Statement of the Art Work by TaiWoong Kang

"Dream and Daily Life" has been my painting subject for the last 10 years. This subject, "Dream and Daily Life" sprang when I was searching the world of "Consciousness" and "Unconsciousness". I have been more interested in the flow of consciousness and unconsciousness than interpretation of objects to revive them. Our human selfishness contributes to the highly advanced scientific technology in modern society. As a result, the functional value of machines and humans is recognized as equal to each other. Consequently, we have encountered the loss of humanity. Although I am also one of the objects caught in this situation, my individual effort to search for the way to recover lost humanity led me to pursue the flow of consciousness. At the same time, the world of consciousness and unconsciousness seized my interest. Psychologically, the territories of consciousness and unconsciousness stand opposite to each other, yet they mutually support each other. I have been trying to apply the result that is obtained by stimulating the emotion and rationality of the consciousness and unconsciousness to create my work. These two mental worlds predominate the whole life with their unlimited boundaries. Nevertheless, I limited them only to the visual expression area.

In my work, consciousness and unconsciousness affect both in the content and the form of creation. I will introduce the content of my work first. As consciousness lets us recognize and think about reality, as such it was transformed to a daily routine character. This transformation is easily met expressing the reality in my work. At the same time, I also limited unconsciousness to two characteristic dreams: one is a wishful dream and the other is experiencing fantasy during sleep.

We all meet many repetitive events in our daily lives and are often placed in situations beyond our will. Mostly, we become used to and indifferently pass those events and situations, then eventually forget them. However, when the extreme situations leave us with feelings of anxiety and fear and cause crises, the question of existence strikes us. We are commonly in social crises caused by machines that is the offspring of high tech scientific culture and the root source of lost humanity, pollution, traffic congestion, the lack of food, the regional conflicts. We also experience individual crises through various incidents that happen in our life cycle. In these critical moments, we question existence. As the crises are deepened, human alienation is worsened, the traditional values are destroyed, and at the same time the question of actual existence arises.

Therefore, I intend to approach the question of existence and to accept various events in daily life. I want those events to function as factors in order to visualize reality as processed in harmony with dreams in an unconsciousness area. I also wish that they remain as agents to reflect present existing human forms.

We can categorize dream into two meanings: one is an abstract meaning that is our wishes and hopes to accomplish something or some goals. The other is a photographic development during sleeping. I accommodate both meanings of dream in my work. Especially, the dream during sleeping which is one of the mental stages similar to the activity of the awoken stage. In contrast, the dreams and real life activities are very different. These dreams also function to protect sleeping. In other words, dream is an illusive fulfillment to eliminate the mental stimulus that impedes sleeping. Also, a dream is a compromise of two opposite factors between sleeping desire and the intention to satisfy mental stimulus. Dreams are serious meaningful proofs of mental activities, and have two characteristics; one is the fulfillment of wish and hope and the other is illusive experience. The other characteristic in a dream enables us to overcome time and space; this kind of dream is considered as an illusion and a fantasy. Dream is also a process visually experiencing the Sur-reality in unconsciousness, which cannot be experienced in our daily life.

Consciousness processes to tangible appearances or as a will to compose and to create the scenes. Unconsciousness operates to destroy those tangible appearances or any artificial factors. I intend to accommodate both of these mental stages in my form of art. Both the daily life and dream become simultaneously understood and communicated by connecting the two essential mental stages as freely as requested by the situations.

To express as I intend to cover both consciousness and unconsciousness in the relation between daily life and dream world, I use various technical methods such as "Over coloring", “Dripping”, "Erasing", "Scraping", "Over-adhering", "Paring", "Cutting", “Stencil”, and so on as well as various materials for my work. I especially consider that the whole canvas scene is to reflect layers of the mental world. So, I often repeat, "Over-painting" to have a thick canvas screen. This method is used to raise the density of the screen.

May 2001
TaiWoong Kang