leegihun

Masquerade series - A Study on How Children Live in the World

-Using mythology to cynically depict reality as fantastical realism.

Among the various perspectives from which 'Masquerade' can be viewed, some may see it as evoking a fantastical world or a realm from a fairy tale. The combination of children wearing animal masks with disparate elements will undoubtedly conjure fantastical elements. However, the strangely assembled everyday scenes, through various contrasts, evoke a sense of unease and reveal a cynical and critical view of contemporary society.

Since the modern era, the dualistic Western view of spirit and matter has established itself as the universal standard by which modern humans perceive the world. This dichotomy pulls humans out of the great cycle of nature, treating them as independent entities—a contradiction that leads to a human-centered and individualized reality, raising questions about the sustainability of all life forms beyond societal issues. 'Masquerade' views this Western perspective through a ‘numinous lens’ (Rudolf Otto) and uses myth to portray our reality in a series of fantastical realism.

The myth of Noah's Ark, which depicts a post-apocalyptic world and what follows, overlaps with our modern society, dominated by relentless selfish desires even in the face of crises like climate disasters. As indicated by the subtitle 'A Study on How Children Live in the World,' the work centrally features the next generation and various life forms that must continue to live in the world without a clear solution. Like Noah preparing for the end by building an ark, how might children and other beings facing a potential apocalypse preserve themselves and the life of the world? Perhaps the story within Noah's Ark, preparing for a great flood and preserving life to start a new era, speaks more of hope than the catastrophic outcomes created by desires, despite the unstoppable march of modern civilization.

In the face of a towering tsunami, I hope we can see the reality behind the fantastical images through the figures of children in masks, with bare feet and tender hands, preparing for the end.

The Pietà in Masquerade can instead be understood as an attempt to move beyond such dualisms—between matter and spirit, humanity and nature, life and death—and to contemplate the world as part of a single, interconnected cycle of life.

The masked children cradle fish in their arms. Like the traditional Pietà, their expressions and gestures are filled with sorrow, grief, and mourning. Yet this scene offers no promise of religious redemption.

The beings the children embrace are traces of loss. At the same time, they are the remnants of reverence for all living things—a sense of gyeongmul (敬物), the ethic of honoring all beings—and fragments of the life that the modern world has abandoned.

Perhaps, through centuries of encountering the Pietà as a religious image, we have learned to experience emotions that have already been prescribed for us.

The Pietà in Masquerade may therefore be seen as questioning this familiar language of the sublime. The dead fish held by the child is neither a sacred sacrifice nor an act of atonement for humanity. Rather, it embodies the pain of an age stripped of transcendence—a sense of loss left behind without even the consolation of meaning.

The Pietà already carries centuries of accumulated symbolism and cultural memory. The Pietà within Masquerade confronts this inherited iconography, creating a productive tension between the old and the new: familiar religious symbols encounter unfamiliar masked children; the sublime collides with emptiness.

This tension does not remain confined to the painting itself. It extends into the memories, beliefs, emotions, and historical consciousness of those who encounter it. As viewers engage with these intersecting images, I hope the work resists a single fixed interpretation and instead opens a space where new perceptions, meanings, and acts of creation may emerge.

Prometheus

My childhood games existed within two intertwined realms. One was the realm of creation, where things were made and transformed. The other was the realm of mystery.

In nature, we built houses, crafted boats, and assembled fragments of the world into something new. As our play grew deeper, it inevitably became a kind of ritual—an initiation into the mysterious. It was an invitation to fire.

Fire gave us warmth. It transformed food, creating entirely new tastes. Yet what captivated us as children was never merely its usefulness. Perhaps we were enchanted by the mystery of fire itself.

Objects that seemed solid and eternal disappeared in an instant before the flames. At the same time, fire flickered like a living creature, and the more we fed it, the larger and more fearsome it became. Holding both fascination and terror within itself, fire seemed to hint at a reality beyond the visible world.

What captivated us as children was perhaps more than childish fantasy. Even today, fire remains for me a presence that carries the mystery of another world. Perhaps this is why fire has long occupied such a profound place within myths and religions.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the figure who brought fire to humanity. Through that gift, humanity advanced civilization, and it could be said that today's world of science and technology ultimately began with that fire. Yet within the same fire resides the power to exhaust and destroy the world. The fire that made civilization possible has always been, at the same time, a fire of annihilation.

Fire likewise appears throughout religious traditions as a powerful symbol of mystery. Moses encountered the presence of God through the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb. In Zoroastrianism, fire embodies truth and divine light. In Buddhism, nirvana literally signifies the extinguishing of the flames of desire and attachment.

Fire has therefore endured as an inherently ambivalent symbol—one that encompasses civilization and progress, truth and salvation, desire and destruction.

The children in the Masquerade: Prometheus series carry fire in their hands.

Just as today's world has inherited the fire once entrusted to humanity, these children, too, receive it once again. Holding the flame in their hands, they stand before the yet-unwritten future.

Numinous

Near my hometown of Jecheon are many mountains, including several within Korea's national parks, and I still make time to hike them whenever I can. Although Sobaeksan is a high mountain, its summit opens into gentle rolling ridges, like the broad back of an ox. From there, immense clouds drifting over the mountains from the Gyeongsang region gather before you. Standing at such a height, where the world stretches out below, one encounters vast clouds racing toward the summit—far greater than anything imaginable in everyday life.

Within this overwhelming encounter, the familiar world suddenly becomes unfamiliar, and one is confronted with a sense of wonder. The hidden side of reality, arriving with both fascination and fear, is also the hidden face of the transcendent.

Perhaps the painters of the Romantic era were drawn to this same vision. The landscapes of J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich are more than representations of nature; they reveal the sublime and the transcendent that lie beneath the visible world.

Since the modern era, the world has largely been understood through a Western dualistic framework that places humanity at its center. We believe that everything can be analyzed and explained, yet before the vastness of the universe we perceive only a fragment of reality. To live in the contemporary world may, in some sense, be a gradual exile from the child's capacity to dwell in a world of wonder.

Sometimes, simply by lifting our eyes toward the sky—or by encountering the universe beyond the veil of the sun, bearing the immeasurable traces of time—we rediscover the sense of awe that everyday life has concealed.

The children in Masquerade often gaze upward. Their eyes are fixed upon a world too vast to be reduced to a human-centered order, a world alive with the presence of all living things.

They look upon the world with a gaze that still knows how to recognize wonder in the present moment.