Ghost boxes
Ten thousand li back home and all I have left is this body
October 17th - 31st, 2015
Space One, Seoul, South Korea
Ghost Boxes emerged as my tangible act of resistance, a series of twenty-seven silver shipping boxes, each marked with counterfeit labels. The number is a direct reflection of the actual parcels I sent as I navigated my path from Chicago to Philadelphia—a journey not just through cities, but through the complexities of life as an international student in the United States.
Each box, in its blatant artificiality, was crafted to stand against the idea of movement, the normative purpose of a shipping box. They were created to be immovable, to resist passage, much like my own experience as a student from abroad, often feeling caught between places and identities, belonging fully to neither.
As a graduate student, I was acutely aware of the transience that defined my existence in this country—the impermanence, the uncertainty of status, the sense that I was always poised on the brink of the next move. The Ghost Boxe" are a metaphor for this state of limbo, physical representations of the desire to find stillness in a life of continuous transition.
These boxes are not just objects; they are a narrative of stillness amidst the flux of student life, the oscillation between assimilation and individuality, and the search for a sense of permanence in a temporary abode. They were constructed to please the eye and to fulfill a personal need for creative expression, but also to stand as silent witnesses to the peculiar in-betweenness that international students experience.
Ghost Boxes are thus more than an artistic endeavor—they are a testimony to the suspended reality of life as a foreigner, a life punctuated by the logistics of visas, the temporariness of homes, and the constant hum of the unknown.
