HerRealSecret Onement Original

Her Real Secret is a series of the project that explores fiber installation, multi-channel video, comic, and animations. By utilizing commercial items, materials, and signs from shopping malls, I tried to create a place with ambiguity; it is interesting to examine how the most secular activities elevate the disregarded souls of contemporary collectives. This juxtaposition between materiality and sublimity throws a question of why the dichotomy occupies the current society. By visiting a large shopping center, I experienced the most welcomed; there were warm greetings, answers with smiles. To get a present at a lingerie store, I see it is a place where motherhood and femininity were overlapped. For me who is used to live on the ground level or sometimes works under the ground, such emotional and physical elevation shows me how such materiality is wonderful. It is more than materiality itself; it feels as if I was even located in a religious environment. The divided composition with a middle-vertical strip was adopted from Barnett Newman's painting series 'Onement,' that art-historically drew the notion of 'sublime' with 1960's color-field paintings in the US. On the other hand, most of the sources for this project reflect high commercialism like AD video clips, laces, lights, and extreme hand laborers. Also, the fact that an Asian-born artist created these feminine characteristics emphasizes these unrelatable conflicts are beautifully symbolically intertwined: the western-based market economy, religiously hierarchical relationships, and the roles of traditional women labor.