Anxiety is a state of uneasiness and apprehension, often accompanied by nervous behaviors. It is the subjectively of unpleasant feelings coming from fright with regards to future uncertainties. Being unable to figure out the source of the feelings, anxiety is dissimilar from fear, which is felt on intimidation from a specific source. In the modern society, anxiety is often relatable to social hierarchy. The society establishes a standard of success, which we then react with a fear of being disrespected when we do not correspond to the standard of success. Therefore instead of causing disharmony, we choose a compromising path which can be satisfied by the majority. Regarding education, job, family, relationships, politics and in other areas, we fantasise on deliberating a compromising conclusion so as to please all. However a consensus decision acts as an oppression in expressing an individual’s opinions and objections. This, in essence, acts to prevent the distribution of what ought to be theirs, a principle of identification.

Anxiety is the voice of a body to deviate from the social consensus decision of consciousness; while the differences that are revealed are not negative and requires an arousal statement and by itself it could be the characteristics of art. The artists that participate for this exhibition, by opening a passageway to the sensibility of concealed anxiety, challenges what one should do by bringing in the impartial debate to the public opinions, in other words, an attempt to observe the anxiety functioning external structure into the internal perspectives. Not the method of ‘to express one’s anxiety and to heal by itself’, the intensive and internal emotions that derives from the artists, but to recognize the possibility of anxiety and to masterly encourage and exceed the aesthetic notion/structure moreover, to reevaluate the aesthetic value or to restore the rights from the exclusion of individual value.

Artists: Sung-Hun Kong, Young-Hun Kim, Jong-Pil Park, Jin-Kyun Ahn, and Youn-Joo Ham

*image (left)
© Sung-Hun Kong
courtesy of the artist and Gallery IHN