우물 안에서
우물 안을 들여다보았다. 놀랍도록 검고 깊은 공간이었다. 한낮의 빛도 닿지 않는 그곳은 농밀하게 어두웠고, 높은 곳에 오르지 않았는데도 아찔하였다. 나의 시선은 보이지 않는 곳을 향해있었다. 긴장되었다. 그러나 한편으로 그 불안감에 유혹되었다. 그렇게 나는 어릴 적 외할머니댁을 방문할 때마다 우물이 있는 뒷마당으로 달려가곤 했다. 오랜 세월 닫혀 있던 우물의 무거운 나무 덮개를 제쳐 그것을 대면하는 일은 나에겐 재미난 놀이였다. 하루는 깊이를 가늠해 보기 위해 돌멩이 하나를 떨어뜨려 보았다. 암흑이 순식간에 그것을 삼켜버렸다. 나는 속으로 ‘하나, 둘...’ 세기 시작했다. 암흑이 소리까지 삼킨 건지 믿을 수 없는 적막이 계속됐다. 내가 상상할 수 있는 깊이는 진작에 초과했다. 나는 제대로 초를 세고 있는지도 확신할 수 없었다. 차단된 감각들이 공간과 시간의 관계에 금을 냈다. 무엇인가가 잘못된 느낌이었다. 마침내 바닥을 치는 소리가 들렸다. 마치 세상의 끝에서부터 울려오는 소리 같았다.
어느 날 우물 문을 열었을 때 반대편 세상의 문도 함께 열렸고, 한 소년이 그 안에 있었다. 어째서인지 그날의 우물은 마르지 않았고, 그 끔찍이도 검은 수면에 나의 그림자가 비쳐있었다. 나는 그것이 정말 나의 것인지 확인하기 위해 손을 흔들어보았다. 마주 흔들리는 그 모습은 조금 어색하였다. 아마도 그렇게 멀찍이 떨어져 있는 그림자를 본 적이 없어서일지도 모르겠다. 그 그림자는 어둠 한가운데에 고립되어 있었다. 바라보면 바라볼수록 그 소년이 이질적으로 보이기 시작하였다. 그리고 갑자기 그도 나를 바라보는 듯하여 두려워졌다. 그것은 정말 그림자일 뿐 이었을까.
I peered into the well. It was a startlingly dark and deep space. Untouched by the midday sun, it was densely shadowed, and though I stood on level ground, I felt vertiginous. My gaze was directed toward a place I could not see. I was tense. Yet at the same time, I found myself seduced by that very unease. And so, whenever I visited my maternal grandmother's house as a child, I would run to the backyard where the well stood. Lifting the heavy wooden cover that had been shut for years and confronting what lay beneath was, for me, an amusing game. One day, to gauge its depth, I dropped a pebble. The darkness swallowed it in an instant. I began counting silently to myself: one, two... The silence that followed was so absolute I wondered if the darkness had swallowed the sound as well. The depth had long exceeded anything I could imagine. I could no longer be certain I was counting the seconds correctly. My severed senses fractured the relationship between space and time. Something felt wrong. At last, I heard the sound of it striking the bottom. It was as if the sound had traveled from the very end of the world.
One day, when I opened the well's cover, a door on the other side of the world opened with it, and a boy was there inside. For some reason, the well was not dry that day, and my shadow was reflected on its dreadfully black surface. I waved my hand to confirm whether it was truly mine. The figure waving back seemed slightly awkward. Perhaps I had never seen my shadow at such a distance before. That shadow was stranded in the middle of the darkness. The longer I stared, the more alien the boy began to appear. And then, suddenly, I grew frightened—it seemed as though he, too, was staring back at me. Was it really just a shadow?
—
In the Well is a meditation on the fluidity of childhood memory and the uncertain boundary between the real and the imagined. The work explores confabulation—the mind's tendency to fill gaps in recollection with invented fragments—as a lens through which to examine how we construct the past. In memory, as in the darkness of a well, what we perceive and what we project onto the void become indistinguishable.
Yet there is something more. I have come to believe that a certain mystery reveals itself—or perhaps liberates itself—only in the act of direct encounter. When we gaze squarely at something, even a landscape, and sense that it gazes back, an exchange occurs that cannot be summoned by glancing or passing by. It is in that mutual recognition, that feeling of eyes meeting across the threshold, that the hidden begins to stir. This work seeks to capture such moments: the instant when looking becomes being seen, when the boundary between observer and observed dissolves, and the mysterious no longer hides but rises to meet us.
Through these images, I trace the web of emotions, sensations, and associations that shape our earliest memories, and ask whether they belong to experience or to imagination—or to something that emerges only when we dare to look directly into the dark.
Photographs 2015-2022
Republished 2026