Apple is a three-channel video created by overlapping or intersecting various contents and images of apples mentioned in historical events and literature. The artist uses apples as a motif to rethink dichotomous standards such as truth and falsehood, good and evil, good and bad.

 

The first video shows an elephant show and a documentary of the chimpanzee “Ham” used in the animal experiment in a space with subtitles quoted from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The video evokes paradoxical emotions that intersect with the case of using animals as tools under the pretext of advances in science and human pleasure, and the hate, confusion, and alienation felt by Gregor Samsa, who turned into a roach, and is subsequently killed by an apple thrown by his father.  Here, the apple has ambivalent meanings of a reward and punishment given to a being that is used for human benefit.

 

In the second video, lines from Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo script. a dialogue between Galileo and his pupil Andrei are delivered through the mouths of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, shown alongside video footage from the Manhattan Project, a US-led nuclear development experiment. The heliocentric theory claimed by Galileo was regarded as a heresy by the church at the time, but now it is accepted as the truth, rather than a hypothesis. Meanwhile, Einstein and Oppenheimer urged the United States to develop an atomic bomb in order to prevent Germany’s nuclear development during World War II, developing the Manhattan Project. However, after recognizing the dangers of nuclear weapons, they regretted their judgement. The video combines two events that brought different results to show that scientific advances can be either beneficial or poisonous to humans, and what is believed to be the truth is also variable depending on history or circumstances.

 

The third video refers to Alan Turing's biography The Enigma and the animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Turing is today regarded as the father of artificial intelligence and computers, and was the hidden figure who cracked the German code and led the Allies to victory in World War II. However, as a sexual minority, he was considered a criminal in British society and was forced to undergo chemical castration at the time he could not escape the toxicity of his time. The video compares this to the poison apple in Snow White, based on the anecdote that Turing committed suicide by eating an apple covered in cyanide, and referencing his like of the 1937 animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Snow White who ate the poisonous apple came back to life, Alan Turing is re-evaluated today. By presenting various symbols surrounding the apple, the artist questions whether the essence of existence can be defined as singular, and to reconsider the truth or value that is taken for granted in our time.