A Project For Perfect Reality and Perfect Flatness (∴ Perfect Painting)

This installation is composed of two separate rooms in a gallery: a mirror room and a camera obscura(dark room). The camera obscura has one hand-made lens(60Cm in diameter) at one side through which the external images come in. The audience will look at the projected images on the other side of the wall. The mirror room is made of acrylic mirrors surrounding the walls with the viewer in it.

On the one hand, both rooms are designed to deal with the problem of reality and image, the object and the projected. In the camera obscura, the landscape outside the gallery is the reality. The viewer will look at the projected images already existing when they get in. In the mirror room, the images emerge only when the audience gets in. While the subject and the seen are differentiated in the camera obscura, the subject and the objects are identified in the mirror room. However, both cases raise the question "What is the reality ?." It is also intended to evoke the problem of 'way of seeing', and to give a chance to reflect it to Korean artists who had to adopt the style of Western art in the process of modernization. And, to top these, I wanted them to experience the camera, the first strong competitor of painting, expecting them to broaden their realm of thinking to the relationship of art and technology in this technology dominating century.

On the other hand, the images in both rooms show literally flat images on the surface, thus suggesting perfect(?) two-dimensionality that modernism had sought with paranoia.

This work could be little more than a joke on such outmoded problems as perspective, reality, and flatness. However, It would be worthy if they consider it as a "zero degree" to think about the meaning of our "reality" in the continuous influx of western art.