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Chansong Woo

 

     To me everyday life is reality, art is ideal. I always worry about the discrepancy between reality and ideal. And I want to break that boundary. Then why do I try to get rid of the border? Because I feel I was on the border between reality and ideal. The purpose of my artwork is to narrow the gap between everyday reality and ideal art. My works has been dealing with concerns, questions about the mismatch between reality and ideal, and the boundary between them.

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     “Visiting Pop Art No.1” is my video project in 2013 where I expressed the most direct action to break the boundary between reality and ideal. I, an artist, became a door-to-door salesperson and walked around the neighborhood, not the gallery to sell my artwork ‘Hamburger’. That sales was artwork to break down the conventional stereotypes that art can be seen only in galleries or museums. As soon as I walk around town simply to 'sell' my work, the public can achieve an unintended opportunity to meet my artwork without going to galleries or museums. Hamburger is one of the most familiar food in our daily lives, but the work ‘Hamburger’ I sold is not that hamburger that we can eat in our daily lives. That is, I intended to transform ordinary everyday objet to unusual objet and it became salesperson was selling ‘Hamburger’ as an artwork which is abnormal and difficult to understand in accordance with common sense.

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     I explained the relationship between everyday life and pop art in my master’s thesis. The purpose of pop art is to bring daily life into art and blur the borderline between ‘high art’ to public art by celebrating commonplace objects. The Pop art movement is related to my artworks in terms of utilizing everyday objects as artwork that everyone can enjoy without any exclusiveness.

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     The biggest origin of my work is Nam-June Paik. It was him who show me the artist is not just a painter. Through his artwork, I found artwork can be fun and one of best medium to communicate with the public. His artwork, ‘Good morning, Mr. Orwell(1984)’, is the world's first live show organized by Nam-June Paik. His work has served as a big step forward as a bridge between ideal and reality, demolishing the hierarchy of culture. The meeting with him via his works made me dream of becoming an artist. As a successor to him as a creative disrupter I want to collapse my boundary between reality and ideal furthermore everyone’s boundaries by addressing my fundamental questions of reality. I have been trying to bring questions of daily life into the public to break their own lines. That's why the basis of all my artwork starts in my daily life.

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     I will keep standing in the middle of the boundary and try to be unbiased. Until I realized, the fact I stand on the border made me frustrated and I had no choice but to choose one of them: reality or ideal. But now I get to realize I can talk to the public through my artwork “You can try to break your boundary!” I'll employ everyday objects into art and try ceaselessly to break the boundary. And I'll tell the audience, “Your boundary will be torn down eventually if you don’t give up!”