a porous condition that continually negotiates its boundaries with the environment. Several strands of research encouraged this shift in thinking. Scientific theories such as Einstein's reconceptualisation of space and time challenged the assumption that reality is fixed and absolute. Similarly, contemporary ideas from theoretical physics, including string theory and concepts of vibration' suggest that matter may be fundamentally dynamic rather than static. Although this project does not attempt to illustrate scientific theories, these ideas became productive conceptual references. They encouraged me to question whether the apparent stability of bodies and objects might conceal a more fluid and relational understanding of existence. Rather than treating scientific theories as evidence, I approached them as alternative ways of imagining reality that expanded my own
sculptural thinking.
This way of working also transformed my making process. Instead of beginning with a predetermined outcome, each work developed from a speculative question beginning with "What if...?" What if the body is simply a container? What if inside and outside are not separate conditions? What if stillness is only one moment within continuous movement? These questions were never intended to produce definitive answers. Instead, they generated physical experiments through which ideas could be tested in material form.
05.
Scenes
Making Process
Rather than describing the works in this project simply as sculptures, I deliberately refer to them as Scenes. The term echoes the title of this project, To Be, and What to Be, which reinterprets Shakespeare's enduring question of existence. Just as philosophical ideas in Hamlet unfold through a sequence of dramatic scenes rather than a single conclusion, my research develops through a series of material situations, each exploring a different possibility rather than presenting a definitive answer.
A scene suggests a temporary condition —an unfolding event, a moment of investigation, or a speculative encounter. Similarly, each work functions as a material hypothesis through which relationships between body, object, and space can be tested.
Rather than illustrating established theories, the sculptures ask questions through form, material, and spatial experience. In this sense, objecthood becomes not only the subject of my research but also the methodology through which the research is conducted.
The four Scenes each investigate a different aspect of human existence. Rather than progressing towards a single conclusion, they approach the same question from different perspectives, examining how bodies, objects, space, perception, and movement continuously shape one another. Together, they form a sequence of material experiments that reflect the evolution of my thinking throughout this project.
2026
