There are some images where the reduced state is simulated as a default. These images attractively and cunningly mutate on the ever-changing visual domain in a condition of self-generating data. The archetype of such images is no longer an absolute code, but serves as a foothold for mutating superficial familiarity. From the circulation of the images, we have already entered the repetitive feedback loop of individuals and image-based reality where it is no longer clear whether reality is producing images of experience or experience is producing images of reality. I have been with such confusion for a long time, especially with the images derived from pop-cultural collectibles.
I have been researching the strange survival strategies of these images, and this research itself is a way of understanding the world for me. I have built a thinking structure on the basis of the patterns found in the accumulation of these images. In a cyclic image-reproducing and product-selling ecosystem, physical and contextual reduction, exaggeration, and repetition are the results of the images' desperate efforts to become an attractive substitute for the original entity. The dissonant nature of these physical objects reveals my resistance to wholeness, and catalyzes my embrace of fragmentation, as this fracturing allows me the possibility of escaping the dichotomy of human and beyond human. With history and psychology-specific research, an act of fragmenting can be understood as a form of reconstitution-based consumption and an archive for potential hybrids, away from the human-centered thinking that any kind of reification is regarded as fear of losing autonomy.
In my recent practice, I focus on re-rendering the present visual domain, considering images as mediators, consumption as a strategy, and humans as mutant creatures. This is to navigate and model the mechanism of the image-making system and how an individual processes and collects such images as superficial data. The symbiotic but dissonant relationship between the visual status of collected images and their context has been the driving force behind an act of repurposing. In the process of assembling collected images, the autonomy and dependence of the images are confused with each other, and I aim to expose psychological and physical fragmentation as much as possible through the handling of physical surface. Reconstructive fragmentation toward the superficial totality of the image collection is used as a formative language, and an act of disassembling and reassembling has been repeated to obtain a strategy of camouflage with subversive allure. Through those processes, I am making objects and images of reverse-engineered wholes toward the exposure of programmed stability lurking behind infinite image reproduction. These objects function as toys that have acquired a new fictional value system, and are also a record of sentimentality for toys and a repulsion for a prescribed way of play.