ART ZeAn

 In Shin Young- Seong's last work, a lot of sculptured human groups appear. The faces of the various expressions showing human emotions are full on the screen.

 The screen is arranged for matching well with each other regarding genders, ages, classes or tribes. The faces represent the expressions which are exaggerated and distorted a little, and they are hard to find easily in daily lives. They are the characters who live in the back stage, on the corner or fringes of society rather than they are the stars in the spotlight of the mass media or stereo typed characters. The characters are drawn exquisitely with a pen. Because of the black tone on the whole, these reveal the indescribable mood of the deep regret and gloom even in the delightful faces.

 

 Actually in the middle of 1980s, he was an avant-garde artist moving in and out of genre as the main member of <Nan ji do>, the experimental artist group, that turned the way of Korean contemporary art. At that time, when it changed the topographic map of artistic circles by moving of the young generation for overcoming the power of modernism glorified the vested rights for the long time, he performed the role as the advance guard of the new generation through the installation and performance. At those days, he mainly made the works presenting the new objects that broke up the function, according to grinding with the electric saw and searing with the electric iron the object like the clocks or the electric fan. 

 And then he showed the various performance about this process. This was the work for obtaining the new word about the art in the word of the system and authority, at the same time the work of revealing the phase of the losing the humanity. 

 The movement of post-modernism was opened by the group <Nan ji do> and the group <Meta-vox> as a center, presenting the strong challenge of Modernism authority that was rampant at that time, and received attention a lot of the artistic circles, because of the effort of recovering the new art as overcoming the western modernism through Korean phraseology. 

 

 An aspect of his latest work which seem different, but those are connected to the work in 1980s. Through the breakup of object in 1980s, the effort to try to recover the word of the new object is in the same context as the attempt to dream of the human's recovery.    Because it is the electric fan broken beyond recognition of the form by searing with a hot iron, the image of the human and self sacrificed and destroyed by the material civilization, and in the recent days, the large broken group of people is the humanity and the image of self alienated in the industrialization and economic affluence too.    When he was young, his work revealed the critic energy about the stronger reality, in the latest work the critic energy was controled and sublimated. His characters don't lose laughter in the dark conditions.

 

 Nowadays, the system and the authority set the cause for rationality oppresses the pure human and these are the irrational reality that material affluence is alienated humanity, but he is bearing the laughter and dreaming the world with all together. 

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