A monologue is a dramatic device in which a character speaks to an audience under the assumption his counterpart cannot hear what he says. Just as we know his idea, although he talks to himself, artistic work should be objective despite subjective expression. Through the world I view, my subjective thought and interpretation, and indirect, diverse metaphorical expressions of the world, I arrange visual elements and attempt to communicate others, as if in a monologue in a drama.
The landscapes made through a subtle concealment of images reflected from the unconscious, relate in an ambiguous boundary between reality and unreality. To this my monologues, over this incomplete space are expressed in diverse ways. Images and spaces naturally represented, like a custom we are familiar with for many years, present a recombination of unfamiliar space and time as if in surrealist automatism and depaysement (another technique,forming dreamy, unrealistic scenes by setting ordinary, familiar things in unfamiliar contexts, generating a psychological shock in the viewers’ mind and liberating their unconscious). I seek a remarriage of unfamiliar space and time. This unfamiliarity is akin to the landscape of my reality, but I make more delicate, diverse attempts for change within it.
I spend most of my time sticking to something within some restrictions and habitual regulations. More attention and observation is required for this obsession. I present the possibility to discover something more visible, and a special space to capture fleeting daily scenes.
Discovery and Excavation
I think a daily scene flowing in the same direction is the re-composition of various elements that look different every time in the same or different place. Everyone feels inconvenience and tension in an unfamiliar place, due to an awkward landscape or things. Over time however, one realizes they are almost the same, without complete difference. That is why their unfamiliarity has changed from something unfamiliar to something familiar.
Rene Magritte (1898-1967, Belgium) formed abnormal relationships between familiar things and reproduced objects, portraying them in diverse metaphorical, associative, and contradictory ways. He modified an object into another through erratic marriages with ordinary images, and created somewhat disquieting images by confronting things, to blur boundaries between reality and unreality through such images.
In some of his paintings, clouds merge in a room through an open door; a vase alters into a landscape in a window; a picture before a window is reproduced as part of the landscape outside the window. Likewise, Magritte intended to create something unfamiliar and disparate by adding his poetic ideas to familiar things, making efforts to exchange with others through the manifestation of his philosophical creativity in his paintings.
I attempt an expansion to another unfamiliar space in ever-changing daily life. I insert an image I discovered in a familiar place in another space, randomly, and endeavor an attempt to excavate another aspect buried between image and image, space and space, through new assumptions and suppositions. 
This is much like an attempt to create another world, (an unconscious world that cannot accurately or theoretically be elucidated, but is obviously existent), by drawing out another reality under the surface of reality, and by presenting another passageway in reality made up of similar landscapes.
This awkward scene seems like an unfamiliar bridge linking reality and unreality, but alters to a familiar appearance through a repetition of discovery and excavation. I wish this scene could be reinterpreted as another space where I can communicate with others.
The images, made through direct or indirect experience, appear through a process of deformation, repetition, combination, and abbreviation. These images return to their original appearance in a two-dimensional or three-dimensional space, or are modified into degraded unfamiliar appearances. The expansion and distortion of artificial thinking spreads to an unpredictable sphere, disregarding the distinction of space and things. The objects associated with one another, through unconscious assumptions and suppositions, represent an inner space, through coarse, simplified hieroglyphs, as clues to another world, likely to be somewhere between the conscious and unconscious.
Relations
Zhuangzi spoke his dream of a butterfly to his disciples: Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself. As he was so pleased, he forgot his existence. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly, he woke up, and there he was. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi, who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. “Is this present I the real ‘I’, or am I the butterfly that became ‘I’ in my dream?” he said.
After hearing his remarks, a disciple said to him, “The story is too absurd, and is thus of no use in reality.” Zhuangzi explained again to his disciple about the distinction between usefulness and uselessness. He put it that, “The land that is useful for you is as large as the land you can stand on with your foot.
Collection Other areas of land beyond it are of no use. However, if you lose other areas of land, except for the land where you stand, how long can you endure? The land truly necessary for you is the land on which you’re not standing, and this useless earth for you props up your existence.” In these narratives, Zhuangzi underlines the relationships between dream and reality, usefulness and uselessness. These Zhuangzi stories talk about whether I am the real ‘I’ in reality, or an ‘I’ existing in another world, confined to a frame of reality, emphasizing another space, propping up reality and the value of abstract space.
Henri Rousseau in his mature years portrayed exotic tropical landscapes through a primitive approach. Although he never visited such tropical areas, he delicately depicted unique landscapes at an intersection of reality and illusion, through what he heard from those who travelled there. Characterized by exotic plants, his paintings look like a repetition of abstraction and expression. Rousseau created unique landscapes through a combination of his memories and information from others, which he himself had never experienced. By using such information, collected from an external world, he gained a momentum, to move beyond the limitation of his expression.
I also endeavor to execute diverse expressions, gathering information from external, indirect experience. A number of images I collected in the same canvas are organically combined and enlarged. These images linked through contours are delicately depicted like Rousseau’s work, and thus look abstract. A repetitive movement of lines with the sense of speed and force divides space, creating equilibrium and order as a whole.
In Oriental painting, the use of lines signifies the completeness of personality as well as dexterity. The lines rendered without modification depict the core of things, often evoking vitality and tension. A conceived structure should be thus in mind before drawing lines in Oriental painting. The images rendered through articulate lines are deformed and deconstructed for an entire structure. The colors occupying some part of the canvas are used to distinguish space and things, and to underline a specific area.
It has become one of my long-held habits, collecting and arranging the traces of my memories, then recomposing and keeping them in a specific place. This habit, derived from an unconscious impulse, forms a new space naturally and presents a new possibility, disregarding the limit of reality. An example of this interpretation is found in the following:
“A habit is a pattern repetitively unveiling an individual’s inner state. Accordingly, a habit is one’s mental attitude practiced into a behavior. Our habit refers to a way with which we exist and assemble life fragments. This is also a symbol signifying who we are. Francis Bacon thus concluded that a habit is a daughter of our behavior.” (Eric Booth, Everyday Work of Art, translated by Gang Joo-heon, p.163)
I strive to find new meaning from many memories discarded in everyday life. Through this process, I am able to focus more on myself and gain momentum to observe the verge of time we pass over without noticing it.
Compromises
Standing before an enormous wall, I look at it. The wall is filled with countless doors. A dim light exudes out of a door, while a disgusting noise from another door stimulates me. I imagine depth among such doors. I choose one door, wondering which space and time this door links to, and which unexpected incident it hides. If the door distinguishing a real world and an unconscious world opens, the world behind it approaches me to compromise the world I live in now. I thus assume the role of a passageway in the middle of these two worlds.
I offer these worlds, derived from the unconscious, a position and role to find something in common and become more like each other. Spending most of my time in an isolated space encircled by walls in all directions, I imagine landscapes outside this space and draw them into my space.
If an empty space is filled with the visualized traces of memories, unintentional modification arises. Just as harmony is created by performers in an orchestra, playing instruments with different characteristics, each object exists for the whole. My work, spread from a standard image to the whole, has a result that is not expected. If one image is chosen, other images are continuously set to this. By putting them together, one by one, like a puzzle, an entire image appears naturally. It resembles an everyday scene I make. By putting together pieces of life, one by one, someday an entire appearance appears gradually.
I am making a journey to find proper puzzles, following the traces of my memories. The destination of this journey is in reality, but it remains ambiguous. What’s above all else significant and invaluable is the process to reach the final destination.
