In the auto-biographical film of Federico Fellini (1920-1993), the renowned maestro of the Italian neo-realism, titled 8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) (1963), a lead character named Guido Anselmi who is like Fellini's alter ego appears. Director Guido, who is in a director's block, dreams of endlessly going backward to the childish fantasy to escape from the work and daily life nibbling into his own body and mind. Guido who is eager for salvation between reality and imagination begins his speech boldly and calmly surrounded by so many women in a "harem" in his fantasy where all women associated with him live together in harmony: "My Dears... Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone." It is not clearly remembered what kind of a story followed it afterwards. And yet, in moments where this line that lingered on for long overlapped with the practices of art that have unfolded in the reality I live in, the obscure and numb circumstances begin to be out of fog. The exhibition titled My Dears... Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone extracted from a somewhat grandiose line of the director facing a crisis of creativity begins for another trigger where a hard-kept mumbling question is let out. 

Possibilities of art that can give momentum for changes in the society and the belief in and long waiting towards artists who seek to operate and communicate such processes have resulted in strong beliefs in art as an effective communication tool, and imbued expectations towards the social and political functions and obligations of art. And such expectations have endlessly generated opaque and obscure sentiments, overlapping with respect and gratitude for the Minjung Misool, that is, the grassroots art of the past and the social participation of those that generated it, and regrets for the ways that they had to choose. It was because the approach of the generations of thirty years ago who exposed this world to us, and actively played the functions of "enlightened" artists who continued to awaken the fact that all of us have responsibilities towards this world was starkly ethical. It was, at the same time, regrettably straightforward and dogmatic. True, the art back then that had to tide over a reality strong enough to eradicate the existence of art had no choice but to choose the way to propose the strong desire to claim the insights into the contemporaries and the due responsibilities as "they are." In other words, the desperate demand of the hectic life was exposed as the narrow-minded desire to convey the miserable reality and the hidden truths faster, more strongly and more directly. True, the reality must be looked into, and art must begin from solid awareness about such reality. However, art back then and
the art of later years with a focus on how it was a brainchild of the former boiled down to the "reality per se" instead of generating the productive "language of art." It seems that they failed to effectively acquire the genuine functions of art that they had been eager to achieve.

The act of facing the reality and manifesting it in the language of art is not merely based upon the way of representation that is both direct and straightforward. Instead, art is not a tool to convey truths as they are but a vehicle to disclose hidden truths through the highly refined mechanism of art. In other words, the world where art must belong must be the world of "metaphor" instead of that of "facts." Thus, we expect that artists with a critical mind could reveal the truths of the world that we do not sense through various layers expressed through their views and sentiments, instead of presenting them factually. It is because it is through such layers that we can expect the power of metaphor, the genuine functions of art that can grasp the trivialities of the world in a glimpse that the language in this world does not catch. And I discover such "aesthetic and yet ethical" approaches in another attempts of artists living in the twenty-first century. Young artists that observed the dreams, frustration and hopes of their senior generations who could not resolve problems of the reality despite long struggles and concerns now reject all these and encounter the reality in a different way. Instead of proposing one simple answer through the individual praxis of art before the reality that contextualizes circumstances more than any other plots they seek to have leeway to raise further issues and doubts. And at this juncture, the two concerns--"what to tell" and "how to tell"--are premised on the statement that goes, "Truth is vital and must be socially represented," and seek for a state of "being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone." In the exhibition titled My Dears... Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone are propositions of individual participating artists, that is, Seokho Kang, Yunho Kim, Dongwook Suh, Jungju An and Kichang Choi, their homage towards the senior generations that generated all these triggers and their yearning for the still hard-to-grasp happiness.