In 2017, I scribbled a short text on a paper:
"What you see here is not art.
It's a dream. While my friends diligently go to work four or five times a week,
I give up making art just as often.
It occurred to me that i do not even have to hand in my resignation, or many.
Sometimes you feel like you've lost your way while walking home from the supermarket.
Where am I? Am I living, or am I dreaming?
A single realistic thought floats in my tofu-soft brain:
'I must take an apple tree with me if I were to go on a long journey with a submarine.'
Don't forget... never forget, never forget.
Otherweise you won't wake up from the dream."
I began making art when I was fifteen years old. After studying art in Seoul, I moved to Germany. While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, I took a part-time job installing exhibitions at Haus der Kunst to pay the rent for my studio. What I expected to be temporary eventually lasted almost eighteen years. During that time, however, my life as an artist was slowly, almost imperceptibly, shrinking.
One morning on my way to work, a feeling of despair overwhelmed me.
I had devoted more than thirty years of my life to art, yet I had become someone who only occasionally exhibited, almost like a hobbyist. Dust gathered in my studio, and little by little, I felt myself drying up along with it.
That day, I locked the studio door and never went back.
I had decided to quit being an artist.
But as I turned away from the studio, an unexpected question came to me.
If I were allowed to make just one final work—one last project—what would I make?
At heart, I had always been a sculptor.
So, for the very last time, I wanted to return to sculpture.
Not to make a work for an audience, nor for an exhibition, but to create one final sculpture as an act of respect for the person who had spent more than thirty years trying to live as an artist. Only then did I want to quietly let go of that life.
The moment I made that decision, I felt an extraordinary sense of freedom.
I no longer needed to succeed.
I no longer needed to prepare for exhibitions.
I no longer needed to satisfy anyone.
All that remained was the simple, pure desire to make something.
As soon as that question arose, a memory from years earlier returned to me.
It was a summer morning in July.
After dropping my child off at kindergarten, I was cycling through Munich's English Garden on my way to an exhibition installation job at the museum. As usual, I was rushing, pedalling as fast as I could.
Then, like a great wave, a single question struck both my mind and my heart.
Where on earth am I rushing to?
I stopped my bicycle.
Beyond the blurred veil before my eyes—whether it was morning mist or my own tears—I noticed something moving slowly between the enormous trees.
It was a submarine.
Almost imperceptibly, it drifted through the English Garden, moving so slowly that it seemed less to travel than to float.
Only much later did I understand what I had seen.
It was the very submarine from the forgotten text I had scribbled years before.
At the precise moment I was riding toward a museum filled with completed works by other artists instead of toward my own studio, where unfinished works were waiting for me, that submarine appeared before me like a vision.
That was the day I decided to create Apple Tree Submarine.
For a sculptor, the next question is always the same.
What should it be made of?
At that time, I had been teaching myself the technique of gilding sculptures with gold leaf.
Gold leaf was beautiful, but incredibly difficult to handle.
The fragile sheets tore at the slightest breath, drifted away in the air, and expensive material disappeared again and again before my eyes.
Then, just as in the old note, another realistic thought drifted through my tofu-soft brain.
"Why not simply make it out of pure gold?"
It was an absurd idea.
And yet, strangely enough, at that moment it felt like the most realistic thought imaginable.
Of course, I never believed such a sculpture could actually become reality.
It was simply an image floating through the middle of despair.
But once I decided to devote myself to making that final work, the imagination slowly began to move toward reality.
I quit all of my part-time jobs.
Then I began preparing for a sculpture made of pure gold.
I had no money to buy gold.
So instead, I began drawing the Apple Tree Submarine travelling through the ordinary landscapes of my everyday life.
It drifted quietly through parks and streets, between my home and my studio, among people going about their daily routines.
At first, I believed these drawings were merely studies for a sculpture.
With time, however, they became works in their own right.
I began exchanging each drawing with people who connected with it in return for a certain amount of gold.
Every gram of gold I receive is carefully set aside as material for the future Apple Tree Submarine.
One day, when the sculpture has finally been completed, I will return the gold—or its equivalent—to everyone who entrusted it to me.
Whether by separating pieces from the sculpture itself or by melting and recasting the gold, I do not yet know.
But one thing is certain.
A drawing will remain in their homes.
The gold will return to their hands.
And I will be left with the footprints of a sculptor who continued walking, even while losing his way.
That alone will be enough.
Apple Tree Submarine is not simply a project to create a sculpture.
It is the journey of a person trying to live as an artist, a voyage that can never be completed alone.
And that voyage began long ago, in a dream.
