Concept
My works under the theme of memory are a kind of a ‘flashback device’. People created images to revive the appearance of something that didn’t exist. One kind of ‘somethings not existing’ is ‘memory’. Photos have been used most often as a ‘medium’ for memory since the invention of photography. I want to tell you my story, I've been told that if you can't take care of them properly, you might lose your sights because of the hole in your retina. Because of that, I has had a vague fear of what I can't see, and I have obsessed with the words that “I have to remember what I can't see.” Rather than the ‘daily life’ that I could reach any time, I started to miss the ‘scenery’ of Jeju's sea where I was born and raised, and I felt like I would miss sunshines reflected from the sea. The first thing that came to my mind was the ‘photo’ that could bring up ‘memory’.
When we recall memories, we feel as if we can bring the exact picture of parts of the memory back, but if we look at the process of deriving the memory, we can find out that this is quite different from our general ideas. Memory goes through five steps as one process: input, storage, reconstruction, and extraction. During steps, memories are sometimes typed in new ways, and errors such as deletion or addition might occur during each steps. Therefore, we use 'photos' which can represent objectivity as a medium for the perfect memory. But photography is an extremely one-dimensional way of memory, looking at the world from one exact second with a shutter. Measuring the memory system of a person who stores emotions as a memory as well as countless points of view against those simple states, a photo is only ‘one memory fragment'. For example, humans store things that were important, such as intense colors or special emotions, and then forget the rest of them naturally, or confuse different memory images recognizing them as one single memory. In this step not just objective images, but subjective feelings that each person feels are also stored together. In other words, the memory that comes from the extraction process when reminding memories is a kind of "common sense synthesis" that is combined with multiple images, including subjectivity, into one. In my work, photography, a means to subsidize memory imperfections, is drawn as a medium between the work and the audience and used as a means of sketching. Photos are accepted as ‘one authentic memory’ but when you look back, you can feel that our emotions, not the images are in the photo as memory. In other words, the substance, a photography, can not be our memory, and it is just a means of supporting memory. Therefore, The photography as a medium only assists the work until the sketching process that forms the basis of painting and the framing process of the colors.
A person's memory has more multiple viewpoints and is more complexed than a photographic image. Thus, each of the subjective emotions and images described above is defined as a "piece of memory" and a moment of memory is divided into pieces using light and shade, color, and quantity of paints to present the diversification of time in my work. The landscapes of the photo are divided into some fragments along the light and the shade and represent an incomplete 'separation of memory' or 'decline of memory'.
In order to reinforce this separation of memories, we are fully engaged in certain memories through a medium called photography. I try to put the separated "Memory Puzzle" together by using enamel, which can make a similar texture of a photo.
This is related to the process of deriving memories. Memory can draw a different memory from the real memory due to errors in the initial input or in the output process. This also fills the empty space of the memory which has been lost due to oblivion or being lost importances with new pieces came from other memories to draw new memories that were not real. These processes sorted by different sizes, colors, heights are described as the processes to finish ‘puzzles of memory’, and audiences can be in the middle of the processes for ‘reproducing memories’, using the memory what they had experienced.
It also means that the material of reality or memory that everyone has is reconstructed into a "Puzzle of memory," reminding audiences of the finite memory and its meaning, and to make audiences reconsider the dullness of memories that have been lost due to excessive modern culture. In addition, the hard-to-find or want-to-forget memories are also purified into puzzles as the meaning of entertainment. This art work is intended to bring the audience's memory-coordination effects about modern times.
This is the audience's "return to the past," which aims to hold onto memories forgotten and tp give the audience a chance to immerse themselves in their own dim memories. This art work reminds us of the busy modern society and loss of memory, and the hope in our hearts that we want to live peacefully and beautifully even at a little slower time still with beautiful memories of childhood that are easily forgotten.
In above processes, audiences can get a kind of joy that comes from finishing the ‘puzzles of memories’. A Dutch historian, Johann Huizinga insisted that to play forms the basis of human culture in his book . This is in line with claims that human beings are Homo Pictor which means painting human beings, not Homo sapiens, it makes sense to the audience who enjoys the intention from my art work. And also, confusion between the work and the real thing in Hyper-realism was employed as a way of recognizing the differences between photography and memory. Because using enamel as the main material can shows the process of becoming abstract by seeing the art work closer and from a distance or in different pieces, the audience can easy feel ‘the process to reconstruct the memory’ by connecting to the function of ‘play’.
