I characterized the present 20s as a “media generation,” and my work is a process of exploring their identities, and memories
of “my youth” are also mixed.
The "media generation" refers to the generation that is most sensitive to all the images the media produces. Fiction images
created by the media have a huge impact on the lives of young people in their 20s. They imprint on their consciousness or
unconsciousness the 'visual identity' gained through images floating in the mass media. The artificially bright and fluorescent
images in my work also imply the fictional beauty of idol stars who are in their 20s. They may also reflect young people’s unconscious
desire to resemble the stars while taking selfies and doing photoshop.
The emergence of idol groups in the K-pop scene in the late 1990s and the rapidly expanding media glamour thanks to the Internet have
had a great impact on the notion of beauty, gender identity and consumption style in our society. The advent of the media generation
is a symbol of a new cultural trend. The "media generation" is a consumer who is at the forefront of the trend and at the same time
is the weakest in the labor market. This includes various and heterogeneous contexts politically and economically. This is sometimes
seen as a game of meaning to acts unrelated to each other, or as light and fragmented individualism.
But wanderings of the generation should not be taken lightly. In fact, their wanderings are tearing down all boundaries. They are creating
a new level of cultural concepts that go beyond genders, peoples, races, nations and religions. They are free from love, marriage and
employment handed down by their parents. They find a new path and act on their own criteria. They seem to lose their identity to the
influence of the mass media and standardize on the media’s looks, but they are the protagonists of a new culture. So the time of 'vacuum’
they are dreaming of is a time of 'nourishment' to conceive new paradigm of life.
The vacuum appears at the moment when existing order and stereotypes collapse. It could mean the destruction of common sense that we
relied on. It also stops the reasons corresponding to existing regulations and customs, and creates a new order. The vacuum lies in
unconsciousness, which is an independent mind structure with a pattern of repetitive motion.
Memory is 'the survival of past images,' Bergson said. As such, my old memories pop up through some triggers. A song I listen by chance,
a movie scene, the image of my son enjoying youth, and many images in the Internet space bring back my old memories and experiences. Some
images are linked to another image. Old memories are seen from the present perspective. After selecting some of the images I reconstruct
them and color them anew. In this process I meet my young self and meet today's media generation.
The memories that pop up to me reflect the ‘involuntary memory’ in Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Images captured at the moment are
random and devoid of a uniform format. Past memories and experiences move to the present, then bringing back images of the past.
Accordingly, my work is neither in the present nor in the past. Nor is it objective or subjective. In other words, it can only be
described as artistic sensibility. It is a process of discovering something more essential than the past and the present. Images
scattered like numerous stars twinkling in the night sky are at one point linked together to form a constellation of images and
create new shapes.
Simply put, my work combines the universality of 20-year-olds with the peculiarity of today's 20-year-olds and gives us a glimpse of our times today.