The uneasiness brought on by the feeling of some imminent event became all the more familiar when mixed in with the serenity of daily life. The potential danger and fear lying beneath mundane life lead me to search for the enemy within and gave me the habit of scrutinizing my environment. Surrounded by events that cannot be explained with reason and thrown into situations where neither side can be trusted, I developed the compulsion of identifying friend or foe, as well as the determination not to be instigated by anyone.

I was born and raised in Seoul during the 1980’s, a period after the national divide.
Not having experienced the Korean War or the pro-democracy movements directly, the only exposure my generation has had has been an utterly superficial one, having learned of these events only through books or storytelling. And the awareness of the existing historical gap between my generation and the previous one resides in me as a complex of sorts. Ideology to me is considered as something of a “non-existent entity” but despite such considerations the series of events observed in daily life as well as in and around life’s proximities bring me to the realization that I am not as removed from it in actuality. Therefore, my attempts to explore all possibilities which contribute to my philosophy and convictions are based on identifying what has been fed to individuals by society. The situations and interests I encounter as a twenty something male citizen becomes manifested through autobiographical experiences and narratives.
In Discovered Traces, the backgrounds show locations of my personal surroundings. The sceneries of my home and the town hillside and parks I used to frequent came to have personal symbolic meaning and the remnants of the past that surfaced when pursued forced me to question the things that creep into my subliminal consciousness. So I began collecting items around the house that held the potential to possess alternate meanings and began deliberately observing sections of usual places in unusual manners. This was a way of focusing on the process of habitual and unconscious internalization and an attempt in investigating the true nature of the ideology nested within me.

It occurred to me that intellectual reasoning by individuals regarding a specific subject allows for new phenomena and experiences as well as becoming aware again of events past. Reality once obscure and distant becomes clear with record keeping and thereby brings into obvious focus the identity of the subject. The reconstruction of text and images based on my experiences and research reveals an utterly personal perspective, but it explores an alternate meaning when expanded into the collective memory. And it is through this I wish to examine the true nature of memory and discover my redefined “ideology.”
- Jung-Kyun Shin

*image (left)
© Jung-Kyun Shin
courtesy of the artist and SongEun ArtCube