SaGe
Ryu, DongHyeok

I’ve trembled for as long as I can remember.

People called it a flaw, an illness—

and for a time, I tried to hide it.

But eventually, I placed a lens upon that trembling.

I chose not to resist the anxiety,

not to erase the wound,

but to look straight into it.

 

Photography, born from my unsteady hands,

became my language—

a private sentence directed at the world.

 

When I first picked up a camera,

I wandered the city capturing light and shadow,

only to find myself lost in the familiarity of what I saw.

So I began to experiment,

to blur, to deviate.

In that process, I encountered not just an image,

but a trace of myself.

 

In 2019, I began living and working on Jeju Island.

The sea there embraced me, then cast me out;

it welcomed me, then threatened to drown me.

Its duality mirrored my own interiority—

and I tried to photograph not just beauty,

but what beauty conceals and forgets.

 

The blur in my photographs is not a mistake.

It is a rupture, a refusal of perfection.

A way of holding a world

that constantly shifts beneath our feet.

The softened lines,

the diffused colors—

they resemble how we understand each other:

partially, imperfectly, and with effort.

 

I still ask myself:

Why do I keep making these trembling images?

That question drives me to create,

and the act of creation returns me to myself.

 

As SAGE,

I move through photography, video, sound, and material forms—

documenting the drift between anxiety and healing,

resistance and poetry.

 

And if you stand before my work,

I hope it stirs not only what I’ve seen,

but something deeply your own—

a memory, a fracture, a quiet kind of grace.