This installation was constructed by arranging hair collected from prisoners in Cheonan Prison at regular intervals across the tiled floor of the exhibition space.

The arrangement created pathways for viewers to move through the work, allowing them to physically experience the faint, peculiar smell of hair that had not been washed for long periods and the subtle sense of bodily presence it carried.

The work was conceived as another method of “repositioning” grounded in sensory experience.

Through the direct encounter with the object, I attempted to move beyond the historical gap that separated my context from the historiographic narratives of contemporary Western art.

At the time, I was beginning to recognize that the creation of an artwork and its reception could occur within the same field of experience—through shared acts of perception and interpretation.

Just as Picasso and Braque referred to Cézanne, and countless artists have generated new works by repositioning the creations of others, artistic production often unfolds through acts of re-reading and reconfiguration.

In this work, I deliberately avoided altering the hair in any way.

By simply arranging it, I sought to open a space in which viewers could encounter the object sensuously and directly, allowing thought to emerge from that experience.

Four years later, when I encountered Richard Serra’s thirty-six-ton cast-steel cubes at the Gagosian Gallery in New York (1997), I unexpectedly recalled this work.

At that moment I realized that the weight of a small handful of prisoners’ hair I had once installed and the weight of Serra’s massive steel cubes might ultimately be the same.

What mattered was not the weight of matter but the weight of existence.

The hair, so light that it could easily scatter beneath a viewer’s footsteps, was not in any way lighter than Serra’s monumental blocks.

The ordered rows of hair were also not unrelated to my own memories of military service.

During my twenty-eight months in the army—particularly in the tense period surrounding the October 26 and December 12 political crises—I spent months stationed on the front line in a state of extreme psychological pressure.

Shortly before my discharge, I was also mobilized as part of the troop formations for the Armed Forces Day ceremony, where we endured endless drills standing on the burning asphalt of the Seongnam airfield.

The experience of “formation” and “line-up” remained etched in my body.

This work itself also became a typical example of repositioning.

Because the gallery failed to prepare the agreed exhibition space due to budget problems, I had to reconstruct the installation on site.

I purchased steel wire and improvised a new arrangement, transforming the constraints of the situation into another form of the work.