Between Brushstrokes

I model the slow clothes. Hanbok that takes twenty minutes to tie correctly, hanfu with sleeves that have their own weather, silks that remember every careless gesture and repeat it to the camera. Photographers who book me know what they are getting: someone who moves at the speed of ink drying, who can hold a fan like a sentence and a gaze like the pause after one. Fast fashion exists and I wish it well. It is simply not my department.

I grew up in Jeonju, in my grandmother's hanbok shop, falling asleep under the cutting table while she argued with silk. She taught me that a garment is a letter someone wrote with their hands, and that wearing it badly is a kind of misreading. When I put on a customer's finished jeogori so she could check the shoulder line, and stood very still in the mirror while she frowned, I was, although neither of us knew it, in training. My whole career is that mirror, with better lighting.

Seoul is home now, a studio apartment above a stationery shop, which is the correct place for me to live. I keep an inkstone I don't deserve, write letters I mostly send, and spend my free Sundays at the river pretending I am not working out poses in my head. I photograph best in the early morning and am honest about it. Some models are golden hour. I am first light, before the city has said anything it regrets.