Stranger Room Personal Card

This work explores migration, living in solitude, and the redefinition of personal identity.

When a person leaves their homeland and begins life in an unfamiliar country, their established routine gradually crumbles, and the concept of home ceases to be a given. They must rebuild their daily life and search for a sense of belonging within the small details of personal experience.

How does one rediscover the feeling of home while situated in an unfamiliar space?

5 Hours

Clocks are an ordinary object of daily life. The five-hour difference between China and Russia is not just a difference in geographical points—it prompts reflection on how distance alters one’s relationship with home and with past versions of oneself. For this reason, I intentionally left the numerals off the clock face: time transforms into a space where emotions, the rhythm of life, and memories are preserved.

Plastic Engraving

I created print stamps, hand-cut from foamed PVC, combining imagery of everyday objects with personal symbols: windows, cups, blankets, pets, houseplants, and Chinese characters. By layering them, I transfer fragments of familiar life into a new living space, allowing memories to intertwine with an unfamiliar environment.

Home is no longer just a place we aspire to return to.

For me, home is no longer a fixed geographical point. It is a constantly evolving sensation connected to environment, lived experience, cherished memories, and how we perceive ourselves at different stages of life.

Each work is a way to interpret one’s own identity and seek a sense of belonging: from loneliness and distance to a new understanding of home, from travel to memories of plants and homeland.

It is a space that we redefine and create anew, influenced by experience, memory, and a shifting understanding of ourselves.

Together, my works form a personal map of my migration and coming-of-age: I am learning to live in an unfamiliar environment, feeling the distance between myself and my homeland, and gradually finding my own way to build a life.

TITLE
Personal Map of an Unfamiliar Room

FORMAT
A series of six graphic works featuring clocks

TECHNIQUE
Plastic engraving; hand-cut printing stamps from foamed PVC

MATERIALS
Foamed PVC, oil canvas, clockwork mechanism

QUANTITY
6 works