What constitutes the foundation of the city are, in ideological terms, clearly composed of structures of both the upper and lower strata. As such, together with the forces that shape its environment, such as technology, capital, and history (and the cultural conditions that emerge from them), the city continuously generates its own material and conceptual transformations. At the micro level of lived reality, the lives of citizens who constitute the city are typically organized as subordinate components within the broader framework of the macro level of urban design. Yet it is rather paradoxical to recall that the very emergence of the city originally placed its purpose in the happiness of these individuals. This is perhaps because once the vast structure of the city is set in motion, its initial justification quickly evaporates, and its original purpose is gradually submerged in the self-reproduction of the urban system itself. Ultimately, as all such aspirations converge toward a logic of maintenance, the reality of the city unfolds within a kind of entropic cycle—where actions arise, fade away, and arise again—repeating similar trajectories while, in the process, somewhat indifferently losing sight of the very existence that should matter most. Such circumstances simultaneously demonstrate the rigidity of reality and reveal how the structures of the city organize everyday life. The problem, then, is that under these conditions individual lives are still assumed to be determined by the city as a kind of a priori proposition. Yet it is axiomatic that the urban system will persist, and the lives of citizens will continue to share their fate with that of the city. This raises a further question: if the so-called class of citizens is conceived as a subject, what meanings might they reclaim as their own foundation within a reflexive context? This question, in turn, gestures toward a more expanded form of public proposition addressed to us all. As Henri LEFEBVRE observed, "specialists who have studied urban reality" can "hardly go without a synthesis, settling for a quantity of knowledge, of dividing and splitting urban reality"¹. He continues: "More often, they conceptualize the city (and society) as an organism. Historians have frequently linked these entities to an 'evolution' or to an 'historical development'"¹. This line of critique becomes productive insofar as it redirects attention to the secondary effects that arise when the city is fixed as an object of rational analysis. In this context, EUM Kixung's aesthetic practice re-presents the city as a living form in progress, through a documentary practice that constructs from the residual traces left behind.

Taking this dynamic structure into account, EUM Kixung's so-called Urban Image Scrap series may be understood as an attempt to focus on constructing an archive through a distinctive act of collecting. His archives, on a material level (regardless of the desires of the subjects who inhabit the city) depict the conditions of a particular era held in suspension. The series of procedures that constitute this act of recording—put more concretely and in commonplace terms, the act of casting the captured city—may, within the institutional context of the modern narrative of development, be reduced merely to the sentimental residue of nostalgia. Yet at the level of private identity grounded in personal memory, it can also transform into an occasion for a different mode of meaning, inscribing the contemporary value of inevitable fractures. Furthermore, the artist's rubbing practice does not aim primarily at realizing the conventional principles of preservation. Rather, it emerges from an effort to painstakingly accumulate, from within localized worlds, the political legitimacy of the urban realization of the structures we call reality. In this sense, EUM's work may be understood not simply as the construction of monumental representation, but as an expression of ignition—a practice that genuinely questions the present function of such structures. Such a process summons the elements that urban planning has excluded—those pushed beyond the boundaries of official categories. The rubbings that unfold along the outer surfaces of buildings render the image of the city as fragments of sensation through a process of direct contact. In discovering and arranging these traces, the artist blurs the hierarchies among the elements that constitute the city. The minor images of urban components he captures no longer remain background or peripheral details; instead, they acquire equal standing as formal units. Rather than placing vague hopes for improvement in the outwardly radiating energies generated by the collisions of massive structures, EUM turns to the opposite point: the implosive processes that unfold almost imperceptibly through the small accumulations of everyday life. From this inward dynamic, he cracks open the seemingly stable order of purposive systems. In particular, the formal language of his work is situated within the category of craft grounded in ceramics. Through this medium, the fragments of memory left incomplete during the process of on-site casting and image collection are hardened through the plastic transformation of firing, thereby elevating their status into markers of record. In this way, craft produces reality not at the level of commerce but at that of the public, and not at the level of abstract concept but within everyday life. The concrete act thus sinks deeper precisely through its fragmentation. Accordingly, the position of the artist evolves—from attention to creation, from witnessing to reportage, and from reception to the articulation of a standpoint. EUM's Urban Image Scrap series recognizes the scale by which meaningful information of the present era may be measured. At the same time, it inscribes subjective propositions related to that information into the level of objective indices, while elevating them into a form akin to pseudo-artifacts or quasi-ruins. Fragments of reality transcribed in this manner function, within the artist’s practice, to reveal overlapping strata of history. In other words, his transcription (jeonsa) operates as an image-skin surrounding the urban system, through which the implications of the surface transcend the layered strata of other signifiers that once displaced its outward extension. Incomplete urban sites, such as renovation or demolition areas and aging city centers, are thus repositioned by the artist from the margins into visibility. Within the alternative time and space of the exhibition, these ‘shadowed’ places are brought into the ‘light’, prompting a reconsideration of the lines of management and control that have governed the operation of the city.

The sculptural forms thus constructed by EUM seem to suggest a certain threshold, suspended between past and present and between elapsed time and spaces yet to arrive, linking the city’s history to its unfolding future. As members of a society who inevitably live within the structures of the city, the attempt to reconsider the proper purposes by which such structures should operate recalls the mode of sovereignty exercised through relationships established by contract. In other words, the functioning of a vast artificial persona such as the community itself³. In this sense, the artist’s work reveals the possibility of restoring the crowd—once constituted as a collective body of citizens—to its original density. It thus proposes that the city must mediate citizens and their lives not merely as objects of management and control, but as genuine manifestations of subjectivity and as plural ends in themselves. The space of everyday life derives its force precisely from exposing the stark differences in positions regarding the organization of an ideal locality. The construction of meaning, therefore, should begin from the recognition of a variable totality woven from the accumulation of multiple generations—erasing the attribute of a singular, monumental unity, or alternatively rendering it opaque. In this way, the meaning of the contemporary city, marked by the keyword of disappearance, must be rewritten as the very process through which its values are constituted. It is precisely this rewriting that EUM Kixung’s work calls for.