Sculpture of Existential Psychology, Responding to Anxiety

We at times watch a bodybuilding contest broadcast on television. Participants’ solid bodies appear oily and swollen. Their bodies, different to a commoner’s, look unrealistic. We are often surprised at their extremely solid, overstated bodies. What is a body? The body is a dwelling place of the human mind and existence, and a means to express the human self externally. To excessively inflate the body is a sadistic act, but humans, in our distorted age, reveal themselves through such bulging bodies.

Ian’s sculpture pursues human anxiety, through inflated, pressed, twisted, and exaggerated body forms. Such physically concretized bodies reflect the sounds of the inner self. While drinking a cup of tea, in a peaceful atmosphere, a human can find it hard to escape from an unidentified anxiety. To this, anxiety and horror is the essence of human existence. Work to represent this physically is to concretize inner psychology. How does human existence appear in material simulation? What meaning does sculpture have in this regard? If human existence can be simulated, how can we make sure of the authenticity of human existence? If both sculpture and real existence are false images, what makes them meaningful?

Ian’s sculpture denotes human existence as identical with human anxiety, and it expresses such anxiety, so humans are solaced by the sculpture. It also argues for human existence to recover its realistic balance, through twisted, distorted form. His sculpture states that if a work of art responds to inner senses, and reality, and reflects inward resonance, it can be beautiful and have a special meaning as art.

Ian seems to view the world standing on his hands: he explores and unveils himself, performing countless acrobatics and virtual experiments. Twisted, inflated, and overstated muscles of the upper body appear in contrast with an abridged lower part of the body. As his work articulates a kind of paradox, to see the normal from a twisted viewpoint, we have to approach his art by standing on our hands too. What does his sculpture say to us? What can we say to his sculpture? The normal always comments on its value and reveals itself amid the abnormal.

By Chang Seok-won, Art Critic