Escape from Unconsciousness
Acrylic on canvas, 65cm x 53cm, 2016
While studying Freudian psychology, I wished I could have a look into my unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is normally stuffed with social taboos like profanities, violence and sexual desire. For sure, I have these things in my unconsciousness. I wanted to pull out these negative feelings and make them clean. I also wanted to comfort my unconsciousness that had been locked in for so long. Such desires served as the motivation for this piece. In my works, colors are the elements that express my delicate feelings. The assortment of intertwined colors and textures expresses my knotty and subtle feelings. The process of bringing out my unconsciousness to the world of consciousness was quite challenging. Facing the wrongs of my unconsciousness was even humiliating. Although I wanted to face my unconsciousness, I also wanted to remain unaware of it for the rest of my life, which was represented by the hands in the upper right corner.
If I could become a child
Acrylic on canvas, 65cm x 53cm, 2016
Every now and then, I wish I could go back to my childhood with the thoughts and knowledge that I have now. If I could go back to my tender age with mature thoughts and knowledge that I came to have as a grown up, would I be in such a better situation that other people might be jealous? I also wonder what it would be like for me, an adult from the mundane world, to play house and fiddle with robots within a group of little kids. This painting represents my diverse responses to the things I would be doing as a little kid.
Excitement
Acrylic on canvas, 65cm x 53cm, 2016
Excitement is a nice feeling for everybody. Working on this painting of New York’s Central Park, I vividly remembered the excitement that I felt while I was there. I wanted to revisit the excitement in greater level, so I added other elements into painting. The colors represent the sunlight shedding on Central Park and the feelings of excitement in a harmonious fashion. With the diverse textures, I wanted to reproduce the vivacity of tree leaves fluttering in the wind. This painting reflects those delicate feelings and exhibits the colors changing minute by minute, depending on the amount and location of sunlight, the shadows of natural or artificial objects and their movements.
Life Mural Work, 2016
When I was eight, I had made a house from a cardboard box the size of myself. The house had a round window that showed the outside reality. The scene still persists in my heart in which sometimes create new images by distorting the reality that I am seeing today. I have taken my daily life and portrayed the repetitive transformation between total realities, the amalgamation of reality and imagination, and total submerge into imagination. Each painting on the wall represents my recollection of memorable events. They became distorted and enhanced in the feelings from my imagination. Depicted in geometric shapes are my feelings about the images within myself.
Life 1/4
Acrylic on canvas, 2016
Life 2/4
Acrylic on canvas, 2016
Life 3/4
Acrylic on canvas, 2016
Life 4/4
Acrylic on canvas, 2016
Accidental discovery
Acrylic on paper, 78cm x 109cm, 2016
Creation begins by imitating nature. When I discover images people cannot see, I have a desire to interpret them with ‘aesthetics.’ I always try to find such images in nature. Like the chameleon, objects in nature change subtly in response to diverse variables and create new images. For this painting, I intended to take photos of the ‘bird-of-paradise’ flower from many different angles and enlarge them to find new patterns within it. The three painting were converged to create a new shape.
Connection
Pencil, Acrylic, Masking tape, 2017
DNA
Acrylic on fabric covered frame, 116cm x 91cm, 2016
This painting is to illustrate my unconscious distribution of emotions via colors and shapes that represents my emotions. They are clustered and distributed like continents on the world map representing my collection of emotions. These shapes are derived from my paintings where I chose the most prominent shapes and colors from my paintings because when I looked back and analyzed the myself by the shapes and colors use, all my works had a constant shape and color tone that represented my emotion at the time of painting. Therefore, this piece is a collection of my emotions – my identity.
Taejung Kim - Artist and Educator 