The Butterfly Dream - No.2403 Painting

The Ambiguity of the Boundaries 1. My artwork is a reflection of my utter inability to adapt to reality. No matter how hard I try to understand why we were given life, I can never find an answer. It's like Zhuangzi’s The Butterfly’s Dream. I don't know if I'm dreaming or dreaming here. In this fundamental ambiguity are dreams liberation. In it, there is no fundamental despair of existence, no need to worry. In it, I can just be me. 2. I used to hate flowers. I don't like the symbolic meaning of flowers. In the real world, as I was taught, flowers were always temporary, fragile, vulnerable, weak, and negative. And most of all, they were always too feminine. One day, flowers started to look different. The strength and courage of a flower that blooms with all its might, even though it knows it will fade away. I began to see the beauty of the flower's strength and courage in giving it all it had. I began to see the struggle to keep the life that had been given to it beautiful. I was becoming the flower and the flower was becoming me. Not in a dream, but in a reality that is destined to end in death anyway. Between these two worlds, I alternate between both. When I was in reality, I longed for the dream. And when I’m in the dream, I wish I were still in the dream. In reality, I live like an eternal stranger. 3. So maybe that's why the artworks of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte have an unknown pull on me, who were always strangers in reality. Whether indoors or outdoors, nonsensical objects in nonsensical situations, leading me to a strange sense of otherness. Windows or doors that appear in common in both artists' work, in particular, seemed to take me somewhere else for a moment. They are like the portal that connect to the two different worlds. 4. I was born and grew up in South Korea and moved to the United States and have been living in New Jersey for over 20 years. After graduating from all my coursework, I was introduced to graphic design by chance and have been working as a professional graphic designer until now. I would like to try to combine traditional painting and digital art in the future.