1. The Soldiers_ 3:46 animated video art 2018
The Soldiers is an animated video art. The video will be projected on a wall in a huge dark room. It is not just a simple media art but stimulate the human senses, such as anxiety, fears, ecstasy and etc.
I’m very scared of war, like everyone, of course. But with me, this fear is more concrete, since I am a citizen of South Korea, which is constantly threatened with war by the other Korea in the north. I have always lived with this pressing fear of war, even though I have no direct experience of it.
War has to be stopped. I am against violence. I cannot prevent war by myself. However, I would like to try to eliminate it, even if I might be powerless to do so. I have been studying a symbol related to war which is a soldier. This symbol of violence has concerned me since I served my two years of military service in South Korea.
In The Soldiers, I begin with the symbol of a soldier as a symbol of violence, but I take this violence away from the soldier through an expansion of the figure. The line tracing of the soldier slowly becomes like a circle and the violence within him is dispersed. The circle is the symbol that philosophically can represent purity. These circles of purity are similar to the rings in a tree, symbols of vitality and history. However, When we observe this work, we can feel a sort of tiredness or dizziness, resulting from the illusion of movement expressed by the lines. Ironically, I made a visual violence even though I desire to have a peaceful world. This is a replication of immortal war. One soldier is now hundreds of troops, the army makes the background turn white into black. Then, the white soldiers are gradually revealed on the background of the black colour, turning black into white. This is a visual representation of the human being’s endless war.
Through my artworks, I interpret an invisible threat of war and a reality that I have seen and felt. I represent the madness of violence by creating visual works without words. The work conveys interpretations of my concerns about the conflict between peace and violence.
2. War is up to you_ lenticular art 2020
A nuclear bomb is exploding in front of us. We, of course, have never really experienced the power of this bomb, but we know about the effects and consequences of it. The copied images that exist far more than the actual number of bombs are already so familiar to us. So used to it, the original concept threatening is gone and even beautiful.
I manipulate the mushroom cloud image to make it looks beautiful to the audience. Indeed, we may ignore the terrible facts of war, even though we know it. The work seduce their eyes with violence disguised as beauty. In this work, the mushroom cloud no longer exists regardless of our will. It is either created or destroyed by our will.
The shape of the image is changed by the angle of view that changes as the audience moves. The audience can see as their position changes the mushroom cloud is dissolution and produced. In a phenomenological space where this infinite change occurs, the audience recognizes that they exist as a part of the work. A part of the war.