Through my art, I tried to vividly express the standards of "perfect art" and "successful art" that people imposed on me in the past. The obsession brought me feelings such as discomfort, anxiety, fear, and suffering. Through my art journey, I wanted to break the framework of perfect art that people had instilled in me. I also wanted to break down the emotions, as during the time I emotionally wrestled inside thinking ‘Why am I doing art?’,’What is my identity?’.
Back when I was young, I remember that the school art teacher assigned us to draw animal figures demonstrating how to match proportions with a ruler,emphasising that our work should be examinable. With contemplation, I decided to paint a dragon that appears in the Korean myth, and was happy with my work,expecting that the teacher would be too. However,I got a C for my grade. I was upset with my grade ,and the teacher’s mean comments implying how bad it is in front of the classmates. I didn’t know back then, but now I realise, my art spirit was broken.
I started to get really obsessed with getting compliments from teachers, friends, anybody, and really pushed myself for my art to get a perfect score. I was happy when people said ‘it looks nice’, but was depressed when people said ‘what is this?’ although they were just simply being curious about my artwork, now I figured. I was desperate for compliments. I had emotional fluctuations and was fighting with my emotional and artistic identity.
However I started to navigate a new pathway of approaching art through journeys. When I first moved to a boarding school, it was hard to study various subjects at school from the beginning, but it was always fun no matter how many assignments I had when I took art subjects. Unlike existing art classes, our school had to work a lot in a short time according to the iGCSE and IB curriculum. Therefore, there were many friends who lost interest in art because they usually needed academies to do the work for them because they had too many assignments. Unlike them, I realised I was improving day by day and became more interested, thus disregarding my emotional fluctuations. I now realised it was no longer just ‘like’ that I felt for art, but passion. It became my identity.
This passion appeared in the form of various shapes of exposure and challenges to this field. Especially, I was inspired by wood and scrap sculptures and 1,000 luminous sculptures hanging (I'm Home - Koo Bon Ju) from the Arario art museum and took a risk to create wooden engraving sculptures using high-angle knives for the first time, and make patterns by printing them with ink. Through this experience I found out that I am a person who likes to improve from my weaknesses, and confront new situations.
Hence, I also went one step further leading the school exhibition 'Dark and Light' inspired by the same art, and held a glow-in-the-dark event to plan and hosted hands-on activities where students could draw their initials and pictures with glow-in-dark paint about their school life. Art gave me further interest in directing, too.
Outside of school, I became more intimate with art. My life began to be filled with my interests. Works by favourite artists such as Mary Cassatt, and Mane were posted on the walls, souvenirs from galleries and cultural centres were placed on the desk. Bookshelves were filled with exhibition catalogues, musicals, and movie tickets that I've gone to on my own. Naturally, starting to find things that interest me lead to discovering my style. As art became more intimate to myself, the pressure and emotional ups and downs gradually decreased. Now, my purpose of art is not getting a perfect score, but a method of expressing my emotions and myself to the world.
