Song Gidoo’s work begins with the residue of memory. It is time revived through material, and landscapes conjured in the language of sensation. Trained in architecture, Song left his design firm to begin woodworking in earnest—driven by a longing, as he puts it, “to form a deeper relationship with a single object rather than constantly negotiating with many people.” Through what the hand can hold, he seeks to revisit what cannot be seen, to remember once more. This is the way of thinking he has cultivated over time, and it is what he continues to inscribe into his stools, lights, and sculptural pieces—fragments of life, etched into form.
The artist says, “The moment inspiration first arrives is just before I begin, when images drifting like spiderwebs start to loosely connect into something whole.” While his process is still grounded in careful planning and design, he adds, “I’ve recently begun carving more spontaneously, meeting the wood with my hands—almost as if I were working with clay.” This shift suggests that his practice is evolving like a living organism. His forms are becoming less refined, and his surfaces bear the traces of the hand. Instead of familiar straight lines and clean planes, his stools and lights now reveal uneven curves and trembling expressions. They are, in a way, living sculptures.
This sensibility is also evident in his recent focus on gwaemok—twisted and irregular wood long collected by his father. “At first, I didn’t think much of my father’s hobby. But after moving back to Wonju and seeing him more often, I began to notice it differently.” The house his father built, the bricks from childhood photographs, and the objects scattered around the home have all returned as a kind of memory. Song’s work gives form to these things that have endured—his pieces act as vessels for memory itself.
While continuing his sculptural work, Song also began writing and illustrating a picture book. It was not a simple hobby, but another layer of self-expression. “When I closed my workshop in Seoul and moved to Wonju, I had a feeling that maybe I could begin again. The stories that had floated in my mind suddenly started to take shape.” Over the course of two years, he completed and published the book—a body of work that captures living memory through a different medium than furniture-making.
This exhibition, Living Memory, is, as its title suggests, a space where memory and material unfold side by side. The textures, forms, and rhythms embedded in his wooden language become structures of recollection that go beyond simple function. This is how the artist sees the world, and it is also why he carves, refines, and joins wood—bringing it to life through his hands. “I want the work to make people remember something. I hope each viewer will be able to retrieve a memory in their own way.”
The works in this exhibition—stools that are also sculptures, lights that are also landscapes—gently cross the boundaries between utility and form, reality and reverie, the present and the past. In this way, living memory quietly lingers in the eyes, hands, bodies, and hearts of those who encounter it.