Tibetan lamas create Mandala with sand. The Mandala is the practice of asceticism for realizing the truth of the universe as well as a guiding map towards the enlightenment through the practice. To obtain a complete Mandala, one needs to know the principles of visual design based on circles, rectangles, red, yellow, green, blue, and white. One also needs to learn the contracted images of the universe, and most importantly, endure the long, slow process of making the icons while humbly crouching down on the floor. Although the world created using colored sand obtained from natural materials is flat, yet time and space, past and present are immersed inside. Once the Mandala is completed, the lama begins to slowly dismantle the Mandala in the given order. What is left alone at the end of the deconstruction is a handful pile of colored sand. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Se-kyun Joo makes sand paintings crouching on the floor like the lamas. The ‘powder series’, which the artist made with colored sand, graphite, and baby powder, shows the present image of the world consisted of all the national flags available. He gently draws sand flags using a funnel-shaped tool he invented similar to the one that lamas use. The flags are not the replicas of already existing flags but ones made out of the arbitrary process of combining and transforming the images, symbols, and color planes adopted from the original flags; they are only possible inside his supranational world. As Tibetan monks express the notion of equality of all existences through the form of a circle, Joo paints the flags within the grid structure where the ordered egalitarian utopia of modernism has survived. The work does not allow any hierarchy between the countries or groupings such as the First World, or the Third World, rather, everything remains horizontal. His transnationalism overcomes the strict and ordered ideology of modern states by deconstructing and converting the icons, symbols, and color planes, which once represented the authority of modern nation states, into a subject of visual play for the individuals who live as anonymous in the system (including the artist). When the exhibition is over, the artist, just like the lamas, sweeps the sand flags up. A heap of sand remains, disappears, and lasts only as photographs or video works. Form is emptiness. While dealing with sensitive icons and images such as maps and flags distributed in the globalized world, Joo takes the truth-seeking attitude like the lamas who attempt to awake their spirits through materials. In the age that it becomes imperative to understand others across the national and cultural boundaries, the artist tries to reveal the incomprehensibility, non-transparency, relay, and difference encountered at the borders, and tell us that they all stem from tenacity, competition, jealousy, and the sense of inferiority which are, in the end, shapeless and ‘empty’.