Soft Quiver

My interest starts not from dead organisms, but from keen attention about the creatures that once lived. These simple ingredients for food started to approach me as soft quivers and their subtle movements have caused me to get startle again and again. Different from my consumer¡¯s point of view, I began to take interest in the life forms that were used to create the food that I was eating. Suddenly fish did not seem like fish to me. At the butcher¡¯s, I felt myself becoming flabbergasted by the sight of the hanging, unbroken successions of the chunks of meat. At least once or twice a week, I find a different side of myself whenever I visit a local mart.

The ¡®me¡¯ who eats the food did not assimilate the ¡®me¡¯ who chose the ingredients. Meeting a fish eye to eye, seeing the bright red chunks of meat being cut at the corner of a market, and the smell of something fishy, musty, and peculiar stimulates my imagination. I do not cook very well. In fact, I cannot touch or prepare the ingredients that are necessary to cook with. The sensation that I get when dealing with these ingredients makes me feel as though I am personally killing a cow, a pig, or a fish, which leads me to be unable to touch them. It makes me feel afraid and makes me tremble. A life form that became an ingredient, an ingredient that has lost its life- witnessing this opened my eyes to the difference between life and death. Therefore, I began looking more closely at all that contains life.

Within my lifetime, I feel as though my encounter with life have all been tactile. The quivering, slimy, fleshy and viscous texture¡¦ The fact that I can feel life through my hands startles me time and time again. The story of the sacrifice made for the sake of my own¡¦ That is the start of my work and the yearning to get closer to these immotile creatures is my hope.

We think of life as a premise of death and witness the sacrificed creatures for consumption with an emotional and even a biased view. However, when it comes to food, we only think with our appetites. My life, which is conditioned by consumption, takes appetite for granted without acknowledging the creatures that are used to sustain life itself; this is what I want to speak about. Is it okay for ¡®my¡¯ existence as a human being to be prioritized among all else? This puzzling uncertainty is the driving force of my endeavors, as well as a form of duty for me to solve.

-2012 Notes from the artist