Artist Note — Lightness (2025)

 

ENG ｜ KOR

 

 

 

Lightness is the first series in which the emotional state of “lightness” is constructed as a pictorial scene. Within this world, emotions are treated not as abstract sentiments but as entities possessing form, color, and weight. While form remains relatively stable, color, texture, and density shift in response to emotional weight. Transparent hues and low-density elements tend to float or disperse, while the pictorial space organizes emotional tension across condensation and expansion, proximity and distance.

 

These scenes resemble an inner environment more than an external landscape. Structures such as fountains and Ferris wheels create points at which emotions may pause or move, establishing the conditions for release from stagnation and movement toward inner balance. Vehicles such as boats and submarines carry light emotions, allowing them to pass into another state. In works such as Cloud Walker the self begins to move of its own accord toward inner balance, no longer merely reacting to emotion.

 

Here, lightness functions both as an emotional state and as a condition that opens space for movement. Light emotions do not possess an inherent direction, but they retain buoyancy and the potential to shift. When they encounter constructed structures—fountains, Ferris wheels, or boats—movement becomes possible, and an emotional current begins to form. The scenes in Lightness do not present balance as an achieved state. They remain at the threshold where emotional buoyancy and the artist’s will converge, setting this movement in motion.

 

Situated within The Shape of Weight, a broader framework that interprets emotion through the concept of weight, Lightness is the first visual field to examine how light emotions take shape and under what conditions they emerge. As subsequent series move toward phases of heaviness and distance, Lightness functions as a point of departure, revealing the initial conditions under which lightness can exist within this emotional structure.