Sugar and candle. Candlestick . Cement, 180 x 410 x 90mm, 2019
Sugar and candle
Through the various changes of property with one mold, I tried to eliminate the formula and prejudice that spoons and chopsticks are simply durable utensils to move food. This process of change was an apt expression for “the identity confusion of modern men.” Furthermore, due to loss of function, objects that were taken for granted by the viewers have been granted a renewed sense of existence, and it is a moment when we can imagine how things we commonly use can have such diverse figures.
Sugar and candle. Sugar, Candle, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Melting Marie Antoinette . Super white slip, Plaster casting, Oxidation firing 1230℃, Various sizes, 2020
Sugar and candle. Marie Antoinette ceramic . Super white slip, Plaster casting, Oxidation firing 1230℃, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Marie Antoinette candle . Candle, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Marie Antoinette candle . Candle, Working process, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, 50 x 115mm, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Various sizes, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Working process, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Working process, 2019
Sugar and candle. Sugar spoon . Sugar, Working process, 2019
Sugar and candle. Candlestick . Cement, 180 x 410 x 90mm, 2019
Sugar and candle . Idea sketch, 2019
Writing
Flow
I have talked about the identity of temporality and time of staying in accelerated time. Time of staying is the time of finding one’s lost time and of finding oneself not distracted by others and of filling one’s redolence. However, in Korean society where organizations and social structure are prioritized, ‘individual’ is a word with negative connotation and tacitly synonymous with ‘selfish.’ In an exhausted organizational society that wants to ‘distribute’ and ‘share’ even individual time, it is hard to keep an individual’s free time.
Work even commands time to work. Labor tries to dominate all activities and powers.[1] The commands besides time given to us are labor’s time and all power is taken away. Due to the exhaustion of labor, there is no capability to engage in other activities during free time. The empty time given is just consumed. If this empty time is repeated, this free time turns into ‘urgency.’ It is eternal emotion of anxiety that is the cause of restless corporate activities.[2]
Time and emotion flow together. According to the flow of time, emotion is led passively or according to the flow of emotion, time is led. However, if my time in the present disappears, my emotion also will lose its direction with its flow interrupted.
We must recover the freedom of individual emotion. Today’s emotion is being controlled. By nature, emotion is a free being that cannot be controlled. We cannot stop tears from accumulating because we refrain from crying nor can we control the edges of our mouths from moving by refraining from smiling. However, in modern times when our time is not free, we began to control our feelings. We control emotions with medication and, restricted by time that is labor, we postpone feelings and emotion of that moment. Being free means doing as one feels.[3] Maybe we are losing both freedom and emotion at the same time.
We must acknowledge the emotion we are experiencing while we find the individual time lost in this controlled society. In the past, I tried to control emotion according to the flow of time. I divided the short amount of free time given to individual and ‘shared’ it among many relationships and the individual time was attached to communal time. Ultimately, I became impatient with individual time and tried to ignore the feeling of anxiety that came with it. However, this mental suppression, in turn, caused psychological illness. Everyone must face not only positive but also negative emotion and must find solution to the problem of time we encounter without controlling emotion.
At a time when even the word ‘Individual’ has lost individuality, it seems to be an empty shell that was made to fill the need for an antonym of community. It does not have the temperature like warmth that comes from the word ‘family.’ Just because it is individual, it does not mean that individual has to stand outside other people. ‘Individual’ in my opinion is an integral self, ‘myself’ that has the freedom of space and time inside the coexistence of society and good relationships with people. It has to be individual, not communal.
