A Longing for Love and Salvation
"My previous exhibition, titled Aporia, sought to represent the impasse of love as implied by the neon texts glowing amidst bleak and desolate landscapes. This series marked a turning point in my artistic direction. While I had been especially interested in the exploration of image and text, the humane yet surrealistic appeal of the neon signs inspired me to develop a new vision and interpretation about text. In Aporia, a narrator’s desire is always inherent in the expressions of love – the narrator is a virtual character that runs into neon texts while wandering through a landscape. Aporia follows the traces of sorrow and longing from a first person point of view of that traveler.
If the words used in the series Aporia implied the desire for a love that cannot be possessed, then I came to wonder what is the end of the journey begun with Aporia and its inherent emotional entanglements? This question began to manifest itself with the fracture of this language of love and a deconstruction of these phrases to form clusters. The new series, Day and Night, tells the story of people’s ultimate desire through these clusters of expressions of love. To radically contrast such empty desires against the sea, a symbolic space, all works are of neon installations shot on site. A cluster of neon floating over the dark sea … drifting along … portrays one’s internal pursuit of salvation.
In this new exhibition, I used “God” and “Love” as the two main words. This reflects my interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and his belief that true faith and love would lead you to heaven. But many of the words “God” and “Love” are displayed like a host of reproductions or in a large heap thereby demonstrating the inner confusion of people. In the beginning, God called the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.” Hopefully, the neon texts illuminating in the dark will give you a chance to reflect on our longing for immortal light and to provide a means for contemplation and introspection.
Press release courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.
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