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Flowers of the World

In Flowers of the World, Kim Seung-young approaches life in a fragmented way from the perspective of communication.  As with his previous work, his interest in interpreting eternal conflicts, or confronting situations from a humanistic, cultural, or anthropologic perspective, is striking.  But this doesn’t mean that Kim Seungyoung's  work is merely an illustration of situations, a stylized arrangement, or straight documentation.

...In his work, Kim Seung-young re-imagines existing images, revealing the flexibility inherent in reading them, depending on the given context.  In the 21st century, almost all human lives are constantly devoured by mobile phones and the internet.  Today, these forms mediate and chronicle even our secret and private lives.  In the past, newspapers, television, and radio were one-way mediums.  But now, mobile phones and the internet make the distinction between the receiver and caller ambiguous, building up a 21st-century Tower of Babel.  In Flowers of the World, Kim Seung-young presents a powerful compilation of mobile phones.  Including words, letters, and pictorial images, they all can be exchanged via the internet and cellular phones, which continually evolve as multimedia.   They grow like identical twins; or they have long been Siamese twins. 

Kim Seung-young sets up a castle wall with cold glittering structures, forming a modern-day Tower of Babel.  Multimedia devices, connected like plant-stems, grow from it and bloom small monitors from which all kinds of images are transmitted. These images are collected from the world, proving humanity’s life while moving beyond space-time relationships. They bear documentation of conflict, love, attachment, hate, and indifference.  Human life is so enormous that it can surpass even the galaxy; it can be so trivial that it is less than a microscopic organism.  The images are fragmentary and present beauty and pain as simultaneous events. Kim shows our desperate need for communication through these flowers of the world.

By Choi Geum-soo / Director of Imageology Research Institute
                      

 
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