ARTWORK

The Image Left Unclaimed
2025

UV inkjet print on paper
H952×W732mm

The Image Left Unclaimed is a series of works that investigates the ontological residue of the image after its collapse as representation.
Originally based on photographic images, these works undergo a deliberate process of destruction and destabilization during printing.
Ink is left unfixed, allowed to drip, blur, and peel—obliterating the legibility of form and rendering the image unreadable as referent.
What remains is not representation, but trace: an index severed from its origin, a visual afterimage that refuses both narrative and mnemonic function.
This series operates within the conceptual space between archival logic and its failure—between the desire to preserve and the inevitability of loss.
Here, the image is no longer a medium of memory, but a residual material event: the remainder of a visual that was never fully claimed by meaning, nor integrated into symbolic systems.
The Image Left Unclaimed thus proposes a poetics of visual orphanhood: an image that, having lost its subject and function, persists as a performative remainder—a fragment of failed inscription.
Rather than offering visibility, it embodies the impossibility of fixing presence. It invites us to consider what it means for an image to exist outside of recognition—and what kind of ethics might emerge from that space.