Self-defense mechanism is a psychoanalysts term about people’s mental awareness and activities. When people face some possible dangers, they will try to protect their own feelings and they may unconsciously lie to themselves or give an explanation which is good for them. Such defense mechanism supplies people with comfort when people need to protect their mental feelings while they come across kinds of threats.

Art comes from daily life and it always represent the realities. If we define the main motivation of art to be the pressure and anxious of society, then we can call art “defense mechanism”.

The purpose of this exhibition is to show different kinds of defense mechanisms via art works from eight Korean artists. Because of the specialist of Korea’s location and it’s westernization as well as it’s willing of integrating into the globalization and controlling the world and civilization, so the defense mechanism of Korean is much stronger than others. Korea is one of the Asian countries which conformed democracy and free market principles. It also one of the economically developed countries, so it bears too much pressure in the environment of globalization.

Living in such period, the artists surely bear Self-defense mechanism. They may think their failure is reasonable or even laugh at it. What’s the most important is not the truth but the interpretation of the truth. Via such viewpoint, we can have a better understanding of the interpretation.

Curator: Park Jun-Heon
Participating artists:
Byen Ung-Pil, Shin Chi-hyun, Wee Young-li, Yoon Jong=Seok, Lee Kwang-Ho, Lee Gil-Woo, Lee Sang-sun, Jung Jae-ho