Upopia

• I am neither an artist who records serious history nor an artist who seeks sublime beauty.
  . If I have to define myself, I am just a timid and cynical fantasist who wants to find, distort, create, imagine, and create my own world. At the same time, I am endlessly contemplating and trying to be aware of my own identity. In fact, this effort to be aware has become bigger and stronger since I migrated to a new environment called the UK. I was shocked and thought a lot about the truths I had believed so naturally in Korean society being conveyed to me in a new environment with different codes. And I wanted to unravel these stories through my work. The works shown here are photos that I did not shoot myself. There is no such thing as a personal photo in North Korea. Everyone has recorded their stories in their perspective as they want to be seen and recognized. It was very different from the truth I knew. I started collecting these photos one by one from three years ago. And using the images of the collected photos, I wanted to move, raise, color the buildings, and visualize other stories within the set photos, and translate the appearance of North Korea as I saw it into my work. The meaning that the work gives me is to create another world full of my own imagination. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not to those who see it. To me, it's just the truth. The boundary between reality and fiction in my photos is just a vague line. The "unreal world" where time and space are combined arbitrarily confuses the viewer's gaze. The objects in the image that appear more real because they are beyond reality but not surreal start another story with just the simple gaze of the camera.