Where is My Mind *Planning (2025-)

This work examines the form of contemporary capitalism by tracing a structural resemblance between the financialization of architecture and the immaterial, unruly—almost messy—quality of abstract painting.

As the securitization of subprime mortgages, one of the factors behind the Lehman Shock, made clear, housing has been treated as a financial instrument within contemporary capitalism. Housing was originally a complex entity, deeply bound up with local environments and communities. Yet in the process of making it easier to circulate within financial markets, that complexity is stripped away, and housing is reorganized as an exchangeable asset. Gentrification, too, has functioned to homogenize urban space and resident populations, thereby facilitating the transformation of real estate into an object of investment.

Since the rise of the internet, this tendency has become even more visible alongside the acceleration of global real estate investment. The “view” from luxury towers and super-prime properties has become an iconic image of housing value, sharpening the contrast between their regulated interiors and the uneven urban landscapes that spread beyond them. At the same time, the accumulation of units owned as assets but left uninhabited has produced what is called “zombie urbanism,” a condition that symbolizes the hollowing-out of the financialized city.

Within this environment, parametricist architecture emerged with its fluid forms generated through mathematical operations. At the same time, it has also been criticized as a style that attenuates locality and symbolism while turning difference itself into value. In this respect, it shares certain qualities with the abstract paintings placed inside financialized domestic spaces. Abstract painting, too, has often been commodified as a form of “pure art,” precisely through its distance from explicit symbolism and direct political legibility.

The fluid, undulating forms produced by twenty-first-century financialized architecture, together with the urban decay that unfolds behind them, resemble the chaotic surfaces of Abstract Expressionist painting. Mark Fisher compared capital to the endlessly mutating and proliferating creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The amorphous and parasitic nature of capitalism infiltrates the formal languages of both architecture and art.

Through the constellation of “abstract painting,” “The Thing,” “formlessness,” “self-proliferation,” “architecture,” and “financial instruments,” this body of work and installation explores how contemporary capitalism might be represented.