Statement

In my early works, I preferred to represent my remembered dream in some ways derived from my experience. I had been explored how I could express my illusion of the dream in order to share it with audiences in the real, which has been the key point of my works. I wanted to invite the audience to my own place of dream and unconsciousness. Therefore, I focused on exploring the stimuli and sources of my dream.

When I have had ups and downs emotionally, I fell asleep and woke up again in a very short time. During these repetitive processes, I saw various lights moving around in the infinite space of dream. These illusions are sometimes vivid and they even continue when I am awake. According to Freud, these experiences are the “subjective excitations of the retina”. He pointed out about this illusion as follows:

It is in this way that is to be explained the remarkable tendency of dreams to conjure up before the eyes similar or identical objects in large numbers… Here the luminous dust in the darkened field of vision has taken on a fantastic shape, and the numerous specks of which it consists are incorporated into the dream as an equal number of separated images. (Freud, 1991: 92)

To express effectively, I use mirrors in my works. I wanted to express the character of dream, “similar or identical objects in large numbers” as Freud described. When audiences enter the room of my dream (Trans-State), due to the different angles of mirrors, numerously reflecting to each other, they might feel like they are in an infinite space of illusion. In fact, they are merely in a small space with enclosing mirrors (270x270x270cm).

Starting from the exploration about dreams and its illusionary state, my concern has moved more into the recognition of subjectivity and self-desire which are formed by the relation with others. Since 2007, I have focused on “how do I recognize myself and what is that something reflects consciousness back on to myself?” I come to think that the unconscious and dream are connected with subjective and objective relationship. People often want to do something when they wish to show off something to others. Desire cannot exist without presence of others. If dreams project the unconscious desire, these images could be clues to tell me who I am. Entering the mirror room is, for the audience, a kind of invitation to my hidden and private desire that I want to show them and share with them.

In my future works, I would like to pay more attention to the idea that I get knowledge of who I am from how others respond to me. And this concept is shown by the infinity of reflection in my dream world. For this reason, I have made the octagon-mirror room to show “the dialectic of recognition”. In other words, through my artwork, I would like to demonstrate that I have made audiences themselves into objects and subjects at the same time.

I wanted to let somebody see through a timer, which was connected with black lights and hundreds of optical fibers. It shifted to the other every 30second. How we present ourselves is always subject to interpretation by others in an octagon mirror room. Audiences can experience that they change from object to subject in a minute by exchanging two different light environments. In the other words, they encounter “the possibility of mutual recognition”. (Sarup, 1993: 13) When black lights shifts to optical fibers, all of sudden images painted by fluorescent dye are disappeared by swapping to optical fibers, and then audiences can be in the center of thousands of optical fibers moving in an infinite place as a subject. As soon as one person is the subject, the other is the object.

I want to expand this relation between the self and the other regarding Lacan’s theory: “mirror stages and other’s gaze” for the future works. The mirror stage as a metaphor is showing how the self recognizes oneself from the place of others. With the numerous reflections from different angles of mirrors, the audience might have been confused if he/she was looking at the mirror or was seen by the mirror (or by the image of artist on the mirror). He/she was either the subject looking at the image or the object seen by many other images. This visual mechanism of my works can be expanded to other forms of media such as performances and video works. The ongoing practical aspects of these issues and the notion of other’s gaze seem to be valuable to develop with further extent in my future works.

References
Freud, S. 1991. The interpretation of dreams. London: Penguin Books.
Sarup, M.1993. Post structuralism and Postmodernism. London: Prentice Hall.
Lacan, J. 1993. The psychoses: the seminar of Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge.
Homer, S. 2005. Jacques Lacan. UK: Routledge.