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Dream
Single channel video installation, Multi-media installation, dimension variable, 2021

still cut of Dream
single-channel video installation, color, sound, 20 min 27, 2021
Dream is composed of a single-channel video and objects that traverse the past-present-future, reality and virtuality. Replica of famous paintings and sculptures appearing in the video are independent objects and are installed in pair with text messages displayed on mobile device.
Dream begins with a scene where dream and reality are indistinguishable, as a field of peach blooms from An Gyeon’s Mongyu Dowondo (Dream of Strolling in a Peach Garden) is overlaid with the trees in the dolmen park in Hwasun, Ganghwado. The scenery one encounters in the field of peach blooms after following a light is a tragic image that suggests life and forgotten deaths in our blind spots. From Gosiwon (low-cost accommodation) where you can barely lie down, the subway platform at Guui Station, to Yangjaecheon, Cheonggyecheon, and Bulgwangcheon, where you can see the skyline of high-end residential complexes and high-rise buildings, each location in the background hints at the social murder caused by poverty and alienation, which you may have seen in the news at least once. Small clothes hanging from trees serve as an analogy of blooming peach petals, a motif that symbolizes the souls of those who have passed away after this death. In this way, Mureungdowon, a symbol of utopia in East Asia, is not the dreamed world but a place where cold reality unfolds, making us question whether the utopia exists.

still cut of Dream

A Vertical Spirit Soaring from the Earth
multi-media installation
A replica of Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitekton Gota (1923)
wood, plaster
86 × 56 × 52.5 cm
Single-channel video, color, sound, 4 min. 8 sec
Objects appearing in the scenes of life in the video, including Mongyudowondo painting (which constitutes the main narrative of Dream) and Kazimir Malevich’s Arkhitekton Gota, Jean-Francois Millet’s The Angelus, Paul Klee’s Above Mountain Summit, and Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, are reborn as completely different entities or creatures in the text messages exchanged with an anonymous interlocutor, rather than simply imitating the original. Arkhitekton, which rises up against the background river in the video, is portrayed in the exhibition hall as a “vertical spirit soaring from the Earth” which is created as memories of sadness and fear,and are reified over a long period of time. This shows the outline of how the latent thoughts and minds in each person's unconscious gather, creating and generating utopian attempts and projects, while implying their planned decline simultaneously. Meanwhile, the paintings of Millet and Klee hanging in the empty Gosiwon room are not unlike antiques that tell the story of a frozen time, and they are introduced as “creatures living in the black hole.” In a black hole where space-time is distorted, the square creature of “painting” makes us think about the existence of art in the space of each individual's life and everyday language. Also, as people who are consumed as instruments of capitalist society are depicted like asteroids floating in space at Guui Station in the video, asteroids are referred to as “electronic bugs” who were forced to work mechanically on the planet Earth two billion years ago in the text message. As such, the main video and objects of Dream, and the fiction delivered through familiar digital language, are a medium that intersects with the viewer's world, highlighting the scars of the harsh reality.
Dream shows that the sacrifices of others we have forgotten, the weight of hard work and life that each individual has to bear, and the proximity of the hell from the reality. Just as the projects of utopia that were never realized are just a daydream, the Mureungdowon described in Dream is full of scratches.



Electronic Bugs Flown from Earth
multi-media installation. Styrofoam
fluorescent paint
113 × 133 × 55cm, 58 × 126 × 68 cm
Radar images of asteroids
single-channel video, color, sound,
5 min. 20 sec.
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

still cut of Dream

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