LOVE & HATE Painting

I was born in Seoul, Korea. I have been interested in drawing since I was in elementary school and my school teachers recommended me to major in art, but I gave up art in high school due to my father's opposition. I majored in Chinese literature in college. Even before Korea established diplomatic ties with China, I had a lot of interest in China's political situation. When I was a college student, I stayed in Taipei to study Chinese as an exchange student, and I was able to look at one aspect of Chinese culture through Taiwan. After graduating from college, Korea's economic situation became so bad that I had to go to Hong Kong to find a job. I have been working between Hong Kong and Guangdong for several years, and after moving to a trading company in Korea, I was sent back to Shanghai, China, where I worked for about a decade. There was a financial crisis from the U.S. at the time and Shanghai's workplace was also affected and very dangerous. I quit my job and traveled for a year to China's regions, including Jilin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Sichuan, as well as Japanese cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Nara. I seriously considered the path of life that I had never thought deeply about. I wanted to choose a way of freely pioneering my life rather than a career swayed by circumstances. I posted an article on the Internet community and asked publicly how to start art. Just in time, there was feedback from an art teacher in Changwon, Korea, and I came right back from China to start art in that strange city. In South Korea, newspapers are dominated by several nepotistic media with history and power, who have distorted public opinion by only representing the interests of large corporations and vested interests rather than representing the truth, although they have strong social influence. I was deeply interested in the influence of letters and language on the world. I've been making abstracts using newspapers as objects for the past decade. I used to think that if Korea's nepotism newspapers distort the world by distorting public opinion with texts and pictures full of them, I would send their newspapers to a completely different world. For a long time, people have viewed, reasoned and changed the world through the newspaper. Nowadays the emergences of broadcasting, the Internet and the SNS have been weakening the power of the newspaper.