'FIELD, Something Scattered'

Work notes. May 2021

While exploring new media to break away from my pictorial concepts that were preceded by printmaking and painting, I needed a more fundamental approach than my previous works, including 'Inherent Symbols'. In an attempt to minimize the visual grammar as a symbol in the existing expression method of revealing and showing with lines and colors, 'FIELD' was first esquised as a print.

The earth work 'FIELD', which began in 2017, originated from repentance toward the land.

Where does life begin and when does death begin? Every day is the starting point for the track I am constantly spinning, but the time to return together is running away in the minutes and seconds of the universe, and the days I will live in the future are becoming less and less than the days I have lived. Today, no matter how many pieces I put together, the length does not increase. The place where I stand, craning my neck and looking up at the sky as if my dream will last forever, is the land where I will die and return as a handful of ashes. Life, which can only be seen when you bow your head, eventually collapses and breaks like a lump of dirt and is buried in the ground. The ground embraces all the lives that are crumbling beneath our feet. That land, no, my countless scattered lives are enduring my sloppy and foolish life right now.

In addition to the existing 'FIELD' work, the charcoal skin used as an object is burned in a charcoal kiln. We pick up and use the poor things that once breathed in the warmth of wind and sunlight, but have changed into useless lumps of carbon that break apart at the touch of a hand, and are finally thrown away. Fragments of charcoal blood are scattered like floating signifiers. The cracks that encompass the entire background are between the lines of inherent language, and the randomly scattered debris are lives that existed in different times and spaces, gathered together for a while, and then scattered again. Reality and emptiness, emerging and blooming beings and abandoned beings are not different from each other. They don't go away. Life that has fulfilled its purpose and returned to the place of death only exists somewhere else in a different form. Gathering into the ground is the order of nature, and soil is a trace of time in which the entropy of the universe circulates.

Like a grain of sand washing up on the beach, something crumbling helplessly like the soft bark of a tree piled up in a charcoal kiln, thoughts that arise suddenly but are never completed and forgotten, words that have been held back and swallowed at some point, a being that has come into the world and received no name. Where are you in the cycle of birth and return?

Like the remains of a fierce wave, each one hovers at the edge of time and is finally scattered, the last thing that is carelessly abandoned in the wilderness, can it remain in our hearts as a large rock-like shape or a shadow? Things you've already forgotten. I hope that all of the abandoned and scattered things, those who have passed through the water and fire of countless seasons, will become solid, solid ground for someone to stand on somewhere in the distant future, and that the person I am today, obsessed with Asura's desire, can be reborn again. If so, I sincerely pray that you may be reborn in a beneficial and new way in the heart of the Creator.

*The place where the sun rises and sets

All the gods lie there

Nothing can escape it

This is it.

That thing right here, that thing right there

What's there is what's here

He goes from death to death.*

-Kata Upanishad Chapter 2, Verse 4, Lines 9 and 10-

*(The smallest visible units that turn into atoms, such as grains of sand, powder, or dots, have not disappeared, but are just broken. When they return to atoms, they become energy, and energy will gain life again. Anything that is thrown away is reborn in the loop of circulation. It is the principle of the universe that the energy of the non-material circulates from reality to unreality, from material to non-material, and back to material.)